The firm uses content for a number of things, from closing deals on sales to onboarding new staff or clients. But the marketing department of a company frequently initiates the content generation process.
Early in the 2000s, when the idea of content marketing started to gain traction, it was surrounded by hype. Some ardent supporters recognized its long-term benefits right away. However, many pundits dismissed it as a passing marketing fad that we would all soon grow tired of.
But twenty years later, content marketing isn’t only enduring; it’s becoming more valuable and significant. One of the most effective tools available to organizations today is content. But like any instrument, it needs to be used properly in order to make the correct impact and provide the desired results.
Here are some suggestions to help you generate content that accomplishes more for you, your company, and your audience if you’re wanting to improve your content strategy and creation procedures.
Make Sure Everything Fits into Your Sales Funnel:
According to Rhett Stubbendeck, founder of LeverageRx: “It’s all about conversions these days. This usually refers to sales, but it can also imply clicks, newsletter signups, or any other marketing-specific objective you might come up with.
Sharing a popular video from the office, writing a blog post about the status of your industry, or linking to an infographic you made are just a few examples of content marketing.
Yes, it does include those elements, but it also involves conveying a narrative. It must have an emotional hook to influence a target’s behavior, ideas, or feelings regarding what is searched. And one little component of that is search.
All of your offline and online marketing efforts must be consistent with your brand story and relate to a certain stage of your sales funnel.
All of your material, including social media posts, photos, fresh blogs, and even press releases, is therefore crucial. And for everything to advance your targets’ sales journeys, it must all operate together.
And to do this successfully, you must have a sound plan in place before you begin.”
Review, Refresh, and Replace:
Percy Grunwald, owner of Hosting Data shares: “Although nothing is permanent, if you can produce content with a lengthy shelf life, you’ll be able to drive traffic, clicks, and interaction for months or even years. Some pieces will burn brilliantly for a little time.
You must decide what needs to go, what needs to be changed, and what only needs a modest refresh.
Examine your current content to determine what should remain and what should be deleted. Make sure you regularly verify any stats or links to other content if you utilize them.
Certain content, referred to as evergreen content, will stay current for a very long time. Even while you can’t just leave it alone, it needs much less maintenance than hot topics.
How can you determine the kinds of tutorials, blog posts, and videos that will continue to be useful? You can determine that through effective research.
Examine your current traffic, research your rivals, and consulting resources for the sector.
What subjects keep coming up over and time again, no matter how recently they were published? Find words and phrases that have received a lot of searches over an extended period using your keyword research tools.
Select images that are appropriate and less likely to appear dated.
Above all, make sure it is helpful. Once you’ve published a quality piece of evergreen content, keep marketing it. It will continue to attract clicks as long as it is still pertinent.”
Listen to Your Audience:
Put your ear to the ground when using social media and pay close attention to what your audience is saying. What are they discussing? What inquiries do they make? What do they say about your brand when they talk about it? What specific details are they seeking?
Abe Breuer, owner of VIP To Go claims: “There are many ways social listening can benefit you, but we want to focus on topic generation.
You can learn about your followers’ problems, wants, and hobbies by listening in on their chats. Using this data, you can create articles centered around keywords that are more pertinent to your audience.
Let’s take the example of selling landscaping services. You may have always assumed that your clients employ you to maintain beautiful lawns. However, you find out via their likes, shares, and comments that they’re just trying to find ways to save time.
With this knowledge, you can change your emphasis from writing about best practices to how landscaping services can help homeowners save time.”
Identify Your Competitors’ Top Performing Content:
Industry leaders don’t rise to the top by keeping to themselves. Instead, they continually observe what their rivals are doing and then go out and improve it.
Brands can now monitor one another more easily than ever thanks to social media. At least once a week, look at your competitors’ feeds to observe what kind of content they produce and, more importantly, how their followers respond to it.
Your investigation may bring to light subjects or viewpoints you had never considered before and lead you to desire to hire blog post-writing services, or it may demonstrate what not to do.
In either case, competitor analysis can help you plan your strategy for producing social media content.
Set up custom templates:
Andy Golpys, founder of web design agency MadeByShape states: “Whenever you post, if you’re making new visuals from scratch, you probably take a lot longer to create your content. That’s where templates come in!
Say, for example, that you frequently share articles advertising fresh blog entries, quote-based images, or meme-style content. You may spend just a few minutes modifying the text and image by creating templates for different content kinds for your brand.
Making the templates may take some time upfront, but you’ll end up saving a massive amount of time in the long run.”