Content marketing is now one of the most important components of your greater marketing campaign and it really could mean the difference between a marketing win and a marketing fail.
So, aside from the customary MUSTS of excellent content creation such as proofreading, perfect grammar, including images with your text and the likes, we are going to take a look at some hints and tips for you to follow that will instantly vamp up your content marketing campaign that you may not have thought of:
PINPOINT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Identifying and understanding your target audience is the most important aspect of any campaign whether that is content marketing or not, yet it seems to be where so many people slip up and fall at the first hurdle. You must remember what you enjoy writing about is not always what your audience enjoys reading about.
It will take a fair bit of delving to fully get to grips with who your audience are and what they want from you. Content that is not aligned with your users interests will not create the traction, conversation and engagement that you intend, whereas writing fully tailored content will help you reap the rewards tenfold and your hard investigation work will all be worth it.
CREATE A FOCUSED CONTENT PLAN
To hold a viewer’s attention and full focus, content should be precise, snappy and not wandering off on a tangent. Creating a well-structured content plan before you begin writing will help keep you on track and maintain your focus. Planning also aids the ability to identify and write copy catered to your audience’s interests, whilst ensuring you have included all of the critical points that your article or blog post requires.
DON’T LIMIT YOUR CONTENT PLATFORMS
When people hear the word content, they often think of written copy but thanks to advances of the 21st century, podcasts, eBooks, voice clips and visual content such as infographics, photos and videos are more important than ever for making your content marketing campaign current.
Visual content in particular is now the prime focus on a number of social media channels including Instagram, snapchat and YouTube – three media platforms a business cannot afford to be missing out on in 2017. Even traditional ‘text’ based platforms, such as Facebook, now has video components as a centre of attention with their Live Video feature. It was found that Facebook users spend 3x more time watching live streamed videos than pre-recorded clips.
Visual content provides bitesize snippets of information that are easy for the user to digest and consume. The click-through-rate on an email marketing campaign containing a video is 300x higher than those without and a product page that contains a video will have, on average, 64% more sales than a product page without a video.
TAKE ADVANTAGE OF USER GENERATED CONTENT
Letting the customers take the reins on your marketing campaigns might seem a bit daunting at first, but it can be very powerful. UGC (user generated content) is a new lease of life for content marketing and it is most definitely the way forward. For example, some 85% of people trust UGC over potentially biased content published by the brand itself.
One of the most original, successful and quite frankly exciting UGC campaigns was the “Share a Coke” with Coca-Cola campaign, which I’m sure doesn’t need much introduction. Coca-Cola cleverly printed popular names from all around the world on their bottles and asked consumers to share a selfie of them with their bottle on social media. This spread like wildfire around the world and created such a buzz in just about every country, with excited individuals now on the frantic and eager hunt for their name on a simple bottle of coke… they changed the UGC game forever!
Naturally, we would imagine Coca-Cola had a pretty high budget for this innovative idea, but you do not have to focus your entire campaign around UGC for it to work. UGC content can be customer reviews, brand and customer engagement, social media shares, tweets, blog posts or YouTube videos from influencers just to name a few.
COMBINING CONTENT MARKETING WITH SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
If you have taken the time to produce great content, whether this is written, video, podcast or otherwise, you want it to have the widest audience reach possible. What is the most effective way to do this? By creating highly targeted paid social media advertisements.
Some businesses believe they shouldn’t be paying for social media advertisements as the platform itself is free to use, when in reality, organic Facebook posts reach a very small number of users. Paying a small fee for an ad will help catapult your inspiring content into the hands of mass audiences, bringing about more conversions and new followers to your brand – it would be silly not to, wouldn’t it?
DON’T BE SCARED TO SHOW YOUR PERSONALITY
You would assume such a tip belongs in the realms of “obvious advice,” along with grammar and proofreading but you wouldn’t believe how many people let this slip through the net.
Much too often, companies lose their character when creating content because they are too focused on maintaining high levels of professionalism. Of course there are certain do’s, don’ts and standards that must be upheld, granted in some industries more than others, but injecting character into your content doesn’t mean neglecting professionalism. We don’t believe any industry is TOO formal where you can’t include a bit of humour and personality here and there.
Your target audience are not robots, whatever industry you are working in the viewers of your content are human too. Showing a warm and funny nature will draw in a larger audience base and help you to stand out in the minds of consumers, more so than your competition. Humour often helps to spark social media conversation and engagement, creating the convincing user generated content we mentioned earlier.
You don’t have to take it to extremes, you could post an occasional humorous tweet, an April fool’s Day Facebook post or include a punch line in one of your blogs; it’s the simple things that take your content from lifeless to personal!
SEM Consultants understand the key components needed to create an award winning content marketing campaign, from the flamboyant ideas to the simplicity of perfect grammar. We are not limited to content; you can have your wider digital marketing campaign created all under one roof by the same dedicated and creative teams at SEM Consultants. Call us now to get your show stopping campaign underway.