4 tips to improve your content marketing strategy
30-09-2016
A catchy article or an interesting social media post can trigger people to visit your website. Before you start creating content, it is important to create the right content marketing strategy. But where to start? We have selected a couple important tips for you.
#1 Determine what you want to achieve with your content
Before you start creating content, you have to ask yourself the next question: What do you want to achieve? Do you want your loyal customers to take actions on your website? Do you want to inform a new target audience about your business? Or maybe, you want to reach potential customers with a special offer? These are important things to think about. It is a waste of time to spend hours writing an article or blogpost while no one is gonna read it. Keep in mind in which phase your customer is. Is it a new customer who's orienting your products or is it a loyal customer who wants to gain information by reading an interesting article? Content marketing isn't a hard sales tool, but it is a way to share knowledge and information to build a long-term relationship with your customers.
#2 Who do you want to achieve with your content?
Of course you want to reach as many as possible people with your content. Unfortunately, not everyone will be attracted by your content. Make a choice who you want to reach. Like mentioned before, you have to keep in mind the customer journey. In which purchase phase is your customer? Use this and help your target audience. If you don't know who your target audience is, you can use a creative technique to find out. You can make personas. A persona is a fictional person who stands for your all your customers. This persona should have an age, study, hobbies, income etc. The more specific your persona is, the better you will know who your target audience is. People won't read stories to find out how great your business or product is. Create an experience for your target audience and make the content fits the experience you want to give them. Eventually, you want your story to be heard by the right target audience, therefor the will undertake actions.
#3 Choose the right canals
Now you know what you want to achieve with your content and who you want to reach. Now it is time to share it. You can choose to share your story on all platforms, but is this also where your target audience is? For example, Instagram is a visual platform and perfect for the retail business. twitter is for quick information, so this is perfect for journalistic info. Imagine, you launch a new product for already existing customers and imagine yhese are men from 40 years and older. Then you should know that Snapchat isn't the right tool to create exposure. This is because th emost people on Snapchat is between the 15 and 20. Stories can grow big when it is shared and has strong presence on the right platform.
#4 Measurement is the key to knowledge
After sharing your content, you want to know what is brought you. Make it yourself easy and monitor various reactions and/or conversations with the "Hootsuite" system. With this tool, you are able to follow all social media platforms on one screen. Always respond to reactions and questions. There is nothing more annoying than not being heard as customer. Start conversations and gain knowledge about their experience with your business. Do something with the feedback you get. This will create more trust. It also can be interesting to follow the complains of your competitors, so you can prevent your business from making the same mistakes as them. In the end, you want to know what the content delivers you. You have set goals and Key Perfomance Indicators (KPI's) to measure this. Imagine, you want to gain more engagement, you want to make a connection with your target audience and build up a relation with them. Take a look at the social shares, comments and likes. Measure your engagement ratio like this: shares+comments+clicks+likes and divide it by your total visitors on your content and multiply this with 100. The answer will be the percentage that sows you if your engagement is good. It is recommended to analyse your Facebook insights well. It is possible that no one liked your post, but still went to your website.
Content strategy is not a hard sales tool, but it is all about sharing knowledge and building up a relation. Keep the content flowing and tell your story to the right target audience. Try to attract attention with your content, so that more and more people will be interested in your content. Measure your content often and keep your goals in sight. Do you want to get more tips about content marketing strategy? Contact us and we love to help making your strategy stronger!