Happy *almost* new year! We’ve created a list of the top 10 content marketing tips, based on what we learned in 2015, to help get your content marketing efforts off to a great start in 2016.
1. Prioritize quality over quantity.
Your #1 goal for 2016: publish quality content on a consistent schedule. Consider repurposing existing content, user-generated content and creating evergreen content to help your company meet that goal.
2. Go adaptive.
Adaptive content allows you to deliver meaningful content to users when and where they want it. You’ll need to open your mind to a new way of thinking about content, one that lets go of the presentation of content and instead focuses on creating useful, recombinatory chunks of content—content that’s designed to go anywhere.
3. Tell stories visually.
Visual content gets more engagement, plain and simple. If you haven’t already, it’s high time you added visual content to your content marketing strategy. Check out our blog post on how to craft great visual content for some great ideas you can put to use today.
4. Keep it mobile.
As mobile continues to gain in importance, it will also continue to affect the ways in which we plan, create, and deliver useful, usable content. We should also be thinking about new functionality specific to the unique properties of mobile devices.
5. Focus on your customers.
Put your customers at the center of your content marketing efforts. Focus on their needs by listening, observing, and joining the conversation. Let what you learn guide your strategies.
6. Inspire customers and employees to create content.
Start building experiences that inspire customers to get involved in the creation of your brand. For example, you might put together a pop-up event that gets customers talking about you on visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat.
7. Make your channels work together.
Integrate your content marketing with all the other elements of your marketing, sales, and branding processes. The end result: your content will have wider appeal, more visibility and better ROI.
8. Be all about the analytics.
Analytics are becoming vital to content marketing. Collect good data—meaningful and analyzable data that maps to strategic business objectives—in order to understand and optimize how customers interact with you online. Don’t know where to start? Check out our blog post “Web Analytics: Where to Start.”
9. Tap top influencers.
If you haven’t yet, it’s time to launch a program involving influencers. You want to get influencers talking about your brand and your products or services. Lucky for you, there are a lot of strategies to choose from. First, define your goals and objectives. Then, identify influencers and strategies to help meet those goals and objectives. Finally, work on building relationships with the influencers you identify before you invite them to be a part of your program.
10. Get strategic about content distribution & amplification.
As 2016 gets underway, create documented strategies for both content distribution and content amplification. You might consider using social media, native advertising, and internal and external newsletters as part of these strategies.
What are your top content marketing tips as 2015 comes to a close? Share your experiences from the past year in the comments section below.
Learn more about Filament and how we can help you put some of these content marketing best practices to work for your business in 2016.
