Top 3 Tips for a Better Content Strategy

If you create posts on social media, a personal website, or through any other media platform, you’ve undoubtedly witnessed the effect of quality written content on your audience. By building engagement and fostering trust in your expertise, producing effective copywriting is an excellent way to improve your online content strategy. Although writing effective content for your website or other media platforms can seem like a daunting task a first, it’s certainly a skill that becomes easier over time. Most effective copywriters adhere to a few basic, proven principles:

1. First Impression: Is it Worth Your Reader's Time?

Your title is your first impression, and it needs to instantly convey why your writing is worth your readers’ time. A great title typically promises to solve a problem, convey value, or otherwise confer a benefit to the reader. It should be to the point. Not too cute, clever, or otherwise difficult to understand at a glance.

2. Can Your Readers Grasp Your Message at a Glance?

Just as you want your title to be easy to grasp, effective content is clear and easy to follow. It’s often helpful to break chunks of text into lists, bullet points, or short paragraphs.

3. Don't Let the Action Stop When Your Writing Ends

By the end of your piece, your readers should come away with a sense of purpose. Whether you want them to buy your product, subscribe to your service, or visit your website, this should come across in your writing.

To What Extent Should You Personalize Your Content Strategy?

Is it worth it to try to personalize your content for your target audience? In this blog we'll look deeper into this question and explain why personalization is such an important quality of your company's content strategy.

Let's begin by putting this in the context of milliennials. This generation consumes more content than any other, and businesses are trying to figure out a way to tap into the market's potential. 

Personalizing content for millennials seems like an impossible task, but understand that it's not an all-or-nothing practice. If you can take a few steps to personalize content on social media and in marketing emails, the investment will pay itself off. 

According to a recent Entrepreneur article, the majority of millennials share personalized content on social media:

"Achieving content personalization at the scale of millennials’ content consumption is daunting. How can you possibly scale to give everyone a unique brand experience. Yet, if you take the time to deliver content that users can care about, 50 percent of the time the survey respondents said they would share it on social media. It’s worth it to invest the time in the content that will make a connection with millennials early and make it deep."

Try to get an idea of the big picture ROI here. You have to invest a lot in your content strategy, but many members of your target audience will share it as a result. 

So in the case of millennials, content personalization is an easy decision. But before you start practicing it, realize that this might not hold true for other demographics. We've already said that the ROI of personalizing content for millennials is positive, but we couldn't estimate that for earlier generations. Before you start planning your content strategy, you have to keep in mind who you're marketing to. 

To talk more about content strategy, or anything else, please contact us. Thanks. 

Content Strategy: Why Content Isn't Just a Trend

It's not at all surprising that content is the most important factor in your content strategy. The reason content has become more important in terms of marketing as of late is because it will always be an effective tool. 

Others disagree. Due to the undeniable buzz that content marketing has created, they see content as a trend. To them, content creation will be outdated in a few years just like the old SEO tactics. 

Out of all the qualities you can use to describe content, trendy definitely isn't one of them. According to this Forbes article, content is, and always will be important in a marketing context: 

"Some content experts moan that there is too much content out there. Or is there? Content, often referred to as “king” is so essential to digital marketing that it can’t be dismissed as a “trend.” While individual publishers may be overextending themselves by publishing too much, there will always be content. It will always be important."

First, you need to understand the purpose and function of content. What makes it such an important component of online marketing? Is it because it enhances your SEO and increases your page rank?

While these are certainly two possible outcomes of content creation, they're not the goal. The real reason you create and post content is to inform and engage prospective customers. 

In addition to keeping your website current, you also need to establish a brand identity and explain why your business is relevant to current events. Creating content is way more important than improving your technical marketing efforts. 

If you want your content strategy to be effective, you have to believe in content as a viable long-term component of your marketing efforts. Once you do that, you'll be able to engage your target audience. 

To talk more about your content strategy, or anything else, please contact us. Thanks. 

3 Ways to Determine The Success of Your Content Marketing Campaign

When starting a content marketing campaign, the first way to measure success is to identify what success looks like. Are you looking for Facebook 'likes'? Retweets? Blog post shares? E-book downloads? The adage of "You can't manage what you don't measure" starts with knowing what you're measuring. Once your key performance indicators (KPI) are defined, you can then have a yardstick to measure the performance of the campaign. By determining these metrics beforehand, you can begin to compare the data against the goals of the campaign.

Simply defining your KPIs isn't enough, however. You must also make sure that your campaigns are reaching the right people. If your vintage motorcycle blog post links are being retweeted by a kid with 14 followers, that might not be a quality share for your business. This may be a little over the top, but the point is valid. For example, you want to use the search function on Twitter and use terms related to your industry. Then begin following and engaging with those folks.

On the other end, if you're getting comments on the post or Facebook shares by influencers in your industry, then you are winning. To measure this version of success, you will need to know not only who you want to target, but to make sure to engage them with a call to action.

All of those retweets and pageviews are great, but there's one last indicator of your marketing campaign's effectiveness - sales! That's right, revenue. Income. Profit. Is your marketing successful if you don't sell anything? Marketing, as we know, is how you express your company or product's value to potential customers, so naturally it follows that if our marketing is driving sales, then it is successful. However, could it be *more* successful? That's where A/B or split testing comes in. You will want to constantly experiment with your social media strategy so that you know what works and what does not. You can let the numbers determine your course.

By following these foundational guidelines, you can establish some metrics that will help measure and steer the course of your social strategies.

Please contact us for additional content strategies to grow your community and sales.