What is content marketing success? It’s creating great content that inspires, educates and motivates your customers to take action. Whether you’d like them to try a new product, learn how to use the products they have already purchased, or be inspired to use them, content marketing is the way by which customers find – and come to love – your business.
Create your content marketing mission statement with the following elements:
- Produce content around your unique niche in your industry
- Focus on your core target audience’s needs and tell them what they will get out of reading or watching your content
Examples:
We produce how to tips and help for educators on puberty education so that they can more effectively teach 4th, 5th and 6th graders age-appropriate information about their changing bodies.
We produce how-to, tips and inspirations for sewing enthusiasts who love making clothes out of knit fabrics that fit amazingly well and hug you back.
We produce how-to information for clinical directors and executive directors of behavioral health care that helps deliver better care, bill more consistently and streamline recordkeeping.
Critical aspects of successful content marketing:
- One content type, one platform, delivered consistently over time
- Be consistent in your times and frequency of publishing. While each client’s optimum posting time is unique, once you find your perfect slots, keep to them. You can queue up posts and schedule them so they appear the same time each week!
- Live video every [X] day. For example, two we follow have regularly scheduled Friday ‘shows’ (angelawolf.com, Moz.com)
- If you want results in six months or less don’t do it – 15 -18 months is a minimal time to see content success while posting regularly and consistently (24 months is average). You should NOT expect results in six weeks, and you should not even expect results in 12 months unless you have at least 52 blog posts (once a week, minimum.) If you drop off after a few months and still expect to see results, you will be disappointed.
Produce content that your customers really want to see. If you’re unsure what kind of content they want to see, ask them!
- Videos
- Live video
- Product focus video (recorded)
- How-to video (recorded)
- Short snippet videos (explore one topic in under two minutes)
- Staff profile video
- Blogs
- How-to articles on things you know well
- Top 7, 11, 13 15, 25 list-style posts (odd numbered list posts are read more than even numbered list posts!)
- Create a blog post for every question a customer asks (address the pain points)
- Video blogs (embed video that you saved from a live session)
- Infographics
- Draw them out on paper with a pen (a scratched note is fine – Moz.com does them on a whiteboard, it’s low tech and fun)
- Use tools like PowerPoint or Canva or other online tools to create infographics.
- Use graphics in blog posts, social media posts and in case studies and whitepapers
- Inspiration
- Brainstorm a tip per day and share these as a weekly social media post. Think of the things your customers always ask you.
- Photo blog or social feature
- Take a photo a day (a detail, an inspiration, a product feature, a process) and share those over the course of your social media posting strategy
- Share photos that are related to your customer’s interests (but not necessarily your products or services)
Your goal is to drive traffic to your web site, and once there, capture their email for further nurturing. You can encourage e-mail capture with content offers or simple sign up requests.
Quality content that is matched to your audience (buyer persona) and their stage of the buyer’s journey produced consistently over time will yield traffic, leads and business. It works every time it’s done well. If it’s done inconsistently, the results are equally inconsistent. Content marketing is a bit like a snowball rolling downhill. It picks up more momentum (and snow) as it goes.
If your organization really needs to produce more content, consistently, check out our blogging workshop. It’s a one-morning workshop that teaches your team why content is important, how to produce great content and even helps you plan out your first six weeks of blogs! We’ll come to you (within 75-mile radius of Lansing, MI) for no extra charge.
