The demands and expectations of modern business seem to grow in complexity with each passing year, as new technologies offer business owners an endless stream of new ways to engage their audiences and build strong relationships with them.
High-performing content marketing strategies that have the ability to zero in on a target customer’s needs are at the forefront of a constantly evolving public relations landscape that has already radically transformed the way businesses present themselves to and interact with the world around them.
In short, if you aren’t taking advantage of this array of effective content marketing methodology, you’re leaving new clients, business and revenue on the table, robbing your venture of its true potential.
Educate Yourself About Content Marketing
So, what is a savvy entrepreneur to do when she’s learned the importance of content marketing, but doesn’t yet know much else about it? Well, as with any undertaking of its kind, the first step to mastery over this marketing paradigm is education. You can’t expect to use content marketing to its full extent if you don’t know what makes it tick.
Luckily, here to help is Lyfemarketing.com, whose helpful guide lists a variety of content marketing strategies that will enable you to connect with target customers and earn yourself a bigger share of your industry’s primary audience.
The list includes several marketing techniques and media that you’re probably already familiar with: blogs, videos and infographics round out its first entries, and you’d probably have a difficult time finding any target customers who haven’t been engaged by them at least once. But more importantly, these strategies each provide a tangible benefit to your business, and knowing just how they accomplish that can mean the difference between simply trying your hand at marketing and directing your efforts to produce consistent, meaningful results.
Content Marketing Media Types and Channels
Creating value for your customers with these strategies is paramount to getting the most out of them, so it’s important to know what customers expect from them, both to make sure you’re meeting those expectations and to figure out how to surpass them. Blogs, for instance, provide consumers with one of the most stable and consistent means of engaging a business with regularly scheduled posts.
Video is among the easiest media to consume, and its union of audio and visual stimuli makes it one of the most effective at communicating your message. Infographics, as the name suggests, offer customers information in an attractive and easy to consume format that’s sure to catch their eyes.
Another relative newcomer to the marketing scene is social media, whose contributions to mass communication cannot be overstated and whose influence on business is undisputable. Social media is indelibly fused into the fabric of online interaction.
It is among the most powerful and effective means of social networking and provides businesses with a vital avenue for engaging with their customers, new and old. Contentsnare.com emphasizes this point further, noting that social media’s ubiquity in the public eye and low opportunity cost make it one of the most inexpensive marketing options a business can take advantage of while still being among the most lucrative and effective.
Set up a Game Plan for Content Marketing
Now that you have a good idea of what kinds of platforms you can post your marketing content on, it's time to start doing just that! With that said, it's important to have a game plan in place before you dive into content marketing to ensure that you'll get the return on investment you need to make your business thrive.
Publishing one post after another with reckless abandon and little direction is a great way to produce a high volume of content, but the best results come from conscious, directed efforts. The key to attracting and maintaining an engaged audience is providing them with the right incentives to stay connected to your organization.
This is why ebooks, white papers and other valuable resources like those are some of the top-performing forms of content marketing out there; even those target customers who initially subscribe to your content marketing just for the associated goodies will still end up reading or watching it, and that means more business for you. The more incentive you're able to provide, the more attention will be directed at your enterprise.
Metrics and Analytics Are Essential to Marketing
But how will you know when your business is getting that attention? The other side of content marketing involves keeping a detailed record of the content you publish and the engagement it garners with your audience, and the only way to do that is with content management tools like Contently, WordPress or Salesforce.
The insight these tools provide is indispensable to the success of your content marketing plan. Without them, questions about the effectiveness of your marketing can only be answered with a shrug. With them, you’ll know exactly where to focus your efforts to achieve the best possible engagement with your target customers.
Martechadvisor.com notes that marrying your content production and planning to this sort of detailed analysis of its performance creates a healthy environment in which your content marketing strategy is supported by its own proof of effectiveness: high-performing content continues to charge ahead, and low-performing content can put in the work it needs to catch up.
Want more advice on marketing (or just some fun reads)? Check out these FREE resources:
Want a FREE SEO Audit of Your Site?
Get yours here. It’s chock-full of actionable intelligence that will help you boost your bottom line through powerful digital marketing techniques. Need help? We’re happy to assist!