A strategic content marketing campaign could bring countless benefits to your business, including:
- Audience retention
- Better social media engagement
- A sense of trust with your audience
- Improved search engine optimisation (SEO)
- Generating leads
- Conversions
- More site authority
You’ll need optimised content for most of your digital marketing campaigns. For example, SEO, paid search, and social media will rely on quality content on top of data. Whether that’s articles, blogs, images or videos etc.
Knowing how to be more efficient when it comes to content creation and planning can prevent you from wasting budget. We’re going to share our top tips on sharing great content with an even better return on investment (ROI).
Align content with your business goals
Like any other digital marketing channel, you should be considering your end-goals with each plan, post or ad. While every channel will have its own objectives, we recommend aligning all of your channels to a primary business goal—for example, brand awareness, sales or engagement.
Keeping on top of content for multiple channels will be easier if it’s all working toward the same or similar goals. Let’s take SEO and content; it’s likely that the content for these campaigns will share at least one common goal (to increase traffic).
Based on this goal, work out where your target audience will be on their customer journey and share content that leads them further down the funnel. Focus on using SEO and content together to generate more relevant, results-driven content.
Have a strategy
It’s worth spending some time building a well-thought-out and strategic content plan. Doing so can improve your engagement, SEO efforts and site authority; bringing you a better ROI.
A strategy isn’t just deciding how many posts to share a week, or where you’re going to post your next article. It’s essentially a way of bringing all areas of your content campaign together and ensuring each post will lead you towards a specific goal.
How to go about this? We’ve listed a few of the most important things to consider when strategising your content:
- Understand and clarify your business objectives.
- Get to know your audience, what they like, who they are and how you can create content they resonate with.
- Decide how to measure your goals, what are your key performance indicators (KPIs)?
- Find content marketing tools you’ll benefit from using. We’ve got a list of our favourite tools here.
- Audit existing content by looking at what works, what doesn’t and where there are gaps. Look at things like traffic, shares and comments etc.
Having a cohesive and solid content strategy is bound to save you money in the long-run. There is little point in creating content without knowing where you want it to take your business and how you intend on getting there.
Competitor analysis
Content marketing is a competitive field – especially for smaller businesses working on a lower budget. Competitor analysis helps you see what your biggest competitors are doing online and what’s working for them.
To put it simply, seeing what other brands are doing in your industry, can prevent you from making the same mistakes and wasting money or time on campaigns that don’t drive results.
The great thing about content is that most brands share theirs online. Use this to your advantage by monitoring things like:
- What blog posts are being shared or liked
- The type of content that is shared on social media
- The keywords that drive the most SEO value
- How many links are being used on the highest-ranking pages
Learn from your audience
Not everything you learn about your audience will come from data and analytics. There is no harm in learning more about your customers by asking them to leave comments, review their experience or suggest ideas. Doing this can help you uncover:
- Any customer or reader paint points
- The content that helped them the most
- How quickly they found your platform, site or app.
- What could have been better
Encouraging conversation can help you produce more valuable and customer-focused content. Having more communication is a win-win for you and your audience.
Repurpose content across channels
If you’re not repurposing content already – it’s likely you could be saving both time and money going forward. We recommend keeping an eye on your monthly report and noting any top-performing content. Again – this is the content that you should be using again. Generally, this will be evergreen content.
Evergreen content is any articles, blogs or posts that will stay valuable and relevant once they’re shared. These are usually things like how-to guides, step-by-step processes or glossaries.
Repurposing content is a way of saving time and getting the most out of an existing piece of work. Here are a few ideas:
- Turn a blog post into an infographic
- Take key points from an eBook and create separate blogs
- Turn statistics into a shareableTweet
- Round up blog posts into a newsletter
- Make a podcast discussing your high-performing blogs
Keep measuring performance
Once you’ve got your strategy in place and start sharing content, it’s important to keep tracking and monitoring performance. Things don’t always go to plan – and you’ll likely have to make some changes along the way.
Keep measuring your content as the top-level across all digital marketing channels and adjust your strategy accordingly. For example, if you notice a lack of traffic for one particular topic, then it might be worth shifting focus – even if that wasn’t part of the plan.
We recommend using a tool like BuzzSumo to keep track of comments, likes, trending topics and more.
If you’d like to hear more about our content marketing management – feel free to get in touch.