Posted by Bhupinder Kaur Chhabra
December 02, 2016
Like many organizations, your business may also be wrestling with a convergence of changes that are upending the popular tactics you’ve always used to communicate with your customers and potential prospects.
With the adoption of new technologies, growing demographic diversity, and evolving media consumption, customers get information and perceive branded communication messages has amazingly changed.
As you grapple with how to present information and speak effectively with today’s customers, you’ve likely heard about something called “Content Marketing”.
Before we dive in, let’s see What Content Marketing is? Is it just a fad?
It is a digital marketing technique that has proven to be insanely effective for many businesses. A strategic marketing approach focuses on creating and distributing consistent, reliable, and valuable content to attract and retain your target audience that inevitably leads to conversions.
But, like many other marketing techniques, content marketing isn’t something you want to jump into blindly. Just as a football team would not storm out onto the field without a proper game plan, you don’t want to post the contents without devising the right strategy haphazardly.
Research from Marketing Prof and Content Marketing Institute has found that,
“Marketers with a documented strategy were not only more effective but also faced less difficulty with every aspect of content marketing.”
Here are five reasons why your business needs to have the right content marketing strategy:
No doubt, branding has never been so important as today. With the over-flooded markets and an infinite number of hyper-saturated businesses, you need to stand out to stay ahead of the competition.
Content marketing is an ideal outlet for letting your brand shine through and showing what you have to offer. But, to establish a strong business identity, it is essential to have a well-planned strategy in place.
Creating a good identity will guide you towards choosing the style, mediums to utilize, tone and overall approach to take. Then, the right content marketing strategy is all you need to steer the ship and ensure you are going in the right direction.
Your progress depends on your business strategy. Without outlining how much content is needed to be produced, when and where it should be posted, you need to find it all too easy to flounder.
If you need a little nudge to get going, a formal content strategy is essential. Your content strategy may include creating two blog posts a week, updating Facebook twice and Twitter five times a week, creating one infographic monthly, and so on.
Having a good content marketing strategy, all these things will become much easier, and achieving your goals will be much more realistic.
This is another very crucial aspect to taste success with content marketing – endless tweaking and tampering. Some techniques will work fantastic, while some may be egregious failures. All this is just a part of the process.
Having written documentation of what you’re going to do will make it much easier to track your progress and analyze what’s working and what’s not. This will also let you know the metrics you should focus on in a particular area that needs revamping or getting an overall idea of your campaign.
As you garner more information, you can eventually turn your campaign into a lubricated machine and operate with ruthless efficiency.
Most of the campaigns distribute content on multiple channels where content is spread across different mediums. This includes everything from social media and blog posts to guides and webinars. That’s great thing about content marketing. You can reach your target audience through a plethora of mediums.
But the main issue is that there are marketers who lack cohesiveness with their content. It often covers a myriad of topics and is all over the place, which can confuse the audience.
You’re more likely to run into this problem when you don’t have a formal strategy in place. By developing a documented content strategy, you’ll have a clear path. This will also ensure that you cover all the topics within your niche and produce relevant content with your audience and your brand.
Did you know that Content marketing costs much less than other digital and traditional marketing techniques and generates about three times as many leads?
It is believed that content marketing is the most effective marketing strategy of all time. With an innovative and well-thought-out campaign, even the smaller companies can compete with the large ones. All you need is carefully charting your course and developing a comprehensive strategy to lead to a favourable outcome.
To get a higher return on your investment, focus on having higher productivity and less wasted motion. This will eventually help you generate a more significant number of leads and get more conversions while spending less time and money.
Understanding well the HOWs and WHYs of your business are crucial to determining your content marketing strategy. That’s why we can’t emphasize enough just how important it is to develop a unique strategy for your brand. This will save you a lot of time and frustration in the future and enable you to get tangible results within a reasonable period.