If you want to do digital marketing right, you need to have a great content marketing campaign. Content marketing is the development of customer-facing channels that allow your business to meet the needs of your customers (both existing and prospects) through your content.
Whether they come in a form of blog posts, infographics, videos, podcasts, photos or webinars, your content becomes the face of your business. Your content displays your brand’s personality and authority while building engaging and meaningful relationships with your customers.
But as your rivals in the digital space increase each day, how do you ensure that your content marketing campaign gets a leg up on the competition?
Determine your content marketing campaign goals
Before you jump on creating any type of content, you need to have clear objectives in place. For any marketing campaign to succeed, it requires a solid foundation of knowledge and strategy. More importantly, it must be aligned with your business goals.
What exactly do you want to achieve with your content marketing campaign? Is it to raise brand awareness or improve brand loyalty? Perhaps, you want to educate your customers and build connection. Whatever your reasons are, once they are defined, it is easier to measure your results and compare it with your budget.
Work out your resources
Like any other marketing efforts, your content marketing campaign requires money. You will need a budget for a team of digital marketing experts such as content writers, graphic designers, web developers, and social media specialists.
In addition, not all distribution channels are free of cost. While you may find that most social media networks are practically free, you will need to pay for a content management system and your website domain.
Understand your competitors
Find time to learn about your competitors. Look at businesses like yours and understand their activities. What type of content are they publishing? Which of them is gaining the most traction? How often do they post?
Learning about your competitors will not only help you know more about your target audience but also find ways to improve your content marketing campaign. Your competitors should be a source of inspiration, not a resource for your web copy. The deeper you understand your competitors’ positioning, the more you can set your business apart and make it unique.
Develop content personas
The next step is particularly essential to those who are just starting out or are new to content marketing. Having a clear grasp of your audience is one of the keys to having a successful campaign.
It is important that you know your customers’ pain points and the type of content that sparks their interest. With this knowledge, you can create relevant and valuable content that perfectly matches your readers’ preferences.
Craft content ideas
Idea generation is often a team-wide task where everyone shares their ideas and picks out the best ones for the next two to three months. Idea creation may take place during huddles, roundtable discussions, monthly meetings and even in project management systems and spreadsheets.
Wherever it may be, idea creation should be done in advance and continue often. When ideas run dry, you can always go back to your competitors’ websites for inspiration. You might also want to check your comment sections for feedback from your readers. You can also go to social media platforms such as Twitter or Instagram and use hashtags to search for trending topics.
Create, publish, and engage+
Now it is time do the work. Take your time to draft quality content. Remember, quality is more important than quantity. So edit, proofread, and revise your work until you are confident that your readers will love it.
Once it is up for everyone to see, be on the lookout for comments and feedback. Then, make sure to respond to them in a more personal way. This is also the best time to take notes about what you could do better.
Learn new things
Content marketing is a never-ending process. Once you start it, there’s no way you should stop it. If you want to keep your brand constantly in your customers’ mind, never stop improving. Seek ways to learn new things you can implement. Overtime, you will have better content and better results.
How is your content marketing campaign doing so far? From content strategy to content creation and audit, Boost Media Group has a team of professionals ready to service your content needs. Contact us for a free marketing analysis.