8 Ways To Power Up Your Content Marketing Game

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Having a defined and well-strategized content marketing strategy is a must these days, however, according to the Content Marketing Institute, about 63% of the businesses do not have a clear and documented marketing strategy. Publishing content without having a proper plan would hit your return on investment.

Moreover, it would also peg back your efforts to engage with your audience. In the absence of a proper direction or aim, you are not hitting your mark and in turn not adding any real value to your business venture.

Creating content just for the sake of creating is not the way to go as companies that do develop a creative strategy do see their marketing efforts being paid off well and good. On the other hand, without a strategy, all the effort that you put into marketing your products and services might end up as well in a bin as success or failure would now than be on the stroke of your luck.

And if that is not bad enough, then be warned, since, in the worst-case scenario, it can even take a toll on your business as well. When you are not delivering any real value, customers might find your content irrelevant and might stop engaging with your brand altogether.

After reading all this, if you are worried about not having a clear marketing strategy, then don’t worry.

We got a few tips to help you get one

1. Set Your Targets and Goals: Before starting anything it is important that you need to establish a clear set of targets and goals which you want to accomplish, and which should be relative to the amount of effort that you put into your work. You can delegate responsibilities if you are working in a team which will make the task easier and makes the work smooth. It is also essential that you give yourself some small targets and set deadlines by which you want to achieve them and by taking such small calculated steps, one by one, you can achieve a much bigger target in a relatively short amount of time.
2. Know Your Audience: One thing content marketers at times tend to forget while creating content is the audience they are targeting. Knowing your audience is important so that you can understand their needs and wants and as such market your product in such a way that it fulfills the requirement of your customer. A business that is aware of the needs of customers, not only tends to fare better than those that don’t but likewise they have a better outreach and a higher customer engagement and involvement ratio.
3. Do your Research: Content marketing is mainly about listening to the requirements of your customers and providing valuable and relevant information that will satisfy their demands. Before you can cater to their needs, you should carefully research all the platforms that your customers are spending their time on such as blogs, social media, review platforms, and many others. You can check on various sites which topics are trending to give you a better idea. Having done research in advance will help you to get a better idea of your customer needs so that you can design your products accordingly. It will give you an edge in the market.
4. Set the metrics that you will measure: You should have a clear set of standards that you can measure to analyze your performance. You should know if the effort you are putting into your business is delivering the value that is required and in which areas are you lagging so that you can improve your performance. You can set some metrics and tools such as consumption, social media sharing tools like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, website tools like designrr, lead generation and sales to analyze your performance. You may then take appropriate measures to fix the issues and ensure better leads. It is important to note that if you are in a team, then there must be uniformity before deciding so that all of your members and stakeholders are in complete agreement as to how they will measure the success level.
5. Create an editorial calendar: Professional content marketers are well aware that to attract and maintain their audience, they need to publish content regularly so that existing and new customers keep coming back to their marketing hub. Creating an editorial calendar will help you to provide regular content since you can note down the topics that you are planning to publish within the next three to five months. It will help you to avoid confusion when you feel you have run out of ideas and have no more content that you can publish.
6. Target different content formats: Since your audience will be diverse you must plan accordingly. If you are putting too much effort into one platform you may be losing out on potential customers who are not on the channel. Your audience will consume the content differently according to their preferences. Visual content will be more suitable on social platforms where your focus is to increase your reach and the audience will not focus on the details. However long posts are suitable if you are focusing on writing blogs and case studies where details are not only encouraged but are required.
7. Change is necessary: Your market strategy is not a document that you should implement word to word but as guidance so that you can plan and promote your content. Thus you should some space for adjustment so that you can continuously update your work and improve it regularly. Being flexible is necessary if you feel that your strategy is not working and you are failing to achieve your goals.
8. Brainstorm: If you feel you cannot brainstorm further, you should remember that you do not need to do everything alone. You can get together with your team and can brainstorm with them so that you can get ideas. It is better if you work closely with the sales and customer help department since they work closely with customers and will give you better ideas.