How do you make your content stand out from the rest?
What’s the strategic framework for identifying content opportunities that can enable you to accomplish the right goals?
How do you integrate your content directly with your social marketing efforts?
The key is “Quality Content.”
Determine Goals and Resources
Where do you want to get to, and what do you have available to you to be able to get to that place?
Goals for a content strategy:
- Brand awareness: Making people aware of who you are and what you uniquely do
- Lead nurturing: Finding people who are interested in your products and services
- Sales nurturing: Moving interested people into the next stage of the sales funnel where those dollar generating conversions happen
- Customer service: Answering questions, helping existing customers
- Customer retention: Because it’s cheaper to keep a customer than find a new one
- Visibility: Which goes further than just brand awareness, setting your company up to be a thought leader in your space.
Get to Know Your Audience
You can’t just assume who your audience is, as without data, you’re probably wrong. Barone also stipulated that in order for you to be successful, your audience has to care about the content. So you need to take the time to analyze your data and identify patterns.
See what content resonates among the audiences that come in from different referrers, and examine the differences in interactions with the site with those different user bases.
You should mine your social conversations and stalk-observe your audience; see what makes them happy, what they’re talking about, what’s trending, who the influencers are, where the communities are, and what gets shared.
Tools that you can use to do this include:
- Buzzsumo
- Google Alerts
- Social Mention
- Advanced Twitter search
- Topsy
Find Your Stories
As you think through the types of content, you then have to determine how that ties in to the message that you’re trying to tell. What is your story?
- Your core values.
- Your USP.
- Your company mission.
- Your brand promise.
- Your key messages, and how you live them.
Source: Searchenginewatch.com