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content marketing

There’s nothing more frustrating than spending hours creating content for your business just to see it completely flop. Few views, little engagement, no conversions — what happened?

The common culprit? You’re lacking a good content marketing strategy, if you even had one at all.

When content marketing fails, that means you’re not reaching your goals, such as brand awareness, website traffic or lead conversions. The whole point of a content marketing strategy is to take these business goals and determine what steps need to be taken — and what types of content need to be created — in order to attain your goals.

So what all should go into a content strategy?

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How to start your content strategy

To start, ask yourself these questions:
  1. Who am I trying to reach with my content?
  2. What will my content offer to this audience?
  3. What makes my business stand out?
  4. Which types of content should I create?
  5. How will my content stand out from competitors’ content?
  6. How will I promote my content?
  7. How will my content help me achieve my business goals?
Asking these questions will help you create your content strategy and help you achieve your business goals. There are a lot of things you can look at to help guide your content strategy. First, take a look at analytics for your past content. What performed well? What didn’t? Are there specific types of content that seem to work better for your business? Is your audience primarily on mobile or on desktop devices? Look at industry trends and what type of content seems to be working for your competitors. To learn more about making a successful content strategy, check out this free guide from Hubspot.

PRO TIP:

Regularly examine your analytics to track what is and isn’t working for your business — and can adjust your marketing plans accordingly.

How to choose the type of content

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How do you know what kind of content will work best for your business? Think about where your audience consumes content and what message you’re trying to convey.

If social media is the way you reach most of your audience, then you should be creating more social media content. This can include both graphics and videos.

If you’re trying to reach people visiting your website or browsing the web in general, consider creating more landing pages with long-tail keyword phrases combined with paid ad content.

If you want to reach a younger audience, create TikTok videos (which can also be shared as Instagram stories and reels).

And if you have helpful information to share with your audience that requires a longer form of communication, try writing blogs or creating a monthly newsletter.

Basically, the type of content you create comes down to who your target audience is and their preferences. It’s also good to look at whether they view your content more on mobile or web — and create accordingly (using either responsive designs or manually sizing your content for web or mobile).

To be clear, your marketing message matters most. You can only pack so much into a single graphic. If you’re trying to get across a more complicated message, try a video, a blog or even an infographic.

How to keep content creative

So how do you create content that stands out in a digital world oversaturated with content?

Make sure you keep the content interesting and relevant to your audience.

If you’re creating content, it needs to be useful to your business and useful to your audience. Are you sharing information what’s helpful to the customer? Every time you make a plan to create content, ask yourself: Why does my audience care? Why would they want to look at/read/watch this?

Here are some tried and true tips to get you started:

Keep content simple

Don’t overcomplicate things or overwhelm your audience. For example, limit your text on photos and videos. Focus on specific items or themes. Try not to pack too much into a single graphic or video.

Be timely

Create content relevant to current promotions and current trends.

Evergreen is key

Make sure some of your content is evergreen; meaning, it’s always timely and can be re-shared or re-purposed later on.

Be consistent

Keep content brand-consistent. When you’re creating graphics, use your brand colors and fonts. Use your logo. Keep your overall brand message in mind. And try to share content on a consistent basis as well.

Stay relevant and interesting

Just don’t be boring, and make sure your content stays relevant to your audience.

Set a target audience

Your target audience should help you decide which kind of content you’re creating.

Use good SEO

Search Engine Optimization will help you reach a larger audience. Be careful not to keyword-stuff your blogs. Search engines are ranking websites by how long people stay on your blog, how relevant your content is, how easy your website is to navigate and how your link to expert sources.

Give your content time to reach a big enough audience

If you don’t get the views you were looking for right away, don’t give up or delete your content. Give it time. (And when you’re looking at analytics, wait at least 30 days before you make any observation on how certain content is performing).

Make a promotion plan

Your content is useless unless you promote it! You have to make sure it actually makes it in front of your intended audience.

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