What would come to a marketer’s mind when he’s asked about his content marketing challenges? The challenges are definitely variant, however the most common one lies in “Content creation”. Content Creation comes – in any content marketing strategy – right before content seeding and content outreach tactics. Content Marketers always plan for good quality content that engages, and converts, hence the bottom line!
The early days of digital marketing, content wasn’t that big deal as it is today due to the rapid changes to social networks and the behavior of people using them. People have become great storytellers and each one’s social profile has become their own publishing platform and they’re smarter than before. These dramatic changes have raised the quality bar and made the wall even higher for marketers in the execution to get their stories publicized and shared.
Six Tactics To Keep Injecting Your Digital Assets With Fresh Content
1- Your Fans And Followers Are The Best Content Creators
The first rule, in any social media program is to listen to what’s being said about your brand. All those mentions could be recycled into new content and get across all your social assets. It’s highly recommended to use a web listening tool to easily monitor each channel over different date ranges.
Takeaways
- Turn your angry customer/fan negative comment into a new blog/video post idea tackling their trouble with your product.
- Create a word cloud of all keywords that have been mentioned along with your brand name or product (In case you’ve a wide rang of products) and create a piece of content around each one.
- Your brand relevant hashtags are very useful resource to see what people want to hear from you.
2- Create A Team Content Culture
Whether you’re offering a product or service, qualify your product team to join the content creation activities. It’s simple, they’re the ideal members of your team to analyze your fans/following inquiries and then set out a problem solving content strategy.
This culture also has to expand to other teams inside the organization as sales, HR, customers service and last but not the least your CEO.
Takeaways
- Initiate a content creation program internally and set your social and digital efforts at the center of the company
- Reward the contributors and feature them on company news (Give them badges and name them like “Your company name” Ninjas)
- Arrange regular sessions for digital media literacy to promote your initiative across the all company levels and gain trust.
- Your company employees are your brand storytellers, so let them tell you story.
3- Partner with your industry influencers
Blogger outreach has been an indispensable part of any content marketing program. Agencies and brands are always concerned about building good relationships with those influencers in their field. But, what that influencer has to do with your content creation challenge?
Takeaways
- You can team up with them to create a blog series featuring a matter of interest to your audience
- Discuss a guest blogging opportunity so you can refresh your content stream
- This partnership might be in different content types, you could arrange a regular twitter chat with your followers, live-stream a Google plus hangout and on other channels like Instagram or Vine.
4- Track what’s trending!
To keep on delivering quality content, you have to be selective in what you curate. Tracking your market new trends, seize the news stories and turn them into different content types.
Takeaways
- Subscribe to your industry leaders newsletter so you can get the updates
- Inject your listening tool with a set of industry-generic keywords and keep a close eye on them.
- If there’s a spike in the conversations volume around a topic of interest or an event, be smart and turn it into a new content piece.
- Getting to monitor the local or world trends is very useful since you can push out a newsjacking post related to your business.
5- Create Content for Each Persona
Analyzing your brand buyer personas has come right before you start working on the content creation process. It’s the act of segmenting the whole audience into a number of personas with specific characteristics and descriptions. This will contribute to your content creation process because you’ll no longer speaking to your audience in general, but rather you’re tailoring your content to fit a specific segment in age, gender or buying behavior.
Takeaways
- Think of each persona before choosing the digital medium (Blog – Video – Post – Tweet) not all your audience using the same digital channel to hear from you
- Reflect their personality on design, language, calls-to-action and times of posting. In other words, create content that resonates to that specific segment
- This tailored content has to be a problem solving to each targeted group of audience so that it will be consumed and shared among their network on social platforms.
6- Bring your winning old content back to life
There’s nothing more appealing than repurposing the ever-green content that proved success and a shareability. All you have to do is start analyze your old reports and see which content hits the highest numbers in consumption, engagement and reach.
Takeaways
- Along with your measurement plan implementation, you might find spikes in Engagement and reach for some content pieces, save them you’ll need later to repost them in different format.
- Re-write/post this content in different format (FB post – Tweet – Blog – Video)
- You can change the messages, headline, CTAs and thumbnails.
There’s one strategy fits all in digital marketing especially when it comes to content. The only parameter evaluating your content success is your consistent measurement plan. Your report has to include Google analytics metrics; platform metrics (ex. FB insights) and your marketing goals (Leads, Phone calls, Actual sales) and accordingly you tweak your content strategy heading out to even better results.
We live the content age. If your brand doesn’t push out great content, it won’t win the social proof. Now your turn, tell us what’s your approach to create content for your brand and how you overcome your content creation challenges?
