Ever wonder how to build a good marketing strategy? We get it, and building a content marketing machine can help.
Content marketing is where it’s at. Every business uses content marketing to grab consumers’ attention and convince them to use their services. If done right, there’s something almost magical about the power that content marketing has over consumers to convince them to buy from a company.
Any quick Google search will show you the shocking comparisons that come into play when looking at the different stats between content marketing and other forms of marketing.
So, with content marketing on the rise, the question isn’t if you should use content marketing but how to use content marketing. The art of content marketing is a powerful one to know, but it takes time, patience, and an excellent strategy to be able to ace content marketing.
As we provide tips for building a nonstop content marketing machine, we’ll cover:
Ideas For Fresh and New Content
Create and Organize a Laundry List of Content Ideas Into a Calendar
Let’s look at how you can build a content marketing plan like a pro.
The Goal
The first, and perhaps dare I say even the most important, step in creating your machine is the goal. Whether with lead generation or gaining a new percentage of customers, every business must start with a goal.
Your goal should be clear and well-defined. Once you have a goal, you can work on the plan. Your plan should clearly state how you’ll get from where you are now to your desired goal. It’s essential that when making your plan, it’s practical and achievable.
Keep your goal clear and achievable, and ensure that your plan has actionable items.
Your Team
The next step in your content marketing machine is your team. To accomplish your goal, you’ll need people to follow the plan that you’ve made. To create your team, you have to list people who can accomplish these goals. Need content written? Ask yourself who can do that.
Often this part of the machine depends heavily on your budget. If you can afford to get the best team of writers to write content for you, you certainly should. However, you also may be able to pull it off by paying a freelancer much less and still get good content.
Create a Content Culture
When you’re thinking about how to create a great content marketing strategy, it all starts with content culture.
An efficient content machine is composed of sturdy, high-quality elements that all work together to achieve the same goal. To craft your content machine, you want to focus on developing a company culture that supports consistent, high-quality content generation.
Content is a necessary part of your marketing strategy, but understanding why is crucial. If you don’t, your content might become an afterthought.
Strong content culture means you and your employees truly get the reason behind content and how it brings value to the customer experience when done right, in addition to helping your business grow. You should prioritize offering high-quality content that solves consumer problems and adds true value to their lives.
Creating Fresh Content
Many people struggle with this part of the content marketing machine. Sometimes, developing new, original ideas for content can be difficult. When it comes to how to create digital marketing content, it’s all about remembering your audience.
You’re not producing content for yourself. You’re producing it for your consumers. We suggest making a list detailing everything about your consumers. These should include their interests, age range, and everything that grabs their attention.
Experiment on social media platforms to learn what appeals to your consumers. Once you know what they’re interested in, it’ll be a lot easier to come up with ideas for content to give them. Remember that it’s all about your consumers and what interests them.
Get Your Calendar Going
The next part is your calendar. Your calendar should have a list of your consumers, what they’re interested in, and show your content. This content should, at a glance, instantly show you if the content you’re displaying is aligned with what your consumers are interested in.
However, it’s important that you don’t get too caught up in the specifics of this. It’s much more important that you’re focusing on creating exceptional content for your consumers than worrying about your calendar.
Create & Organize a List of Content Ideas for Your Calendar
Sometimes, the more you think about producing high-quality content, the more you get stuck. Between confusion, perfectionism, and uncertainty, you can become too conscious of whether your ideas will succeed.
The first step is acknowledging that you can’t know for sure if an idea will have an impact right off the bat. When you’ve published and received audience feedback, that’s when you know the merit of your content. While that uncertainty can feel discouraging, using that feedback to grow is how everyone learns to create great content.
The most effective way to help yourself is to create a list of content ideas designed for different parts of your targeted audience. When you’re starting off, you can relax knowing that as long as you can back up your concept and it’s logically sound, it’s not a bad idea.
Organize these ideas into a content calendar or an editorial worksheet. Share this with your team, and let collaboration bring these ideas to life.
Repurpose Your Content
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel or constantly develop your content from scratch. A well-run content machine uses content amplifiers to increase the reach of its content without coming up with new ideas and researching them.
For instance, you can transform a long-form blog into other content, such as:
- Slide shares
- Infographics
- Short how-to videos
- Short-form posts
- Ebooks
- Checklists
- Emails
Employ different distribution channels to maximize your content reach. And, when coming up with new ideas, prioritize those that you can easily repurpose.
Monitoring
Once you have production up and going, you must continue monitoring it as you get closer to your goal. Be aware of your audience and understand what you can change as you assess your content and consumers. Ensure that you’re aware of each stage in the machine and constantly be aware of what’s happening.
Ensure that you continuously look at your content and that what you’re pushing out is only the best content. Constantly be aware of your consumers and how they react to the content they’re receiving. As you get closer to your original goal, ensure that you assess your traffic and conversion.
