Content marketing is an important strategy for many businesses today. Using video, visuals or text-based communications, content marketers create materials that directly engage and connect with audiences in ways that traditional forms of advertising don’t.
Successful content marketing always begins with a strong strategy to reach established audiences as well as new ones while still remaining flexible enough to expand and adapt to the demands of an ever-changing digital marketplace. Below are some tips to consider when crafting a content marketing strategy.
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Start Scheduling
The first step in planning a content strategy is creating and sticking to a content publication schedule. Posting on a regular schedule is an easy way to build and maintain an audience. While posting should be consistent, the optimal timing and frequency of posts will depend on audience interaction. If a brand has products that are popular in different time zones, daily schedules can be a useful reminder of when to share posts for international audiences.
Put Your Best Feed Forward
Like spices are to life, content is most effective when it’s varied. Part of an effective content strategy should include diversifying content. A brand that uses social media to only post inbound links to their blog for example, will come across as predictable and ultimately uninteresting.
Rather than solely posting images or text-based content, mix it up. Try infographics, video content, podcasts or in-depth interviews. According to a 2018 survey conducted by the Social Media Examiner, audiences respond and engage most with visual imagery. The same study showed that throughout 2019 and beyond, 77% of marketers plan to increase use of video content, while 66% and 63% will increase the use of visual content and live videos, respectively. Having a variety of media in your content calendar will help build audience engagement and keep them interested in your brand.
Keep Content Current
Effective content answers questions or solves problems for the audience. But as important as offering up solution-based content is, it’s even more important that that information is current. Keeping research current not only makes content that much more useful for the viewer or reader, it also helps position brands as industry thought leaders. Up-to-date research shows that a brand prioritizes relevance and accuracy, which gives the impression that a brand is professional and trustworthy.
Be Engaging
An excellent strategy for boosting content effectiveness is to engage with industry influencers or peers. Audiences don’t respond well to content that’s overtly self-promotional, and aligning with influencers gives the impression that a brand is up-to-date with current trends in the market. On the StickerYou Twitter feed, for example, we re-tweet posts about influential sticker art and post outbound links to brands in various industries that are utilizing adhesives in interesting ways. This results in a resourceful feed that’s visually appealing and exposes our audience to information that is useful and interesting.
Reuse, Recycle
If a brand is new, or has started posting content on a new platform, there might not be a lot of content to post. Some social platforms refresh very quickly. Twitter, for example, allows users to post up to 2,400 tweets a day, which means posted content might not be available long enough for the intended audience to see it. One solution to this issue is to recycle content.
Recycling content isn’t bad if done so strategically. Brands often re-post inbound links, but for effectiveness do so in different ways. Recycled posts should always have rewritten captions, headlines and text, new hashtags, and a different feature image. This way search engines won’t report recycled posts as spam, and the opportunity for content to be seen by more readers is increased.
Creating a content marketing strategy may feel intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. By crafting a regular posting schedule filled with a diverse range of current and engaging content and adapting pre-existing content in an efficient content recycling strategy, brands can engage current audiences and reach new ones with relative ease.
Author: StickerYou Founder & President, Andrew Witkin
As the founder of a global e-commerce leader in custom-printed, die-cut products, Andrew Witkin is widely recognized as a leading authority on e-commerce, customization, startups, marketing and the tech economy. Witkin has also served as VP North American Licensing for Nelvana/Corus Entertainment and Director of Marketing for MegaBrands/Mattel.
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