Many companies today believe it is more important to be aware of new trends than to adapt them properly to their business model. A good example of this would be content marketing. It is impossible to enter into any social network, without encountering at least one, two, or three posts that indirectly, or directly, try to sell us some kind of product or service, some with more and others with less mastery, must also be said.
Therefore, to avoid saturation on the one hand, and on the other to achieve the desired result, it is recommended to previously set the goals of our strategy and be very specific with them. It is not the same to work with Instagram as with Linkedin or use your own website as a focus that repeats the same content on other social networks. The possibilities (and opportunities) are endless.
Perfect content: entertaining, informed, and visual
Another element that many forget is the need to promote informed, entertaining and visual content. It is one of the keys is to go from point 1 to point 2 with content marketing. Therefore, our content must be at least:
1- Entertaining: Entertaining is key when it comes to content marketing. The entertainment, in this case, translates into being friendly, and direct and trying to introduce the idea that is intended in as few words as possible. Of course, entertainment is not only achieved through words.
In fact, everyday videos and images are a faster and more attractive way to convey our ideas, meet our fans and make more people share our content.
2- Informed: the form is not the only thing to be careful of in the marketing of content. Although I dare say that the presentation is sometimes as important as the subject we want to discuss, it is very relevant to add some kind of value to the life of those who receive our content.
From helping you carry out some activity to solving a personal problem or improving your productivity. If you still have doubts about how your content can inform or improve the life of another person, simply try to put yourself in your place as a customer and determine the problems that you would like to see solved by your product or service.
A good example of this technique is companies such as petsitter, which complements the sale of feed for dogs with a blog that offers useful information to prevent diseases such as obesity in your pet.
3- Visual: social networks like Instagram have grown considerably over the last few years and much of this growth is due to the ease of browsing with it, and especially its visual appeal. Plus the photos give a lot of play because they allow you to share a story that can be “read” in a few seconds. You must carefully choose the photos you publish on Instagram if this is your source of visual marketing, and create some consistency between each publication.
In this way, all the images that involve your followers in the process of making or creating a product or those that show the most human side of the company usually have great success.
For those of you who are starting to get discouraged, we all know that Rome was not built in a day, and therefore you cannot expect all the content you publish to be read by a multitude of people, or that translate from the night to The morning in faithful followers.
That’s why you have to be constantly creating a committed audience and content that after all talk about you and your brand, involves all the elements mentioned. Therefore, they should follow a plan, which guarantees the regularity of the publications and their evaluation by the reader. In short, content quality is paramount, much more in fact, than publishing it in large quantities. With this being of good quality, and producing it at a frequency that may vary depending on the habits of our followers, a good result is guaranteed.
In a good strategy of marketing content, we cannot put aside the need to update ourselves permanently. This implies taking into account, the hours to which it is more appropriate to upload our content, to the latest trends in thematics and strategy. Change is a constant that must be dealt with permanently.
Control and Dissemination of Content
If we want our content to be seen and extended, another factor to value in this sense is our means of diffusion. We are all aware that social networks are an indispensable ally to reaching our target audience, although they do not have to be the only platforms to promote this diffusion. In addition to this, we want each person who comes to view or read the content can (and wants) also share it on other social networks, in order to create a broadcast chain.
To do this, we must add that the object of diffusion should not always be the product itself. Every time we meet more people are interested in the creative process or in the day-to-day of providing a service. This generates interest in the public for the product, and also maintains it, or even, until the moment of its launch.
Perhaps it tends to undervalue this part of the creation of content but the truth is that it is one of the most relevant. Dissemination of content should be planned as much or more than your own publication. Establish our target audience once again, as well as where we want to spread and in what way, it will help us considerably as well. Here are the keys to our content being disseminated:
1. Media: the media offer is very broad and goes beyond social networks. It will depend on the criteria we have chosen previously, select one medium or another. If we were to divide them into categories, we could talk about our own means, paid and earned. The first is made up of all our social networks, from our blog to our Instagram, medium, or LinkedIn. In them lies the center of our content, and we are the ones who control the distribution.
The media gained differs from the previous ones in that they are integrated by the followers of their own means, including comments, links, tweets, or any article that refers to the product or directly to our content. This type of media allows us to generate confidence in the public and a good image of the brand, to gradually create a community around it.
Finally paid media, as its name implies comprises all the content for which it is paid. All sorts of promotions and payment announcements would fall into this category, which may be more focused on increasing the public and publicizing the brand, rather than consolidating it.
2- Visual formats: although it seems less important than the previous point, images are always, and more today a great attraction in the creation of content, and for this reason, we must pay attention to its usual format, which is the size and placement of The image according to the type of content and the medium in which we wish to insert it, this way it will be easier to share and visualize by the users.
3. Optimization of content: in other words, it’s recycling. We have already commented that it is fundamental to adapt to change, and not stopping updating our content is proof of this. The optimization not only comprises such updating from the own medium but also its re-diffusion and extension. In this way, we can continue to obtain new content through ideas born of another, and thus develop it, creating coherence and value to it.
The optimization, however, is not only based on the aforementioned recycling and expansion of content. The analytics will be the ones that indicate to us to determine if our objectives are being reached or not, the variation of our traffic after the diffusion of the content, etc.
In short, optimization also translates into tracking our strategy, allowing you to measure your progress to implement it when necessary.
Nor should we forget that coherence with other mechanisms within our strategy is also key. Content marketing is characterized by being a very effective tool to attract customers and create awareness about the brand without generating pressure on the potential customer. However, its place in an overall marketing strategy is coupled with other methods equally useful and necessary to generate a complete and above all effective strategy, in order to achieve the objectives that we have previously marked. In this way, the coordination between content marketing, and the one that we can practice for example in social networks or in email campaigns should not be underestimated.
Author Bio
As an owner of Gossip Web design Productions, I am a graphic and web graphics designer/video producer that strives to consistently upgrade my skills in order to provide solutions for my clients’ design problems – both online and offline (print media). I am committed to providing excellent creative solutions for my client’s graphic design, video production, web design Melbourne and web development Melbourne needs.