As with most things in business, establishing priorities is critical to success. This includes your content marketing. When you identify your priorities and know what you want to achieve, creating content is so much easier.
What are YOUR content marketing priorities? What do you want to achieve?
Over the past several months I’ve spoken with dozens of marketers and business owners in a variety of industries. One thing I noticed is that they ALL had different goals in mind when it comes to content marketing.
So why is it that we don’t have a set of universal guidelines for what content marketing is and how to do it? Maybe you’re sitting at your computer thinking, “How can I get started with content marketing?” Yet you don’t know where to start because your goals are different from everyone else’s. That’s why I’ve put together this short list of ways you can better understand your content marketing priorities and how it can support your business goals
I’m going to go through the two major content marketing priorities: Content Creation and Content Distribution & Promotion.
First things first: let’s discuss exactly what content marketing is and what it isn’t.
What is Content Marketing?
What Content Marketing is NOT: a list of subjects you need to be talking about (you should already know this) in a blog post once per week or month: a series of articles in the same style each time.
What Content Marketing IS: a strategy for creating, distributing and promoting valuable content to your customers and prospects.
Content Creation
So how do you go about creating valuable content? Ask yourself these questions when planning a blog post or an article. Make sure you’re asking them for every piece of content you create to get the most value from each word written.
1.Who is my target audience?
2. What are they struggling with?
3. How can I help them?
4. What is something they don’t know about my product or service? (This question is key)
5. Why should they care?
When you’ve answered those questions, it will become easier to write the post. You’ll already have targeted goals in mind of what that particular audience needs and wants to know about the topic. This will ensure your content marketing is valuable to them and they’ll remember you when it comes time to make a decision.
When creating content, it’s common sense that you don’t want it all over the place. ‘Scattered’ content doesn’t provide value to anyone because no one can find what they’re looking for, leaving them with an overall bad impression of your business.
Content Distribution & Promotion
This is where many people stop when it comes to content marketing, and for good reason- it’s one of the biggest pain points out there! Getting your content in front of your target audience can seem like a huge challenge, but you know what? If you don’t share your content, it’ll never get in front of them.
For every piece of valuable content you create, you need a set plan for how you’re going to promote that piece of content. If you want the content to get in front of your target audience, then you need to spend time making that happen.
Sharing your content on social media, through your blogs, on YouTube and in your email marketing campaigns is an easy and effective way to get your message in front of your audience. And you don’t have to be on all the social media platforms; just be where the majority of your audience spends their time. One tried and tested method is to create domino content: record a video, transcribe it into a blog post, then share snippets of your content on social media and in your emails. That’s what we do here at Melanie & co, and it works beautifully!
If you’re struggling with creating valuable content or promoting it after creation, feel free to reach out and we can work together to establish your content marketing priorities. Schedule a free 30-minute discovery call today: melaniediehl.as.me
Need some tools to help with your content creation? We have lists of content creation tools here and here.