We are bombarded every day with marketing efforts in a wide variety of formats. Traditional marketing efforts are proving to be less and less effective due to the sheer volume of information that is available to consume. Marketing efforts today need to be more focused, relevant and valuable for the potential customers that are being targeted. Shifting to content marketing is a much more strategic and effective way to drive customers to action. There are many strategies that can be put in place to run an effective content marketing program. We will dig deeper into three of the most proven ones.
Goals and Mission Statements
One of the key elements to content marketing for your website is to have the marketing be tied to at least one core goal for your business. Starting with one main goal is good, but if there are multiple areas to focus on that would work as well. Goals could be based on raising awareness for your brand or building up your email list. Focusing on these core principles will help to guide the content marketing effort and make it much more focused and effective. Goals could also focus on customer conversions or increasing purchases of existing customers.
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A mission statement is another strategy to help bring some focus to a content marketing plan. A mission statement is really a definition of why your company exists to begin with, and it should encompass who your core audience is. This alone can help to target the customer base that you feel is needed for your business to succeed. A mission statement should also define what you are offering your customers and what you hope they get out of working with your business.
Social Media
Social media and content marketing can really work well together if a few key steps are followed. Content marketing is really needed to help drive social media posts, and social media can be a great way to learn from your target audience. When these two things are working well together, they can also be a key part of larger inbound marketing systems. Having a central area for your audience to get more information (your blog or website) is where deeper relationships can be made with the audience. This will be a great benefit to the content marketing plan. It is also important to have a content plan for social media and to have enough resources available to keep the social media content fresh and relevant. Keeping social media content focused on the goals of your business will enable you to keep your audience more engaged with valuable and relevant information. This can lead to more conversions and calls to action for your customers.
Track Your Progress
As with any effort that you are going to invest time and resources into, it is important to track your progress with content marketing. The first step is to make an inventory of all the content that you are publishing on all the various platforms. From there you need to decide which performance benchmarks are most important to you, and see if the data you collect is matching up with your goals. If a goal was centred around increasing email subscribers, then use that to see what content has been most effective. Another step is to keep the data updated regularly and make changes as necessary to your content marketing plan.
Content marketing is the way of the future for online businesses. This type of marketing is much more relevant and valuable to the target audience. The marketing is more personal and an effective plan will build an audience base that feels some connection and loyalty to the business.
