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Posted by Hiren Vaghela
October 17, 2013
How to know that your content marketing strategy is a winner? How to create that content which brings out awwwww? Well if you follow the given advice to pump up life in your content, you could rest assured of continued success with your content marketing strategy.
Content marketing has now become very prevalent in the online marketing industry. Although it was there for years, it has now received the deserved respect in the industry. Of course, there are a number of key performance indicators (KPI’s), which help you in determining the success ratio of your content. However, you will know that your content is an instant hit if the following major points of content creation are included in your strategy.
It is vital to define your goals systematically before starting the task on specific content. The goal could be any. For instance, you are looking for more conversions or more likes and comments on Facebook. Are you looking to develop content for thought leadership? There could be n number of reasons why you are heading to an effective content marketing strategy. Developing content specifically to influence sales may not necessarily work effectively. You could instead decide on those goals which could influence your marketing strategies, such as the betterment of your social presence or acquiring more email addresses for future campaigns.
Effective content is successful in any one of the following:
* Brings attention to a completely new idea, concept, or news story to your audience
* Redefine or repurpose an existing idea into a new concept
Regardless of what you do, you will always need to gather data – the value factor for your target personas. The data should present a unique perspective pertaining to your industry. Data could be collected through various discovery processes such as interviewing customers, measuring the satisfaction ratio, the success rate of a particular initiative, surveys, to name a few. Anything that offers a valuable insight into a particular sector, is valuable data.
No matter if you gather the data from scratch or some existing piece of information; this process is elementary, which will dictate the projection of your campaign.
If you decide to compare your own data, you may use the services of some survey tools like Survey Monkey, which could be helpful in creating and delivering questionnaires, and send them through your e-mail database. The surveys could be placed on a page of your website, and you could introduce some incentives such as discount codes or some takeaways to encourage visitors’ participation.
One more salient way of gathering data is by creating polls for your clients or the visitors of your website. You could also utilize the craze of social media websites to ask questions and make a compilation of data on a particular subject.
Once the goals have been decided, you will need to decide how you will keep track and measure your performance. Make a list of all those metrics which are to be recorded. Google Analytics is a great tool for keeping a record of all the desired metrics. If a particular post is received with a positive response from the visitors, make sure that you are keeping a track of all the results. This data helps in working on the conversion rate, also allowing you to better analyze the success of each of your posts and identify the areas for future improvement. Google Analytics is a great tool for recording goal competitions.
Once the data is on your hands, you are independent to use the data and create the content in any form that you like. There is no restriction on the form that you could implement, as there is a wide range available as far as the forms of content is concerned. One great example is the compilation of the data into a colorful Infographic, displayed on your website and your social media page. You could write a post along with the Infographic, explaining it in detail and also keep a link to your post on the social media page along with the graphic. The information could also be worked into a press release that could be used to promote the content on your website. Even a guest post could work a great deal.
The role of curation has gained an increased significance for quite some time now. Curation is much more than simply reposting content on various parts of the web. A well-executed content isn’t just reiterating already published content. It is a personalized storey re-telling. Of course, curation is the collection of the most useful resources on a particular topic. However, reposting the same content and just mentioning your name below it, is not what curation is all about. There are a number of tools, which could be used to curate content. OpenTopic, Alltop, Scribit, NewsCred are some of the best curation strategy tools that help you in building the content from top publishers.
For the purpose of the content designing strategy, you need to ensure that every part of the content is professionally built by an expert on the particular content topic that you are working on. Also, an expert in a specific content format is required, as they have all the tactics to create the desired content form. For instance, a graphic designer could only work on Infographic and not on press releases, which should be taken care of by a copywriter.
No matter who is creating the content, you should be dedicating sufficient time to the writing process, as teamwork plays a significant role in the success of the campaign.
Your content should be created keeping in mind the overall online marketing strategy. So, if you are trying to establish thought leadership, your content should fulfil this aim. If you have posted content on some other site, interested people may come to your site seeking more information on the same topic. They could lose interest if the online strategy is not aligned with the off-site activities.
It is very essential to know how to optimize content for search. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a vast science and it is not a child’s play to master the art overnight. Frequent Panda and Penguin updates only add to the worries. These algorithm updates are meant to enhance the quality of the search engine result in pages. They are in fact angels for those websites which have high-quality content. For instance, all those websites with thin content are demoted by Google, giving way to all those with great content.
One of the biggest challenges encountered in content marketing is that once the content is created, it could stay deserted on the website. Thus, distribution is everything for your piece of content. You should make sure that there is a clear way for those who are looking for what you have in your content.
To do this, you could look at the existing websites, where you have submitted your content. Analyze the weaker areas and work on them. Is it possible to shift to other distribution channels such as social media, press or other sources? Could you ask the authoritative names in your industry to share your content on their own networks?
Once the content is created, almost the same amount of time needs to be dedicated to finding the right kind of distribution channels for your content. For example, after identifying the targeted audience, you will need to find out the places where you could find these audience members.
The phrase “content partnership” may mean different things to different people, but the basic idea is to get an audience for your content by utilizing someone else’s audience. An increasing number of brands and small businesses are getting into the content marketing race. This opens a content ecosystem for creative partnerships. Content sharing, cross-promotion on social media and e-mails, exchanging of ad space are all examples of potential partnerships helping to expose your content to a wide audience.
Adding and distributing more content to your own and external websites respectively for SEO purposes is a flawed approach. More pages/copy does not get you more traffic, or engagement ratio, or conversions. While creating or adding content pages to your website or external websites ensure that your content delivers value to your consumers, which therefore adds value to your brand.
There is a lot of perseverance, and perspiration that goes into becoming a winner. The same stands true for your content marketing strategy. The list is long and whatever is covered here, are definitely going to be a part, if you are creating a champ of content.
