Content marketing is only worth the effort if it works. That means it should get results. Unfortunately, as I said at the beginning of this article, there are no guaranteed results, meaning it’s often a case of you won’t know until you try.
The good news is there are some things you can do to increase the chances of success.
Plan your strategy
Before you go out and spend a ton of money or time on creating content, you need to consider two important things.
- What do you want to achieve from your content? – Do you want to increase website traffic? Do you want to build a subscriber list? Are you trying to improve your social media following? What are your marketing objectives?
- Who do you want to attract with your content? – Who is your ideal customer?
If you don’t have a goal, how will you know if your marketing is working? If you don’t identify your audience, how will you know what content will attract them?
Choose the right subjects
If you understand your audience, you’ll find it easier to choose subjects they are interested in. Think about the problems they come across that you can help with. Consider the type of information they might be searching for online. What are their interests?
Your content doesn’t have to be strictly educational; it can be fun or entertaining too. The important thing is that you choose content that is relevant to your audience. Otherwise, you might just end up with lots of subscribers, website visitors or followers that like your content but won’t ever be in the market for your products or services.
Choose the right medium
There are so many types of content to choose from it can be hard to decide which to go for. Do you invest in video? Should you run a free seminar? Are blogs the way to go?
Sometimes the subject will dictate the medium. For example, a makeup tutorial might work better as a video than a written step by step; an in-depth guide might be better as a downloadable PDF than a static blog post.
Other factors to consider are your budget and in-house capabilities. If you don’t have the budget to outsource, then you need to learn to do it yourself, train someone on your team to do it, or recruit someone who knows how to do it. If you don’t have in-house capabilities, then you need to outsource, which will involve a cost. You may, therefore, be limited as to the type of content you can create.
Measure the results
There’s no point doing any marketing activity if you don’t measure the success. You need to know if it’s working to decide whether it is worth the continued investment.
Content marketing is often a longer-term strategy, so you may need to be patient, but you should still keep track of the results.
With social media, you can often see at a glance if your content is being liked, shared or commented on. You can also keep track of how many new followers you are getting and which types of content they engage with most.
Google Analytics is an extremely useful tool for tracking results. It will tell you if you’ve had an increase in traffic, as well as where that traffic has come from and which of your website pages people are visiting. This can be very useful in deciding which platforms work best and which types of content get the most engagement.
Ultimately, social media followers and website visitors are only beneficial if some of them eventually convert into customers. Track where your enquiries come from. Maybe they saw a post on Facebook; perhaps they came across your content in a Google search. If you know how they found you, you’ll know if your content marketing is working.
Understand what success looks like to you
In an ideal world, you’d write a blog post and get hundreds of new clients off the back of it. In reality, this is very unlikely to happen, so you need to decide what success looks like for you.
If you spend three hours writing a blog post each month and win one new client every six months as a result, is it worth the effort? If you spend £2000 on video content and triple your social media following as a result, is that a good investment? Only you can decide what results you are happy with.
Repurpose your content
To put it simply, repurposing just means reusing your content in different ways. After all, if you’ve spent a lot of time or money on your content, you’ll want it to work as hard as possible for you.
Repurposing could be as simple as sharing a blog post as newsletter content and taking snippets from it to create social media posts. You might turn a webinar or presentation you’ve done into a lead magnet or a YouTube video.
My A-Z of Blogging is an example of content that has been repurposed in several ways. It started out as 26 blog posts. I also created 26 images that were used on social media. I then added to the content and turned it into a book. Then I created 26 video versions of the content, which were added to the blog posts, and used as standalone videos on my YouTube channel. I also send links to the relevant posts when I get asked questions about blogging.
Whenever you create any type of content, think about how you can maximise its use.
Promote and share, share, share
Creating content is only a small part of content marketing. There’s no point investing in great content if you aren’t going to do anything with it. Once you have your content, promote it and share it. Share it on social media, share it via email, ask other people to share it. The more people you can get your content in front of, the better.