We all know how important content marketing is. It has seen a massive rise in popularity and almost every brand is doing it in some form, turning themselves into publishers to promote their products and services, and engage with customers. Whether through tweeting daily, writing blogs, producing videos or working with influencers, a constant stream of content creation is now the norm for brands.
But how robust is your strategy? Coca-Cola saw the value in placing “content excellence” (as opposed to creative excellence) at the forefront of its thinking several years ago. However, putting that into practice isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve gone back to basics to compile six points to bear in mind when creating a successful content marketing strategy.
Set out clear objectives
Define what you want to achieve and how. Only then can you tell if what you’re doing is working. A lot of organisations are so concerned with producing and publishing, they don’t stop to consider exactly how it will benefit their business.
Whether you want to increase brand awareness, engagement, sales or a combination of these, the ultimate goal should inform the purpose of each piece of content.
Know your (potential) customers
This is essential for targeting your content correctly. By combining a range of data sources, as Headstream did for BBC Three, you can build a more robust understanding of your audience and ways to reach them.
How your potential customers engage with digital and social media, what their interests are, where they shop online and in store, and a whole host of other attributes, can help you discover ways of reaching them with valuable, contextually relevant content.
Map out your customer’s journey
Once you’ve researched your audiences and understand how they interact with content, you can begin to map out their journey with your brand. Whatever stage they’re at – a complete newcomer, someone considering a purchase, or a loyal and returning customer – the content should be targeted appropriately.
Using some kind of framework to map the customer journey can be useful in making decisions that will help you with your content planning.
Make your content valuable
Only when you know your audience can you really commit to creating content that is valuable and timely. Every piece produced should have a clear and defined purpose. We tend to categorise these into four main areas: entertainment, monetary (discounts/incentives), information and utility.
Whatever message you want to convey, think of how the customer will perceive it and how it can be tailored to deliver some kind of tangible value.
Make your content visible
If you want people to see your carefully crafted content, it’s necessary to create a plan of where and when it is going live. It has to be visible, otherwise it’s pointless.
Again, it comes down to understanding your audience and knowing how they’re using the different platforms available. Whether you’re distributing via your own channels or third-party sites (paid or unpaid), you have to consider how you’ll reach people.
Evaluate
Building in a method and timeframe for evaluating your strategy is vital. Measuring what you’ve done and being able to improve on it going forward makes business sense.
My approach is to use a measurement framework to track more than just the channel performance indicators (engagement rates, click-throughs, reach and so on) to ensure that content is optimised for business impact. Analysing the success of content throughout the customer journey and pitting results against key brand and sales objectives means you can determine whether your efforts are having an influence on customer behaviours and actions.
This can then be fed back into future planning to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing activity.
Steve Sponder is managing director of Headstream
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