Increasing your brand presence can never be achieved without content. It’s that one element that makes you visible to potential customers and convinces them that you’re exactly the brand they need.
However, not every content strategy works to an organization’s advantage. There are plenty of examples of campaigns that backfired or generated a dismal ROI. If you’re planning a content strategy, this guide should help you understand what you exactly need to create and manage content that supercharges your brand.
1. Narrow down your goals
When it comes to content marketing, you’ll have to know what specific goals to focus on. That way, you can maximize your budget and allocate the right amount of resources. All it takes is knowing what matters the most to your brand at the moment.
Whether it’s raising awareness online and offline or converting more clients, having a specific goal in mind helps you create a strategy that produces valuable results, saves you time and money, and spares you from potential problems.
2. Map out the competition
The next thing you’ll have to do is to understand how your competitors are harnessing their content marketing efforts. Take time to analyze your closest competitors and look at how they frame their messages.
You should also pay attention to the types of content they churn out and see what they’re missing out on. If they’re not investing in video marketing, then beat them to the punch by starting your own YouTube channel.
3. Include a way to recycle content
The content you published before shouldn’t be left hanging in an online limbo. Your strategy should include a way to repurpose past content into new formats. A blog post you published five years ago might not be relevant today, but you can revise the content by adding updated information and transforming this into an animated video. Through repurposing, you will be able to keep creating content even if your content team runs into a creative block.
4. Consider outsourcing to a specialist
If you’re new to content marketing but you lack the time to learn, then it pays to hire a freelancer who can handle the campaign. Go for someone with experience in all channels, including social media, SEO, and email marketing. You just have to make sure that they understand your brand’s needs. It also matters to use productivity tools and the best time-tracking software for accurate billing.
5. Analyze your successes (and failures)
No content strategy is perfect and you will find yourself and your team back on the drawing board. It’s unavoidable, but you get to improve on the factors that may have caused your campaign to falter.
For this, it pays to set up realistic benchmarks or targets each month so you can see if your strategy is working. Metrics like organic visits and the engagement rate of your Facebook and LinkedIn pages should give you an idea of how close you are to achieving your targets. If you do meet them, then learn how to amplify your successes.
Endnote
It doesn’t take much to build a content strategy, but without the right knowledge, you could end up blindly creating blogs and videos that generate zero returns. Keep these tips in mind and launch a strategy that shines.
