Five simple ways to develop an effective content marketing strategy
Creating content on a regular basis can be straightforward if you plan carefully
Content marketing is proving to be a highly cost-effective way of generating leads for businesses. According to marketing consultant demandmetric.com, a content marketing strategy costs 62% less than a traditional campaign but generates three times as many leads. So why wouldn’t you do it?
Here are five simple steps to developing an effective content marketing strategy.
#1 Do your research
There is no point in creating content that your audience is not going to engage with. Therefore you need to find out which topics your customers are interested in and which questions they want answered.
You may already have a raft of emails with customer queries you can turn to, but social media has never made it easier to get insight from your customers. You can either directly ask your clients which content would be useful or use tools like Hootsuite for ‘social listening’ to see which topics they are already discussing.
#2 Make the most of what you have
The prospect of creating content on a regular basis can be daunting. But it’s easy to underestimate the amount of material that you have already produced in the past.
Material produced for traditional marketing campaigns, staff presentations or pitches for new business can all be repurposed, updated, condensed or spread out over a series of blogs – as long as it is relevant and engaging to your target audience.
#3 Plan a content calendar
The further ahead that you can plan your content, the better. Most blogging platforms, such as WordPress and Blogger, enable you to write blogs in advance and publish them in the future. If you aim to produce four blogs a month, it makes sense to plan and write them at the beginning of the month or even further in advance.
That way you can relax, knowing the month’s content is taken care of. Generating ideas over a period of weeks also helps to prevent writers’ block and gets you into the habit of creating ‘evergreen’ content that will not date too easily.
#4 Market your blog
As well as scheduling when your content is published, it also makes sense to plan which social media channels you are going to use to promote them. Hootsuite, for example, allows you to schedule and coordinate messages across a range of social media, whether you want it posted a minute or a month in advance.
Once you have built up a sizeable library of evergreen content, you can then tweet or share it on a regular basis. There will always be potential customers who didn’t catch the blog first time around.
#5 Measure your success
Once you have started generating content on a regular basis, you need to keep an eye on what is resonating with your clients and what isn’t. Using analytic software, such as Google Analytics, will enable you to see which content is viewed and shared the most so that you can plan further blogs around similar topics.
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