1. Begin by addressing the audience
However big is your content marketing goal, it cannot do anything without addressing the audience first. Knowing your target audience and thereby planning a content strategy, that is where you should begin. Content marketing essentially is nothing but making the right information available to the right audience you have intended for.
Start with the buyer persona first. Have a clear picture of the ideal customer in mind. The ideal customer persona should have been made with different elements like demographics, customer needs, preferences and interests, constraints and pain points.
First of all, know where your customers spend their time online mostly.
Secondly, know whether your customers are engaged actively on social media and in which platforms they are most active.
Know where your customers visit most for digital contents and what type of contents they consume most.
Lastly, it is important to know whether your buyer persona shows active role in sharing contents and if yes, how they prefer to share.
Now you need to determine whether you would like to expand your existing target audience or venture to build a new audience this time.
Take help from an array of social tools to know the characteristics, interests, preference and online behavior of your target audience. These tools also offer you deeper insight into the questions and problems of your buyer persona.
2. Creating content that stands out
Any audience consumes the volume of digital contents every day and there is no dearth of experiments going on concerning contents. The tremendously proactive and vibrant digital space always brims with a multitude of contents. So, we are sort of habituated already with any kind of contents and hardly anything shocks us while browsing the web. This is why it is even more important to stand out from the crowd with your content. Even when you cannot shock you can humbly appeal to your audience by allowing them interaction.
Interaction with the audience can happen in many ways. One of the most interesting ones is to ask questions that make them instantly interested.
Sharing favorite images of familiar things and personalities can also make the audience feel good and inspire them to share.
Creating a video content that grabs attention instantly with a fun or pleasant kind of thing can also be hugely effective.
For creating content with a really eye popping wow factor you can incorporate virtual or augmented reality.
Lastly, nothing works great than a storytelling effect with compelling visuals, graphics, animation and interactive elements.
3. Content friendly for ‘at a glance’ scanning
Nobody these days wants to read a large body of dense texts. Especially with the proliferation of mobile web we more or less are habituated to scan a document quickly at a glance than reading a large and dense body of text. Keeping this in mind you need to optimize content for quick ‘at a glance scanning.
Presenting a text document in small paragraphs accompanying sub heads, bullet points and infographics will make quicker ‘at a glance’ reading possible, making the content more useful.
Small sentences, optimized font sizes, mobile friendly layout and design elements are other important aspects of engaging content.
4. Key performance indicators (KPIs) to know the pooling factors
Finally, how can you track what pools your content and what boosts it? Nevertheless, identifying such factors is crucial for measuring how your content performs. Some key performance indicators (KPIs) can really be useful in this respect. Let us have a look at them,
A Number of website visitors : To keep track of this KPI you Google’s URL builder and Google analytics can be used.
Content downloads : Tracking the number of content download from each digital source is important to assess the impact of content in garnering response from users.
Social shares received by the content : Track the number of times a content is shared on the social platform.
Bounce rate : Bounce rate refers to the rate of leaving the web page by the visitor after coming to the same. Tracking bounce rate is important to know why visitors are leaving the page soon after coming over there.
How it is linked by other websites : If your content is linked by authoritative sites, you can be assured of the quality. This is a crucial determinant of quality.
Time spent on page : On a long blog post if the average visitor spends only 10 seconds, you have serious issues with the content. So, track the time spent by visitors on each piece of content.
Cost-per-click (CPC) : The investment you have made for promoting a piece of content should be divided by a total number of visits and you got the Cost-per-click (CPC) figure.
Leads generated : How many leads are generated from each piece of content is a determinant factor as well.
Cost-per-lead : You need to calculate the cost involved in content marketing and respective generation of leads.
Conversion rate : Track how many of your users are actually paying to you for a product or service.
Revenue generated : Lastly track how much revenue your content marketing generated.
5. Personalization
Personalized or customized attributes have become the great mover for digital experience as a whole. Personalized experience in a shopping environment refers to kind of offers, recommendations, browsing interface, transaction process and promotions offered to customers based on individual preference, interest, demographic information, buying behavior, etc. Similarly, ‘one size fits all approach to content marketing is already obsolete and no longer makes any impression. So, more than ever your content marketing strategy must address individuals personally with specific attributes.
Automated marketing using latest software and technology is already gaining momentum and in the time to come it can help building content, resizing it or presenting content as per the audience.
Location based marketing or proximity marketing thanks to the latest wave of location technologies will transform the way content is delivered.
Dynamic website content is becoming popular and personalized email is enjoying high open rate.
Personalized push notification according to our routine, buying a pattern, location and present condition is already adopted by digital marketing to a great extent.
All content distribution channels are enjoying niche focus from marketers.
New technology platforms keep coming for content marketing.
A new array of content formats like Gifographics keeps coming.