Mere content will not get you anywhere in as far as a successful content marketing campaign is concerned. Due to the intensive competition in the market, you need to create great and high quality content for you to achieve your desired objectives. The good thing is that it is indeed possible to create awesome content that can appeal to your readership.
With these five tips, you are a step closer to creating amazing content for your audience. If you master this skill and be consistent with your posts, you’ll succeed with your content marketing strategy.
#1. Understand Your Target Group
The most important thing when it comes to content marketing is being able to understand your target audience. Defining your target audience will help you know who you are really speaking to. You cannot expect one to be talking about social media jargons when addressing the 80 or the 90 year olds. And the same thing applies to the minorities; you cannot talk to young people about life insurance. As a brand, you need to be aware of your vision, mission and your products so that you can be target specific.
When it comes to defining your target audience, you need to set your age range. In addition to this, it is important to know whether your products/services are targeted for the male/female genders or will it be appropriate in terms of ethnicity. You need to understand how your target audience thinks in order to come up with an effective content marketing strategy. To help you with this, you may want to engage an individual belonging to the same demographic who thinks and reasons like the target lot so as they can assist you to create high quality content that is target specific.
#2. Come Up With The Right Message
Now that you have identified your target audience, the next step involves drafting an appropriate message that can address their needs. You need to know exactly what is it that you’ll tell them. The headline is a very important piece in your message. Make it as attractive as possible to grab the reader’s attention. You need to be spot on with your headline so that the readers can be attracted to reading the rest of your content.
There are a number of viral techniques which can be used to make your content interesting and appealing to the target audience. They include:
- The use of photos – you may want to insert a photo showing the behind the scenes of your office that highlights your employees have an awesome time, for example.
- An infographic – the infographic can contain business statistics together with industry statistics that can be interesting to the readers and in addition it is much easier to read than the plain text.
- Funny images – that may include an inspiring message with your company logo or brand name attached.
- Viral tweets – you can also use tweets that have successfully trended and garnered great engagement as your headline.
The body of the message should also be interesting in one way or the other. Ensure that your message clearly highlights some of your core values that make your customers distinguish your brand from the rest of the competition. Take care not to make it more of an advertisement but a statement that clearly shows them your unique qualities. Remind them of what you are really made of so that the next time they are shopping, it is your brand name that pops up first.
#3. Ensure Your Message Is Specific To Individual Social Networks
The next step involves the optimization of your message. You will need assistance from the different social media channels to create awareness and attract readership, so you need to optimize your message to each social media network. If say, for example, you have created a stellar message that is causing a lot of buzz on Twitter and Facebook, you may want to expand on the same without a gap of your content.
To go even a step further, consider expanding smaller messages on Twitter or Facebook by creating related videos and uploading them on YouTube and Instagram. Videos have been identified to be the highest form of content and can generate a lot of traffic if used correctly. They are not the easiest to create but can greatly help you to pass your message across. When creating your video, ensure that it is clear and is of the highest quality so that the message can be clearly received.
The importance of optimizing your content cannot be overemphasised. Research has shown that attaching an image on a Facebook or Twitter post increases the chances of engagement. If you are using Facebook it important to note that you do not need to request for likes or comments because the platform has an algorithm that identifies posts with such wordings and limits their reach.
#4. An A/B Test Is Always Encouraging
A/B test will go a long way in helping you know exactly what message your target audience are more inclined to. It can be defined as the process of formatting the same message in two different ways. Format your message as type A and type B.
Once you have successfully optimized your message for each social media channel and gone ahead to format the message in to both type A and B, you can now go ahead and try them out. When doing your type A/B testing, it is very important to consider your audience and the time variables. Post them at an appropriate time so that you can give social media a chance to grow.
As the test is still going on, ask yourself questions related to which headline acquired the most engagement, the language that worked best, the structures that garnered the most engagement and the sharing of the post across the time zones.
#5. Curating Needs To Be Considered
Curating content is not very involving and requires an individual to locate, read and qualify digital material which is deemed as relevant to your audience. In a matter of 30 minutes, you should be able to have completed this. Curating is a lot more different from content aggregation which derives content directly from other RSS feeds and shares them automatically.
The best part about sharing third party information is that your audience will look at you as a reliable source of relevant information and it will also build relationships with other players in the industry.
Images: “Content Marketing – puzzle 3d render illustration with block letters on blue jigsaw pieces/Shutterstock.com“
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