Content Marketing Considerations for Success

Just because you generate content on a regular basis does it mean you are engrossed in ‘content marketing’. Let’s take that strategy nomenclature apart:

Content (Creation): This is the practice of generating text, images, graphics, video, audio, etc. for the sake of creating value for your intended audience.

Marketing: This is the part of the process where you are using content to further your brand’s goals, encourage brand awareness, promote products and services, etc.

So, just generating content is not actual ‘content marketing’. Content marketing involves researching and knowing your audience’s needs and wants, understanding what types of content help achieve those goals, planning for content that differentiates you from the competition, promoting it effectively and on the right platforms, and delivering content that has a sense of value for your audience. Otherwise, who cares? Right?

When planning and creating your content for marketing reasons, consider the following:

Determine Your Content Goals: Every stage of content creation, even after delivery, requires that you monitor if it’s working or not. Your analytics is a good place to start, but also check how many comments, likes, and shares your content has gotten. You can then evaluate whether the content you have already can benefit from scaling — in other words, if content is getting engagement and reaching specified goals, start thinking about repurposing in other mediums (such as slide shows, video, audio, infographics, etc.).

Repurpose with Purpose: Ask yourself – can I repurpose old blog posts? Can I create infographics with more current stats? Can I create a slideshow/slide share from this and update the info to be as current as possible? Can I take a specific section of a piece of content and create a YouTube video? Make the most of what you already have and what you already know works!

Think Scalability from the Start: Each time you plan for a new piece of content, start planning for sand thinking about how to scale it — repurposing through any of the above techniques will help you take a piece of good content and take it in mew directions and in new mediums, so the initial planing stages are actually about planning multiple content marketing pieces — this eases up on your frustrations later when it comes to generating new ideas.

Know Your Technology Limits: When planing content to scale, know your limits — if you plan to make a video, ask: do I really know how to do this? If not, I know I can make graphics, so I’ll leave the video part out or hire someone to do it. Also, think about the content you want to create and post — if it’s a larger format, how will that translate on a responsive website that is accessed from a mobile device? Or, is your site even responsive? Will people bounce before they even look at your content from a mobile device?

Delivering the right content to the right people using the right channels at the right time is key — but knowing from the start what you can and can’t do in the future with a piece of popular content will help determine how much mileage you can get out of it.
Remember: your audience is diverse and they have diverse ways of absorbing content, so the more planning and repurposing and platforms you can use to deliver good content, the more success you just may find.