Editorial calendars, sales goals, and the news cycle are all influencers in deciding what type of messaging is best suited for your content marketing strategy, and it’s easy for marketers to get stuck in one of two traps:
Analysis paralysis occurs when there are so many topics and stakeholders involved that you fail to prioritize them properly. Sometimes it can seem difficult to know where to begin.
Content doldrums happen when you feel like you have already said everything that you can and finding new ideas seems impossible.
Getting bogged down in either of these mindsets is marketing poison that will negatively impact the results that you are trying to achieve. Fortunately, they are easy to avoid if you take a step back and develop your content marketing plan strategically.
Expand your audience. It is all too easy to focus all of your efforts on a narrowly defined target market. These are usually the decision makers who are empowered to purchase your product or service, but this can severely limit your reach. Remember that successful business leaders are often multidisciplinary and get ideas from a variety of sources and people. Maybe specialist physicians or mid-market retailers are your core audience, but you have insights that are equally applicable to patient populations or logistics managers. Do not think it is wasteful to create content that reaches these stakeholders — physicians are influenced by their patients and supply distributors have strong mindshare with retailer customers. And don’t forget that all content that appears in highly ranked sources contributes to your overall SEO.
Encourage more reading. No piece of content should ever be alone! When deploying content on your website – spend some time to see what other existing content on your website lends itself to be referenced. This will help with your organic search rankings and confirm you your position as an expert.
Share and share alike. How much sharing is in your social media strategy? It might not be enough. Who is sharing? Are there ways to encourage employee sharing? We have seen great results with a simple $25 weekly gift card for the best social share. On platforms like Twitter don’t be afraid to share the same content more than once – it’s a timeline and people will only see a tiny fraction of the stuff that is posted. Automation can help – just don’t overdo it!
Reuse your content. Creating good content takes a lot of time and effort. Many marketers think of repurposing content as rewriting it for a different publication. That’s great, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg. All the knowledge that fueled the article your industry’s leading website just ran can be repackaged to reach new audiences. Webinars, infographics, newsletters, and videos are all avenues that can be used to derive more value from your information. Over time, you can even aggregate all of your content into a book that highlights your expertise.
Integrating these steps into your content marketing strategy will help keep your content machine generating output that resonates with audiences, and that’s what increases engagement and moves targets to become leads.
Ask us today how Write2Market can help convert your knowledge into lead generating content.