This is the second in our series of posts on Content Marketing. In the first post we explained what content marketing was, why it was so important in today’s digital world and what you could do to build a successful content marketing strategy. This week we’re going to elaborate on a few more key elements of successful content marketing.
Community is key.
Building a community is vital for the success of your content marketing. Having
a community ensures you are giving your content the best possible chance of reaching the right audience. More importantly, it gives your content the ability to be shared and achieve a reach far beyond anything conventional media can deliver.
Building a community also creates a large pool of people interested in your product or service and gives you access to them on an ongoing basis. This in turn can help you climb up the search rankings and generate positive feedback for your brand. The bigger your community, the better your odds of success.
There are two types of communities you can build: Personal communities and public communities. Personal communities are communities you build as an individual. Examples would be your Twitter followers and your LinkedIn contacts. Both can play a vital role in helping you share your content.
Public communities on the other hand are forums/places that users go to discuss a topic, share interests or follow a passion. Examples would be a Google Community, an online forum or a Facebook page dedicated to a certain subject.
Other communities could be people who’ve already shown an interest in your brand. Like your newsletter subscription database, or members on your website forum or blog. The more communities you’re a part of, the greater the chance of your content being shared.
Do the unexpected
Once you’ve established a strong set of communities, the next step is to deliver content that’s most likely to be shared. And one of the key things to keep in mind is that doing the unexpected is often the best way to get your message noticed.
This can be done in many ways. Humour is always well received. Re-engineering a piece of content to give it a whole new twist is also worth exploring. Using topical events/news around which to build your content can also be good. The other popular route to take is to catch people’s reactions to an unusual event or situation that you’ve engineered.
No matter how you decide to create content always keep in mind that the content you create should in no way be disrespectful to your audience or your brand.
Measure. Measure. Measure.
In marketing, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. So make sure you know how you’re going to measure your success before you start. If you’re a small business then this may the only marketing effort you’re doing and you need to know the time and effort you put into it is worthwhile.
Fortunately there are tools you can access easily and cheaply to measure your results. Google Analytics is one of the better known ones and you should familiarize yourself with it.
Every social platform has some measurement tools built into it so you should look into these as well. Again, the best time to do this is before you’ve started your campaign. The great thing about content marketing is that it’s easier to track and measure the behaviour of your audience than with an offline campaign.
Measurement metrics you should be paying attention to are: Consumption metrics,
Sharing metrics, Lead metrics and Sales Metrics. Together these will help you know your reach – how many users are consuming and sharing your content. And more importantly whether it’s paying off financially.
As always, be prepared to act on what your results are telling you. The best part about content marketing is your ability to change and fix your content in response to what your audience is saying. So don’t be afraid to change or improve your content if you need to.
Ultimately the best content marketing is as much about relationships as it is about content.
You need to talk to your target audience on a regular basis, you need to be helpful and you need to reach out to them. If the only time you care about somebody is when he or she buy your product, you’re not creating a relationship, a community or a platform for your content marketing’s success.
Reference used: Insights from a Content Marketer with C.C. Chapman
