Content marketing focuses on the creation and sharing of content. This can be content such as social media posts, blog posts or videos. Content marketing doesn’t typically ‘sell’ your brand, but it’s intended to create interest in your products and brand.
Audience
The first thing you need to consider in content marketing is where your audience are and the suitability of your content for different channels. You want to be delivering valuable content to your audience through the most appropriate channels. For example, short visual posts work best on social media channels, whereas long form content such as blog posts or case studies work best on your website. You need to understand the channels available to you to ensure that your strategy is successful.
Top Tips
- Have someone dedicated to your content marketing
- Content marketing requires a significant amount of time so it’s best to have someone dedicated to your content strategy. Whether this is having a member of your team focus on this or hiring a freelancer.
- Develop a content calendar
- Your content strategy should be consistent. To make sure this is the case create a calendar. This can be done as frequently as you like. This way you can map out your content for a month or more at a time, which means that you’re not put on the spot to figure out content on the day.
- Brainstorm with your team if you get stuck
- We all get stuck thinking of content sometimes. When this happens get your team together for a quick 10-minute brainstorm to come up with some new ideas.
- Ask your audience questions
- When publishing content on social, engage your audience! Ask questions, give people a reason to interact with your posts. You could also ask your audience what they’d like to see from you to inform your strategy.
- Track your success
- Content marketing should have a purpose for your business. As this content isn’t meant to sell your product, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to directly link it to sales. But you can measure the engagement each post gets. It will also show you what does and doesn’t work for your audience.
Tools
To have a great content strategy there are some essential tools you should use. After your research you should have a solid plan for the written content you’re using. But you also need some strong creative content to really make your work stand out and a publishing tool to make your life easier.
The main tools we use for our content strategy are:
- Canva
- This is an easy to use tool for content creation. It’s free and there are templates for everything you could need. Use it for social media posts, infographics, mind maps and more.
- Adobe Creative Suite
- If you’ve got someone creative on your team the adobe creative suite products are great for creating your own, completely original content. With Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dimension, Animate and Premier Pro there’s no end to what you could create. We currently use Premiere Pro for our daily and weekly news videos.
- Hootsuite
- Hootsuite is perfect to schedule your social media posts across all your chosen platforms. Save yourself time by scheduling your posts as far in advance as you can rather than manually posting. We love Hootsuite because it allows you to post videos and not just images, it’s also one of the few tools that posts to LinkedIn.
Promotion?
Your content strategy isn’t meant to be salesy, but this doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t promote it. Promotion of your content will be a personal choice for your brand, most likely based on budgets and priority. Content marketing is intended to be a long-term strategy to draw potential customers towards your brand. Promotion could accelerate this journey but isn’t necessary if you’re willing to allow the process to work.
In conclusion:
- Your brand should have a content marketing plan
- A dedicated team member and a content calendar will give you the best chance of success
- Don’t underestimate researching appropriate channels, audiences and content
- Brainstorm with others when you’re stuck, we all struggle sometimes!
- Make sure your content gives your audience a reason to engage
- Measure the success of individual content types to see what works well and what doesn’t