Unpuzzling your content marketing

When done correctly, content marketing can be a powerful part of your marketing strategy. This involves creating and sharing content across multiple different channels such as your social media platforms, your website and SEO, blog posts, case studies, news stories, print publications and many more.

It is important to be consistent and make sure that you are creating valuable content which is relevant and will emotionally engage with your target audiences!

Joining it up

Before you dive straight into creating your content, make sure you refer back to your overall marketing strategy and work out what you want to achieve. Take the time to create your marketing plan so you can identify where the best opportunities are for your business. Define your SMART goals.

Audiences and messages

Identify the target audiences you want to reach. What key messages do you want them to receive and what is the best way of reaching them? Are they a Googler or an Instagrammer? Think about your values and tone of voice. Then you can think about what content and keywords your audiences will be looking for and how you can help solve their issues.

Planning to make the most of your content

Be smart with your content planning. Work out how regular blogs or news articles could be used on your website to help with your SEO (with relevant search terms) and repurposed for social media. Create a plan that will reach your audiences and get the right messages across all channels. Think about themes for your content so you can show difference aspects of your business – for example: technical ‘know how’, customer stories and testimonials, and your team values and culture (the human and personal aspect of your business)

Create a content calendar

When thinking about what content is going to resonate and provide value to your target audiences, it is important to plan ahead and get organised. In our next blog, we will guide you through the content planning process in detail, but it is key to make sure you have some sort of calendar to allow you to look ahead and identify the key themes and seasonal events you can pin your content to. Also, make sure you post consistently and regularly

Your brand and visual material

When creating your marketing collateral is vital to stay on brand and be visually consistent. Each piece of collateral should have a recognisable look and feel to it. To ensure brand consistency you should establish brand guidelines to avoid any off-brand mishaps! It is also important to remember people are visual so your collateral should be as eye catching and engaging as possible! In the fast paced, digital world that we live in, you only have seconds to capture someone’s attention as they scroll past. Think how you can make you content jump off the page and stand out against your competition.

Platforms and posts

Once you have created your content, you need to think about where it will work best for you and where your audiences are. Is it your website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or somewhere else? Facebook and Instagram are perfect for a business to consumer audiences where you can be really visual and share pictures and videos, however platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn are great for business-to-business audiences and may be a better place to post you or blogs or news articles.

Measuring to grow your community

Finally, the most important thing you can do is check how your hard work is performing! Use tools such as Google Analytics, or social media insights, to identify the content which is performing the most strongly and helping you to achieve your objectives. Tweak your content plan each month to include more of this style of content and provide your audience with what they want to see. This will help establish you a loyal following and engaged community.

If you would like any more advice about creating great content for your business then please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us!

Keep an eye out for our next blog, where we will be talking about the content planning process.