It’s never too late for new beginnings, so even though we’re already nearing the end of January, it’s a great time to take steps toward content marketing success in 2016.
We’ve put together a simple outline of steps – along with some ideas based on the latest trends in content marketing – to help with that goal.
1. Strategy & Planning
First things first. Get out the white board or get out paper and pen, and sit down and think about your content marketing objectives. Define these objectives as a list or a mission statement and select the metrics that you’ll use to measure them. What’s the goal of your content? How does your content impact your company’s overall business goals? What are the content marketing metrics you need to focus on? Get it all down in a documented strategy you can refer back to and tweak as you go along.
Next, study your audience. What types of content do they engage in most? Where do they hang out online? What are their interests, desires, needs? What makes them laugh? This is where the all-important “trend” or practice of relationship marketing comes in; it’s where you engage with your customers and listen to what they’re saying so that you can understand what they want. It’s also where you look at customer behavior data and analytics. Combine all the knowledge at your disposal to create the tactics you’ll use to connect with your audience and meet your business objectives.
Once you have your objectives in place and an understanding of your audience, devise a budget. Your budget might include content creation, paid advertising, brand partnerships, traditional PR, native ads on social media, content distribution, and analytics. After that, assign clear objectives to your team members. Create an editorial calendar that outlines 1) how often and when you’ll be creating content, posting it, and distributing it on each channel; 2) timing for your advertising campaigns; and 3) any other action steps that need to happen to help meet your objectives. With an editorial calendar and an understanding of the resources at your disposal, you can decide if you’ll need professional help for creating content.
2. Content Creation & Curation
With the information from your research about your audience, you’ll already know what kind of content you want to create. For 2016, you’ll especially want to look at these areas for possibilities for building relationships with your target audience:
- Interactive storytelling will continue to grow in importance because it keeps audiences engaged and compels them to stay on your site. Interactive storytelling can be as simple as quizzes and polls or as complex as immersive websites. Also, keep a lookout for what’s to come with virtual reality, also known as VR, and Facebook’s Oculus; it may hold some interesting opportunities for your content marketing.
- Visual content, especially videos, is key to customer engagement. You’ll want to create a graphic story about your brand with videos, infographics, memes and images, especially on social media where images get 180% more engagement. Videos especially help drive traffic to your site and increase visitor-to-lead conversion rates.
- Episodic content is not new, but it’s the way of the future if you want greater engagement. Think podcasts, webinars and video series that build on each other in a way that keep your audience coming back for more.
- User-generated content, or UGC, is something we’ve talked about for a while, but we expect it to grow even more in 2016 with brands inspiring audiences to create content on their behalf via user-generated content campaigns. Once the content is created, your job is to put it to good use by curating it and distributing it intelligently. UGC can include product reviews, social posts and video testimonials.
If you need content, but you don’t have the resources to create it, reach out to creation companies like Filament, to fill the gaps where needed.
3. Distribution
Invest time and money in developing, executing, managing and measuring an objectives-based content distribution strategy that integrates your unique content in paid, earned & owned media channels to deliver better experiences. Your goal here is to get your content in front of the eyes, ears, and hearts of your target audience.
Your strategy should include content distribution across channels and platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your blog, your website, mobile apps, and email. You can improve your reach even further by using earned and paid media as conduits to owned media properties where you can focus on improving user experience. Create ads on sites like Twitter and Facebook. Optimize your content for search engines and use Google Adwords to improve your search result ranking.
As part of your strategy, consider putting into play another rising trend of 2016—influencer marketing, which Google considers a good marketing practice. After you’ve created valuable, original content, you can reach out to influencers in your industry about publishing your content on their blogs and posting your content on social media. You could also have them use and review your products and services.
4. Measurement
Here’s where you use the data you’ve been collecting all along to 1) determine your content’s effectiveness in meeting your original objectives, 2) tweak your strategy as needed, 3) create content that better meets the needs of your audience, and 4) improve your content distribution strategy.
Make use of both outreach analytics and ROI analytics to help answer questions about whether or not your content is engaging your audience and whether your content is bringing in the revenue it needs to. Once you’ve got the right analytics for your business objectives, use them as ways to improve your process to meet those objectives.
Last but not least, check in with your team frequently to see what’s working and what’s not, and to get input from the whole team so that your content reflects your company’s expertise and personality.
What will you be doing in 2016 to ensure your content marketing campaigns are successful? Please share your thoughts in the comment below.
Connect with Filament to find out how we can help you achieve content marketing success this year.
