Content marketing works for some and doesn’t work for some. The reason lies in particular dos and don’ts that some companies follow and some companies don’t. On the surface level, in terms of the attitude of most of the businesses desiring to use content marketing to promote themselves, there is not much difference between content marketing and email marketing. Spam has been the undoing of email marketing. Lack of analysis and strategy is often the undoing of content marketing. According to a live Q&A conducted by The Guardian here are a few things you should take care of while working on your content marketing strategy. You can use these suggestions as a template or a framework and just like you do with a template or a framework, you need to create something unique that specifically works for your business and your audience.
- Define your target audience/market
- Create content that helps you stand out from the crowd
- Create content that establishes trust
- Create content around topics that are highly relevant, targeted and useful
- Create a content marketing strategy that helps you compete with big businesses
Let us quickly go through these individual points.
Define your target audience/market
When you are creating and disseminating content, for whom are you doing it? Who are the people who should react to your content publishing and content marketing? Who is your target audience? This is very important to know. If you seriously want to pursue content marketing then it is going to cost you lots of money and you’re going to have to put lots of effort. It’s a full-fledged activity. The result-oriented content marketing isn’t something that you do in your free time. If you apply this logic, your content marketing is never going to work. So take it seriously and when you take it seriously, you need to know who you’re talking to – the sole purpose of publishing content is to strike a dialogue with the people who will someday become your paying customers and clients (or your followers, or your readers, or your listeners). So it is very important to know who those people are.
Create content that helps you stand out from the crowd
The entire Internet is made up of content. Everything you see on your screen is basically content. You are viewing images, you are reading text, you are watching videos, you are browsing Facebook or Twitter timelines, you are going through your WhatsApp messages – whatever you are doing, you are consuming content. With so much content how do people differentiate you? How do they recognise you? This is why you need to stand out. You need to publish content that sets you apart. It is not as difficult as it may seem initially. You just need to develop your voice, your true style, and then stick to it. Think why people would pay attention to your content. What would make your content irresistible? How does it solve people’s problems? How does it deliver what people really want? In order to understand this, understand your target audience (the 1st point) and understand your own business (seriously, there are many entrepreneurs who don’t understand their own business).
Create content that establishes trust
After all it is trust that prompts people to do business with you. If people don’t trust you, how are they going to give you their money or their support? How are they going to support and promote your brand if they don’t have faith in what you say? Remember that even if they are not your paying customers and clients, people in general are going to play a very crucial role in the promotion of your brand in this socially connected world. So whether you intend to sell to them directly or not, gaining their trust is vital for your business. How do you create content that establishes trust?
- Post important news that can help people
- Create content that can improve people’s lives
- Continuously talk to people through your content
- Create content according to the feedback that you get from your target audience
- Respond to people’s queries
- Curate content that people can use to solve their day-to-day problems
- Be there when people need to hear from you
- Become a part of their daily routine (they look forward to hearing from you)
- Publish content in a friendly language
Create content around topics that are highly relevant, targeted and useful
Sometimes, in order to cover practically every keyword that caters to their niche, content marketers publish content relentlessly. They don’t mind if the content is utterly useless. As long as it is getting good search engine rankings and it is getting attention on social media, they’re fine with the content. Such content may get you lots of traffic and even attention from people, it won’t help you improve your ROI. It won’t get you new leads and it won’t get you new sales. In order to have a truly effective content marketing strategy in place, you have to pay attention to relevance, targeting and usefulness. As mentioned above, is your content actually solving a purpose? Now there is a reason I’m using the word “purpose” and not “problem” because not every piece of content needs to solve a problem. It needs to solve a purpose. The purpose can be making people laugh, making people sad (yes, sometimes that’s needed too), jolt them out of their inertia (environmental activism, for example) and yes, solve their problems. In some way, big or small, they should be a “before content” and “after content” manifestation. If your content doesn’t make a difference, it has no reason to exist.
Create a content marketing strategy that helps you compete with big businesses
That is, if you want. Not every small and mid-sized business wants to compete with big businesses – they are quite satisfied with their current disposition. But here what a mean to say is, with content marketing you can easily compete with big businesses even if you are a small business. This is because content marketing democratises the space; how much attention you get on the Internet doesn’t depend on how much content you can publish and distribute, but how much relevant content that actually touches people’s lives you can publish and distribute. The problem with big businesses is that they cannot be flexible quickly due to their bureaucratic structure. For example, if a blog post suddenly needs to be changed, it can be changed for a small business within a few minutes but for a big business, it may take hours if not days. Similarly, it will be easier for a small business owner to directly talk to his or her customers and clients (and audience) compared to a large business.