By now, most people are aware of the value that a content marketing campaign brings to your business. Given the reach and convenience of the internet, most brands are bound to hop onto the content marketing bandwagon.
The only problem here is that not everyone who hops onto trends completely understands them. Before you fully commit to a content marketing campaign, it’s important to know what you’re getting yourself into so you can avoid making catastrophic errors.
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Why Should I Consider Investing in Content Marketing?
The first reason that content marketing is beneficial is that it significantly contributes to your return of investment (ROI).
ROI can come in different forms, such as a customer subscription, better brand visibility, improved brand reputation, increased inbound traffic, and customer loyalty.
Content marketing also helps establish your brand as an authority, so long as your content is of good quality. You can even become your niche’s primary source of information. When this happens, customers are more likely to remember your brand whenever they need a product or service that you offer.
Finally, content marketing is a potent means to interact with your target audience (and your target demographic). Sharing content helps you build trust with your audience and it also acts as a means to extend your reach even further whenever your audience shares your content.
Furthermore, frequent followers and readers eventually become actual customers.
Content marketing is a useful method to bolster your business’ performance, but only if you utilize it properly. It’s not a silver bullet that’s going to solve all your marketing problems.
Generally, your best course of action is to hire a content marketing agency to launch and implement your campaign properly, but for those who want to try their hand at doing their own content marketing, there are some mistakes that you need to avoid.
Publishing Content Without a Goal in Mind:
Whenever we publish content, it’s important to always have a goal in mind. You have to determine whether the goal of your content is to sell, generate leads, inform, or engage with your audience.
Your goal will determine things about your content such as your call to action and tone (whether conversational, informative, or imperative). For example, if your content is meant to sell a product, it needs to sound friendly yet informative. A post that’s meant to engage with your audience is best written in a sincere, genuine tone.
Failing to Utilize Paid Content Amplification:
The internet is currently oversaturated and highly-competitive. Content brands are constantly vying to get their message on the feeds of prospective customers.
The brand that gets relegated to the background is sure to lose out on customers, even if their product is superior to that of their competitor. Paid amplification helps your content reach your intended audience and they almost always produce quality leads. Consider the fact that even industry giants make use of paid content amplification.
This means that you should do so as well if you want to stay relevant in your chosen industry.
Forgoing the Use of Social Media Stories:
Social media stories are mobile-viewed vertical videos and images that appear outside a user’s regular feed and last only 24 hours. Storytelling will be the key to distributing your content successfully. Stories are perfect for building emotional connections with your audience because they are more casual and are mostly used as a medium for real-time engagement.
Stories also have a natural progression. This means that users can arrange their content to be more cohesive to viewers. Stories also allow users to enable their viewers to react to the story, while also helps users determine the type of content that viewers want.
Limiting Your Content Form:
In today’s market, text and image content alone will not differentiate you from your competitors especially when you consider that users are gradually shifting away from written content because of the increasing popularity of video content, podcasts, and infographics. This is especially true considering how these types of content are also searchable on major search engines.
It’s important to invest in other content channels in order to maximize your reach. This also allows your users to choose how they consume your content. The best part about this is that you don’t necessarily have to generate new content in order to fill these channels.
In fact, you can repurpose written content and simply change the channel they’re published on. An old blog post can serve as your framework for your video and audio content. Your users will appreciate the variety of your content and this variation will also help improve your website’s SEO ranking.
Ignoring Data Analysis:
Successful content marketing is not just based on artistic taste and content popularity. It is also heavily influenced by data. Running an analysis of your campaign’s performance grants brands the insight needed to make informed decisions regarding content.
The numbers will help you determine which approach is better for a particular demographic. This also allows users to correct a wrong approach.
For example, if you’ve discovered that most of your users are active at a certain time, then use that data to determine the best time to publish your content. Simply ignoring the data will not only rob you of the traffic you would have gotten otherwise, but it will also convey that you’re indifferent to your audience, which will eventually spell the failure of your campaign.
Content marketing is a boon to business owners because it grants them the ability to grow their businesses quickly. It requires a lot of work and experience to get it right the first time, but since you’re posting your content on the internet, it essentially means that as long as your website is up, your content will continue to do its job. Whether your content becomes effective or not depends on whether you do things correctly.
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