1. Define Your Goals/Objectives
What are your goals? Why do you want to start content marketing? Is it just brand awareness, traffic or you want conversions? These are important questions you should ask yourself before starting with anything related content marketing. Once you have your goals defined, it’s easier to get to where you want to get. When you define your goals, you can also figure out which platform will be ideal for reaching out to your audience.
2. Competitor Research
Next, look for any competitor who is doing exceptionally well with their content marketing. The idea is here not to copy their approach but studies them so that you do not have to reinvent the wheel. Look closely at their type of content, the frequency of publication and the questions readers are asking. This will give you great insights on how to create your content marketing strategy.
3. Resources
Content marketing requires few dedicated resources. If you think everyone in the company can pitch in few articles a week and it’s gonna probably work, you are dead wrong. You need at least couple of resources who can do research, develop quality content (or get it done through freelancers) and who can monitor progress. Before you start, pick someone from your team who has the capability to do all of this.
4. The Actual Content
Needless to say, this is the most important aspect of the entire effort. From our past experience, what we’ve seen give us exceptional results is purely original content. This means content not rewritten, not rehashed, but pure original content that provides value to the reader. You can test it out and I can assure you that 9 times out of 10, original content will get you more traffic, engagement, and leads than rewritten content.
5. Frequency of Publishing
So now that you have people working on the content, the next question, what should be the frequency of publishing. The simple answer- it varies. But for starters, we request our clients to start off with two pieces of content every day.
6. Type of Content
This again depends on the audience and what business you are into. As a general rule, we’ve found that you cannot go wrong with long form articles that provide value to the content consumer. Now value doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be a how to guide or checklist or something like that. It could even be a simple day to day tips or something that alleviates boredom.
7. Conversion Strategy
So you are doing everything right, you are getting traffic, but unless the traffic translates into business, it’s not really useful is it? So your content marketing strategy should also include a conversion strategy that defines what information you plan to capture the traffic, how you plan to engage them and how to actually convert them into customers.You can increase your engagement and conversions via Email Marketing by using one of these Top Mailchimp Alternatives
8. Patience
If you do all of this and you expect instant results, I got bad news for you. Content marketing is not a quick fix solution that’ll get you more sales. It is a long term strategy that will work, but you need to give it time. At Social Frontier, we make it very clear that 90 days will be a testing phase where we will test different platforms, type of content, different strategies and document all of this so that we can get our clients maximum traffic and engagement for the least possible cost. If you are highly impatient, then content marketing may not be the right choice.
9. Automation
Finally, content marketing being a time and effort consuming activity requires some form of automation. If you can automate at least some of the processes, it would really help you save a lot of effort. At Social Frontier, we have built a content marketing automation tool that eliminates a ton of manual work, identifies ideal platforms, type of content and optimize campaigns to give our clients maximum quality traffic at lowest possible
We are now beta testing the tool and if you want to access, please feel free to drop us an email [email protected].