5 Ways to Amplify Your Content Marketing Efforts

5 Ways to Amplify Your Content Marketing Efforts

Guest writer, Anna Tymoshchuk

Content Marketing is part of a business process which defines a company’s goals and strategic objectives for creating and distributing engaging and educational content to a specific target audience. This leads to an increase in consumer demand for a product.

According to the Altimeter Group 57% of marketers reported that custom content was their top marketing priority for 2014.

Impressive isn’t it!?

So, why do businesses set high hourly rates on content marketing development? Simply because good quality content helps to:

1. Educate your customers about a product
2. Drive SEO to your website
3. Develop long term relationships
4. Keep your company transparent

All these factors lead to a positive ROI.

Take Away: Use the following 5 steps to embrace and energize content marketing of your business which will lead to customer action.

Step One – Develop a Content Strategy

Before jumping right into writing a content strategy take a step back, and analyze the purpose behind your content. Always keep in mind that, content strategy must correlate to a business goal. Ask yourself what I am trying to achieve? What is the purpose of my product? How can I help others?

Don’t try to produce a lot of content if you have just started your business. Your content may be useless to your customer and you don’t want to waste resources that do not provide you desirable results.

Take Away: If you are an old dog on the market try to compare goals with achievements. If you are on track and people are engaging with your content, you know that your content marketing is working right for you.

Step Two – Get to Know Your Customer

I agree that at some point a product becomes valuable for those customers who you didn’t even think about. A good example is when in 2010 a pass was completed to a woman at NFL, after that incident NFL found out that women made up more than 40% of a football game’s viewership.

However, the case above doesn’t apply to all the businesses out there. You should identify a customer before you play the market game. By knowing your buyer persona you will be able to provide them with more relevant and valuable content which they will want to read and convert on.

Take Away: As long as you know demographics, psychographics, behavior and interests of your consumers – you can start working on marketing tactics.

Step Three – Don’t Bite Off More Than You Can Chew

The most fun yet hardest part of content marketing development is the implementation of tactics. However, going out from my personal experience; a common mistake businesses make is when they try to optimize as many tactics as they can Blogs, Newsletters, White papers, eBooks, Case studies, Testimonials, Website, Mobile applications, Social media channels etc, and all of these done online.

Don’t stress your customers out! Make your customer feel comfortable when communicating with your Brand.

Try to diversify your portfolio. For example, lead a blog on the website, launch one or two Social media channels and make interesting and unique presentations on a trade show. It will be much more effective.

People don’t have time to engage all over your channels. They want to engage with a trustful channel, which reflects your personality (you’ll find that your market usually hangs out on a few channels not all).

Take Away: Plan ahead on how you are going to maintain all of your desired tactics on a regular basis. Pick a few tactics and try them out, don’t disseminate your efforts on trying to do too much!

Step Four – Barking Up the Wrong Tree

As we started to talk about personality – I would highly recommend establishing your company’s Tone, which is the attitude of the content and the voice which is the unique way to express your content. When establishing tone and voice you open your business’s heart and soul towards your audience.

This is what makes your Brand stand out in the crowd!

Take Away – Create a tone & voice which humanizes your brand with your audience. If your tone and voice is authoritative and professional but your target audience are teenagers, then you might consider to change it to be hip and quirky.

Step Five – Use Content Management Tools

 There are tons of tools on the market, which will help you see which content ideas will do well, make websites more SEO friendly, marketing campaigns more efficient, and minimize blogging efforts – this will allow you more time to pay attention to customer conversations.

Before you get too excited and ready to get a CMS with all its bells and whistles, try to answer the following questions:

• How much money do I have?
• How often am I going to use it?
• Are there more benefits than expenses?
• Who is going to use these tools (and maintain them)?

These answers will keep your business afloat and your content prospering.

I definitely know you have feedback & thoughts – Looking forward to hearing back from you!

ABOUT ANNA TYMOSHCHUK

Getting into Digital Marketing was quite a ride for Anna – especially coming from a Financial Banking Systems background. It was her passion for travel that turned her towards Digital & Social Media marketing. When on the road, the only way to stay connected with the world and share your story is via social channels. Once settled in Toronto, she simply got hooked on understanding the interconnected nature of social media outlets, site optimization, and understanding how to stand out in all that noise of the web.

She is currently a Social Media Coordinator at Click Armory tasked with engaging influencers and growing their SM presence. She is always up for challenge, as, no challenge is boring.

Originally posted as part of Community Voices series for Social Media Week in Toronto 2016.