With consumers seeing, by one estimate, 5,000 advertisements a day, it may feel like it's impossible to cut through all the marketing noise and reach your audience. Now, content marketing is helping companies deliver more than just another ad.
Content marketing, at its heart, is providing valuable and timely information to your customers without directly selling your products and services. This includes articles, blog posts, case studies, videos, podcasts, infographics, images, how-to guides, and other valuable content that goes above and beyond a traditional ad. In order to get the most out of this marketing tactic, you need to be sure to get to know your target audience and learn their needs.
The idea is that by providing your customers with relevant information and keeping them informed about overall trends and updates in your industry, over time it will drive customers to choose your products and services.
Create an Editorial Calendar
One of the best ways to ensure your content marketing is working is to be consistent. Customers have a harder time engaging with an inconsistent brand, so creating an editorial calendar will keep your content marketing on track. Brainstorm extensively with your marketing and writing team, and work with others in your company to have your content coincide with launches, events, and other timely information released by your business.
Planning the topics you want to cover throughout the year and the methods by which you'll deliver them will help ensure that you have ideas and consistent content ready to go.
Feed Your Readers Snackable Content
Once you've written quality, helpful content for your customers, you'll want to make sure it's easily digestible in a world of 140-character status updates. While longer blog posts and articles with valuable content are useful for your audience, draw them in with bite-sized pieces.
An infographic, for example, is visually and mentally engaging--and easily sharable on social media and can often go viral. A how-to video will not only help your customers address a particular issue, it will reinforce your company as an expert in your field. Whether it's text, imagery, or a video, provide content that quickly engages consumers who are constantly on the move.
Measure Your Successes (and Failures)
The final step in ensuring your customers are consuming the new information you're feeding them is to measure the results. Be sure to provide them a way to give you feedback. If you're not measuring the success rates of your content marketing, you could be wasting time, and possibly losing customers. Consumer opinions and desires change at a rapid pace. What once worked well could now be part of a dying trend. By constantly monitoring your customers' reactions (click rates, feedback, comments, re-tweets, etc.) to your content marketing attempts, you're keeping your finger on the pulse of your industry--understanding what's important and what could soon be obsolete.
Content marketing, when planned and executed well, can provide a valuable service to your customers--as well as strengthen your brand in the eyes of your customers and prospects.
Sincerely,
Mona Graham
Monogram Communication Services
798 University Avenue
Sacramento, CA 95825
Phone: 916.922.0930
Fax: 916.922.0929
In 2013, we want to help you get the most from your marketing budget. Call us today to learn how we can take away the pain that often comes with creating brilliant solutions.
