Content is absolutely key to keeping your marketing channels stocked with material to keep releasing. Not only is content incredibly important to keeping your audience engaged, but also really important to constantly maintaining and building your SEO ranking.
Here are a few steps that can help to make your content creation process more efficient and improve the overall effectiveness of your content marketing plan.
Plan Everything
Schedule your content release as early as possible, the more expensive the ad buys and media production, the earlier it should be planned. You can always switch things around or add something new, adapt to feedback etc, but this should happen on top of an already planned out schedule.
Coordinate marketing content release across your marketing and media channels, practice good customization and segmentation techniques in your digital and email campaigns.
Good planning will give you the lead time needed to make content without having to rush it at the last minute. When working with vendors, giving them extra time often results in a better product at a lower cost.
It’s not just a about Quantity
Sometimes marketers get in a rut of just releasing as much material as possible, and while regularly releases offers, marketing content and social media updates are important, it can be easy to let the quality of content slide while the quantity increase. Don’t do this! You’ll lose audience retention very quickly, and your content will come across much more spammy. Lesser quality content results in a lower CTR, and email open rates, and higher unsubscribe rates. Keep your quality standards high for all your content.
Use Feedback from your Audience and Data
Pay attention to what your audience talks about, asks you, or what their comments are. Often this is a great source of marketing content inspiration. Your data analytics also are a wellspring of information on your audiences’ preferences and what they respond to. It is critically important to use your data and craft future marketing content based on what works well.
Over time you’ll get a pretty good feel for what type of content is worth creating, and what doesn’t seem to resonate. All brands are different, and this is why segmentation is so important, as it lets you push specific content to certain segments of your audience. For email marketing, in particular, audience segmentation is a cornerstone of a good campaign.
Digital advertising also should be heavily based on your CTR and other data. Leverage your data to paint a picture of what type of ads work well with your audience on digital ads. Work with your content creators to A/B test different types of visual content and different copy on ads.
Experiment with guests and Vlogs
Some of the most successful youtube channels and brand pages host guest blogs and video content. This can be an effective way to spend less time while creating high-quality content. Another advantage to guest content is that it puts your content in front of a new audience. Many times some of their followers and subscribers will choose to follow your brand as well.
Visuals are Important
The overall look of your content is really important. It’s important that you develop a visual style that fits with your brand and audience. For example, a business that sells ceramic planter and garden supplies would have a different look than a tech-based online banking platform. So keep this in mind as your over time develop your brand’s aesthetic.
The quality of your visual content is really important, as we talked about above, quality is more important than quantity as long as you are regularly engaging with your audience. For web pages, online stores, sales landing pages, etc, it’s really important that your pages look better than your competitors. Bad visual design is a very quick way to push would-be buyers into your competitor’s arms.
Most brands work with marketing firms to create their actual visual content. Just make sure that your marketing partner is on the same page as you are when it comes to what you want your brand’s image to be. Don’t be afraid to push back if you aren’t thrilled with how something looks. Also, it’s important that you try new things, this is critical for all marketing, but try the new visual style and A/B test if possible.
Small Business Content Marketing
Small businesses have unique challenges when it comes to any sort of marketing. Small businesses need to heavily make their presence known locally. Your marketing content should reflect your location within a community. Try to stay engaged with local events, work with local charities and other organizations. All of these make a great blog or video content pieces for your social media pages and website. Take special care to make sure that blogging content features local keywords to help you rank for google searches that are relevant.
While marketing budgets for small businesses can be tighter, you should still be utilizing content marketing across all your platforms. Consistency is key, especially around holiday sales events. Video production is another important part of your content marketing strategy to consider. Video content represents one of the highest ROI areas of marketing since one video can be used in numerous ways over several months.
These are just some of the many tips and strategies that should be considered when planning your content marketing for 2021. If you have questions or would like to schedule a call for a no-obligation consultation GIVE US A SHOUT!
We’ve worked with dozens of businesses across many different industries and sizes to plan content marketing plans. Volan Media is a top Knoxville based content marketing agency, we not only work with clients in the Knoxville, Maryville, Chattanooga, and Nashville area but also work with clients around the country!
Let us know how we can help your business push forward in 2021!
