10 ways to make your content marketing super effective

According to the latest Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs 2015 survey (US-centric) just 38% people think that their content marketing is effective. What about the remaining 62%? The rate of dissatisfaction is so high simply because most of the people don’t understand what exactly content marketing is but they want to use it anyway because other businesses are using it. They have a basic idea. They know that compared to conventional marketing content marketing is multiple times more effective and multiple times less costly but somehow they are unable to crack it.

Content marketing, as I have multiple times mentioned on my blog, isn’t just about publishing content, although content publishing is one of the most important aspects of it. No matter how great your content is, unless people know about it, it is of no use. It is like the gold in a mine that has not been discovered. As the name suggests, a big part of content marketing is, marketing. You produce something, and then you market it. The difference in this case is, you are not marketing content to sell it, you are marketing content to develop your own platform, to develop your own broadcasting channel so that you become familiar to your prospective customers and clients and they develop a habit of consuming your content on an ongoing basis.

According to the link mentioned above, these are the 10 ways you can make your content marketing super effective.

1. Promote your content:
   Millions of pieces of content is being produced on the Internet every day. This content doesn’t just exist in the form of blog posts and articles. It can be videos, slideshows, animations, infographics, PDFs, social media and social networking updates, online forum threads and comments left by people on various websites and blogs. Any piece of information, any piece of thought, any piece of idea, is content. When so much content is being published how can your content be noticed by people? How do they find your content? Each time you publish something new it is not going to be ranked well by the search engines and it is not going to be promoted by your fans and followers on social media. You will have to do it on your own. You will need to develop a mechanism to constantly promote your new as well as existing content.
2. Clearly define your content marketing mission statement: What exactly do you want to achieve when you publish and market content? Obviously you want to target an audience, a particular audience. For example, if you are marketing some gadget you will be targeting an audience that is interested in the benefits of that particular gadget if not that particular gadget itself. You also need to know what sort of content your audience prefers and what channels it uses to access its favorite content.
3. Create valuable content: Your content is of no use if people don’t find it valuable. They are not going to access and appreciate your content simply because you are creating it and publishing it. Only your mom is going to do that. Make your content irresistible. Make it worth-reading.
4. Repurpose your existing content for many formats: It is not easy to create unique content for all the formats you are trying to achieve. For example, if you have just created a blog post, you can also create a podcast out of it. Pick up the main points of the blog post and create a slideshow. You can also create a small video that goes through all the main points.
5. Document your content marketing strategy: How are you implementing it? What steps are you taking to streamline your content according to the needs of your audience? What are the stories that you intend to tell? Are you sticking to your targets? If you are not, what corrective measures are you taking?
6. Don’t go full-throttle at the beginning of your content marketing campaign: In order to make your content marketing super effective, testing is extremely crucial. Publish some content, distribute it and observe people’s reaction. Study the sort of traffic your content attracts. If it is attracting the right kind of traffic then you’re moving in the right direction but if the sort of traffic that your content is generating isn’t going to turn into business, then it’s time to rethink. This is why, if you have a lean approach in the beginning it’s easier to change.
7. Keep measuring: Evaluate your content marketing constantly. As mentioned above, study what sort of traffic and engagement your content encourages. Use Google analytics to study the traffic pattern.
8. Have a clear idea of what sort of buyer you’re targeting: The better you know about your buyer, the more effective is going to be your content marketing strategy. Don’t try to target everybody under the sun.
9. Automate some of the content marketing tasks: Promoting and broadcasting your content can turn out to be a litany of repetitive tasks. There is nothing wrong in automating some of those tasks. There are many services available on the Internet that can help you automate some of these tasks.
10. Develop a sense of discipline: Accept that content marketing is hard work. Very effective, but hard work. It requires discipline, perseverance, resolve and lots of confidence. At many stages you will feel nothing is happening but still you will need to stick to your ground. You will need to constantly come up with new content writing, content publishing and content marketing ideas to beat your competition.

As mentioned above, in order to make your content marketing super effective you constantly need to be one step ahead of your competition because just like you even your competitors recognise the importance of content marketing. Your competitors are constantly publishing and distributing new content to remain visible so accordingly you have to strategize each and every step. Besides, on the Internet, it isn’t just your competition that constantly challenges you, there is also lots of noise on the Internet that is constantly competing with your content.