If you're not already, you should be considering content marketing
The benefits of your content marketing to your company are three-fold:
1) Build your digital presence
Through digital content marketing, you can easily add your voice to conversations around the web that are relevant to your brand and your audience. This gives you visibility in your industry and allows you to differentiate yourself from your competitors in the market through your own voice.
2) Influence your audience
When you share information that is genuinely useful to audiences, you stay top-of-mind to them the next time they go on a question online to search for answers to their problem. This creates a digital connection between you and your audience, which creates loyalty to your brand if the bond is strengthened over time.
3) Grow your brand
Content marketing can help you build credibility and trust amongst your audience and drive future sales. By providing valuable and relevant information to your target audience, you can establish yourself as an authority in your industry and build trust with your audience. This can lead to increased engagement, loyalty, and customer advocacy.
4) Attract and retain customers
Content marketing helps to attract new customers to your brand and retain existing customers by providing them with valuable information and resources. By creating engaging and informative content, you can generate leads and drive conversions by providing your audience with the information they need to make informed purchasing decisions.
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Our tips for effective content creation
Now that you’re convinced why content marketing is important to your brand, we’d like to let you know that in order to achieve the benefits that content marketing can bring, you must consider the following factors:
A) Consistency is key
Consistency is not about being around all the time — rather, it’s about being predictable. Whatever piece of content you plan to put out into the world, you need to pick a publication cadence that you can commit to.
This is important because you want to be able to tell people when they should expect to hear from you, and you want to commit to your word on that. This is what builds trust between the people and your brand. Failing to deliver on your word will compromise your brand’s trustworthiness. After all, no one wants a flaky friend who’s unpredictable about when they show up.
So, it’s better to start off with an initial commitment that is conservative with the resources you have at hand, and from there build up to a more aspirational content strategy.
B) Engage your audience
Instead of just putting your piece of content out there into the world and then walking away, ensure that you’re keeping an eye on people’s interactions with your content — and engage back! For example, if someone comments on your content, write a comment back!
In fact, when creating social media content, especially, distribution platforms mark content that see high engagement as “good” content that it can then suggest to other audiences outside of your network. This helps you reach more audiences through your content — so you’re better off encouraging people to comment, like, or share your content.
C) Plan a wider content strategy
You’ll want the content that you put out to fit into your wider narrative. Take a moment to write down what are your content pillars — that is to say, the main topics you want to talk about. Then, when creating content, identify which pillar each particular content piece fits into and ensure that the dialogue is consistent across all platforms.
D) Refine based on performance
Even when you’ve mapped out what you think is an optimal content plan based on a deep competitive analysis and inner brand work, if the content you publish fails to be engaged with then you must reconsider your content strategy.
The way you’ll know if your content plan is working out for you or not is by keeping an eye on their performance analytics. Most distribution and hosting platforms offer access to analytics — some even have user-friendly dashboards for those of us who aren’t too savvy with spreadsheets.
We suggest you consolidate your content performance data across all platforms (you likely share repurposing your content for multiple platforms, anyway) so that you instill a one-eyed view of your strategy — just think of the Eye of Sauron.
Note: If you’d like to learn our content strategy and apply it to your business, we teach everything we do and give personalized feedback in our content marketing course and community. If you’d like us to do content marketing for you, then feel free to fill out the form on the bottom of our contact us page.