OK so you might not have the budget to pull off this kind of
thing, but it doesn't just come down to money.
The truth is that the majority of content marketing out there is
doomed to relative insignificance. Creating great content is just one aspect of
creating great content marketing campaigns. There are many more considerations
to bear in mind and ignoring any one can mean the difference between failure
and success.
Below are our 12 steps to creating apically good content
campaigns.
1. Focus your aim
What do you want your content to achieve? Do you want to sell more
products, drive traffic to website pages, get likes or re tweets, raise awareness of your brand, explain details of a new product or
position yourself as a thought leader? You can’t create high performance
content without addressing this fundamental question. It helps your campaign
stay focused and shapes the types of content that you will create.
2. Be true to your core
values
You can’t be something you’re not. Volvo isn't a sporty car brand.
A Stannah Stairlift isn't a cool home accessory. To create great content, you
need to work with the essence of your brand. Are you funny or serious?
Important? Well-liked? Expensive? Useful? Isolate this value, cherish it and
use it as the foundation of your content.
3. Understand your
audience
It’s critical that you don’t skip this step. A great content
campaign isn't a fire-and-forget broadcast. It needs to be targeted to reach
your intended audience and potential customers. But who are they really? To
answer this question you have to look beyond the cold demographic data sat in
your market research files. Where do they hang out and what platforms do they
use? What type of content do they consume the most? Do they read long or short
articles, watch YouTube videos or Vines, engage with Facebook discussions or
Twitter hash tags? Attention spans these days are low but tolerance for boredom
is lower even still. You could have only one chance to hook your intended
audience in, so make sure you get it right first time.
4. Think like a
publisher
A great content campaign works in a cycle – entertain your
audience, attract new people, keep those people, encourage them to come back
for more and stop them from going elsewhere. Don’t trust to chance. Don’t make
things up as you go. Think like a publisher and put an effective strategy in
place to plan what you will say, how you will say it and where you will publish
it.
5. Tap into emotion
What sets great content apart from ordinary content? Emotion.
Great content stirs something primal inside its audience – happiness, sadness,
excitement, disbelief, curiosity, wonder, anger, agreement, and so on. Balancing logic and emotion in your
marketing, across all your content, is key to both informing the
world about your amazing product or service whilst building genuine brand personality.
But whilst it’s important to convey the facts about your service or product, if
your content doesn’t elicit an emotion, then you’re doing it wrong. Go back to
step 3 and try again.
6. Make the right type of
content
Emotion is your hook. Virgin Atlantic’s curated Instagram
galleries give viewers an inspirational insider’s view of Tokyo and San
Francisco. While Intel’s IQ website spins away from Intel’s processor business
to explore the outer edges of tomorrow’s exciting software and technology innovation.
Hook your reader with emotion first, encouraging them to seek out more facts
and detailed information later.
7. Let other people do the
work
Making great content is hard work. But you
don’t need to do it all yourself. Re purpose and recycle existing content into
new formats on new platforms. Encourage people to talk about it and share it.
If the content is ‘great’ enough, people may even pay to be associated with it.
8. Be more social
Don’t broadcast. Instead, take part, be genuine and engage with
your audience.
9. Create content
guidelines (and stick to them)
Ensure the consistency of your content and your message by
creating a set of guidelines that cover tone of voice, design, attitude, use of humor, words you can (and can’t use), spellings and appropriate visuals. The Content Marketing Institute’s blog guidelines, for example, show the type of
posts that they are looking and the key elements that those posts need to be
accepted (e.g. real-life examples; videos, photos, charts, screenshots and
other visual content; specific and actionable recommendations for readers).
10. Plan it out
Make a content map. Define the type of reader or viewer that
you’re hoping to reach and the stage in the sales funnel that the content fits
into – e.g. building awareness, creating a deeper interest, helping them to
evaluate your product or service, and supporting them after they have committed
to you and fulfilled the content goal.
11. Don’t just press
publish, shout!!
Every minute, on average, Google receives over 4 million search
queries per minute, 70 hours of video get uploaded to YouTube and Instagram
users post over 200,000 new images. Your content won’t stand out
unless you shout about it. Spend 10-20% of campaign budget on seeding. Think digital
ads, Youtube ads and blog placements, plus blog write-ups, digital PR, re tweets and social media outreach.
12. Measure and change
Define how you’ll measure success? Look back at your goals (step
1). What metric matters most to you? Is it views, visitors, re tweets, click troughs, an increase in traffic or a reduction in bounce rate? Use appropriate tools (Google Analytic, Hootsuite, etc) to track the performance of each piece
of content you create and use the data to assess whether it succeeded or failed
in its goal. Did you succeed? Then do more of what works. Fail? Change your
approach and try, try again.
This post was written
by Jon Mowat, who is a former BBC film maker and now runs British based
video production and marketing company, Hurricane Media. You can follow Hurricane on Google+, Twitter or Facebook.
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