Content marketing is extensive these days, and businesses are crushing it. It’s time to put your game face on and compete!
Content marketing is powerful, especially when it’s carried out strategically and with reliable data backing up the decisions. With many brands and businesses doing the same, it’s up to the marketing team or an outsourced creative design studio to develop an edge for a brand.
Having a surge of trends and creative ideas can easily lead anyone astray from the objective of a task, which in this case should be avoided at all costs. Unproductive marketing efforts don’t just cost money and energy; they cost opportunities too. While your brand is not utilizing keywords or posting in-brand content, your competitors are increasing their conversion rates and returning customers. Here are some basic principles to remember for content marketing.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a technique wherein valuable, relevant, and consistent content is used to reach a target audience, ultimately intending to drive up sales. It sounds like a lengthy process. Other than developing content, there’s a lot of deliberation, strategizing, and research involved in content marketing. Content marketing can come in the form of web pages, videos, social media posts, and other digital products.
The real challenge in content marketing is content ideation. Pumping out new ideas regularly can be mentally draining. But having pointers to facilitate the ideation process helps a marketing team achieve their objectives. Here are some of those pointers to help make any marketing campaign a success.
Give Your Audience What They Want
The word ‘keyword’ is not just a buzzword you hear during brainstorm sessions and deliberations. In fact, keywords tell you what people are looking for. Think of keywords as a manifestation of the demands of your market because that’s exactly what keywords translate to. Having this knowledge aids in the content ideation process, especially in making clickable and relevant content. But how does one discover which keywords are making rounds all over the internet? There are various tools online that help you with keyword research. An example and free tool is Google Trends. This tool will help you find out how many searches a particular keyword has over a specific time. It even shows the related queries and searches people made.
Have a Competitor Analysis and Study It
If studying what your audience wants is essential, so is analyzing your competitors. Formulating strategies are best when you have data to base them on. A competitor analysis can help enhance marketing efforts, ultimately increasing brand awareness.
The first step is to identify who your direct competitors are. Afterward, define the metrics for the comparison. Be it keyword research, social media engagement, following, etc. Lastly, compare, contrast, and discuss. From the findings, study and compare marketing strategies and efforts. Gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses. It’s important to note that there is no set standard for conducting a competitor analysis. Marketing is a complex game, with many nuances and ways worth studying. No matter what approach a marketing team decides to take, it should be holistic, straightforward, and sure to yield insightful results.
Stay Consistent With Your Brand Image
Creativity within the bounds of the brand image, voice, and identity is key to staying consistent in creating and distributing content. Although experimentation is essential, especially when testing the waters for a new concept or strategy, it’s still important to stay in character. People tend to lean on heuristics, and having a cohesive, consistent brand image helps a brand become memorable and its content easier to digest.
Always Have Reliable Sources
It’s natural for an audience or a loyal customer base to view a brand they’ve grown to trust to be an authority of the industry or niche they belong in, whether it’s beauty, technology, or health and fitness. It’s also expected of brands to know these things if they want to remain competitive and updated with the trends. With that said, it’s a brand’s social responsibility to provide information and source information only from reliable sources. Even if creativity is a big part of the ideation process, the fact remains that significant influence comes with a big responsibility.
The Bottom Line
Content marketing isn’t just emerging; it’s the norm. While everyone else is going on board with it, it’s crucial to have a calculated, strategic approach to marketing your content. Some basic yet essential principles may be lost to others, but that doesn’t have to be the same for you. Follow the principles above, and your brand will yield both organic engagements and a significant return on investment.
