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17th August 2017

#Marketing

Helping brands stand up and stand out is one of our driving forces. And with the marketing playing field having changed especially in the last decade, it’s easier to market but more challenging to market effectively.

So, how do you make your brand stand head and shoulders above the pack?

Well, there’s no silver bullet or magic potion but one of the ways to do it is with outstanding content marketing. It requires a strategic approach to crafting and promoting content that adds value to your ideal target audience.

What is content marketing?

Whether it’s a blog post, video, infographics, case studies, advertising or any branded collateral that you share online in various mediums, that’s content marketing.

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Why should you use content marketing as part of your mix?

Valuable content allows you to connect with your audience, it can position you in the marketplace as a leader or credible authority in your area of expertise. Most importantly, I’d say that it helps you to increase the touch points that people have with your brand. The higher the frequency of interaction the more likely you are to convert. It’s a great brand awareness tool that will ultimately increase your bottom line.

It’s important to know your customers or ideal target audience, have clear goals in mind for your content marketing and have the resources to generate great content. Once you have those key things in place, it’s time to create outstanding content.

Here are our golden rules for content marketing

Add value to your customers  

Having a full understanding of your target audience is key. Part of this understanding is knowing their pains, challenges and outcomes they want. A huge part of your content marketing should be to help solve their issues. We have a rule that 80% of content marketing should add value, add value, add value. The remaining 20% can be up sell and promoting your product or brand.

Showcase your expertise

We’ve often found with the countless brands we’ve worked with, that there’s untapped potential in the knowledge and experience of the team within the company. Work with your subject matter experts to create engaging, valuable and expert content. This will only help to position your brand as credible.

Communicate your brand message & stay on brand

It’s important that your brand messaging is on point. Having a brand message that resonates with your target audience, their needs and the solution that you can provide, creates impact. It’s a fantastic opportunity to pop a few unique client benefits associated with your brand, product or service into your content marketing.

Make sure that your tone of voice and style is in line with your brand guidelines, make sure that any graphics are branded well and that fonts, icons, images etc are consistent. Consistency builds trust and reinforces your brand at each touch point.

Optimise so your content can be found

If you’re writing a blog make sure you use relevant keywords so your content might be found. Sometimes writing blog titles as headings can be a great way to get found on Google searches. If you’re using social media, do a little bit of research on the hashtags that you can use so it may come across someone who’s interested in relevant topics.

Push your content out, not just once

Don’t let your hard work go to ruin or sit on the shelf gathering dust. It’s really important to distribute your content through as many channels as are relevant. And don’t forget that you can repurpose content. A blog could also be recreated as an infographic, a short version for a LinkedIn article, a SlideShare document and many other digital assets.

Track, test and tweak

It’s vital to track your content. You’ll start to identify trends in terms of what types of blogs or posts gain more traction and reach. There’s a lot you can learn from this to tweak your content strategy for the most optimal results. The tracking measures you employ should match your goals whether it’s click through, increased sales, increased social media following or brand awareness.

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There are many things we’ve learned along the way. For example, how images of real people get far more engagements on LinkedIn, the best times of day to Tweet or the best days to send email campaigns.
If you’d like to know more or to discuss how to boost your content marketing plans, please don’t hesitate to Tweet, Facebook or drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.