- Content Marketing
5 Tips to Kick Your Content Marketing Up a Notch
Jan Emmens
Creative copywriter and concepter
1. Start with the target group
An effective content marketing strategy always starts with the target audience. Before you create content, you want to know who is going to consume it, and what that group of people wants to achieve. This will also help you figure out how your business can meet their needs.
One tool for this is to think of your audience as individuals, not as a group. Create a number of customer personas using demographics, but focusing on the customer question: how do their needs differ? You can then start creating content targeted at these individual personas.
And that works! According to this study 56% of marketers who use personas report higher quality leads. 39% of that same group also report higher conversion rates.
2. Make your goals SMART
Once you know who you are talking to, your objective comes into view. It is therefore essential to make benchmarks. And of course you want to make those benchmarks SMART: Specific, Measurable, Acceptable, Realistic and Time-bound.
Content marketing often has somewhat more subjective objectives, such as brand awareness or removing objections that a lead may have. That makes it all the more relevant to try to make those kinds of objectives SMART. Maybe that requires periodic research, or a small poll that you send out after customer contact. If you do this well, you will see which content is worthwhile and which is not.
3. Slow down your pace
A common mistake when creating and rolling out a content strategy is the posting schedule. Many people are too ambitious with their planning and think that they can produce interesting, high-quality content daily or semi-daily. That works well at first, but remember that content marketing requires a long breath. It happens too often that people produce a constant stream of blogs, videos and social posts, but cannot keep it up and drop out after a few weeks because they have nothing more to say or have lost their motivation.
Moreover, an 'aggressive schedule' can also be annoying to your audience, who may not be interested in receiving so much communication from your brand at all.
In short: yes, being present often is important, but a feasible pace for the long term is more important. That way you can keep it up yourself and you don't lose your audience.
4. Choose and stick to your tone of voice
Your brand voice helps you stand out from your competitors. It defines how your customers and leads see you, what emotions they have when they think of you, and why they would choose you over Company X.
Therefore, create a consistent style guide for your content strategy. Often you can base this on an existing brand book, but think further for your content: which words do you use, and which do you not? How do you deal with grammar, punctuation and abbreviations? Do you use English loan words or not? All these things have an impact on the tone you are going to use.
And regardless of the choices you make there, make sure you make the same choices for each channel. 'Consistency is King', to throw in a cliché. If you are very informal on one channel and very formal on the other, that can drive potential customers away. Unless... unless you do that consciously to comply with Tip 1. Well done, in that case, but make sure that the different content is only read by the right personas.
5. Be smart with created content
Good content doesn’t always have to be brand new. Work smarter, not harder, by breaking down previously created content and reusing it in new combinations. For example, by summarizing several blog posts into a whitepaper, or using a series of videos for a presentation you have to give somewhere.
One of the best tips for this is to use large chunks of content as “pillars” for your content strategy. By that we mean create extensive content on one topic and then break it down to be used in different ways across different channels.
You can also think about breaking your content into a series. You discuss a certain topic over multiple episodes. That works really well to keep your audience coming back, and makes your brand relevant for a longer period of time.
In short
By reaching the right target group at the right time, with the right message, in the right format your expertise will be best conveyed. This will allow you to build a relationship with your audience that will pay off in the long run.
