When designing and implementing your content strategy moving into 2019, you need to make sure that traditional marketing methods don’t overrule your ideas board and leave you behind the pack. The following five tips will help you build a strategy that will have your content marketing on top of the game.
1. Find time to plan
The best way to plan forward is to review your existing strategy. Take the time out to spend with your team to analyse, research and implement forward-thinking ideas that will help you achieve maximum results. Documenting your approach ahead of time will allow you to review and remain agile to adjust accordingly, based on trends and industry analysis. A simple overview of your plan every month will enable you to produce the most relevant information at the most relevant time.
What is your best performing channel?
As the evolution of content marketing is forever developing, the need to distribute across every platform is no longer a necessity.
Find the channels that bring you the most engagement and use them strategically to target your niche. The more time you spend targeting these consumers a platform that works for you, the higher the engagement rate from your audience will be.
Allow yourself to implement channels you haven’t previously tried before, remembering not to stick it out if it’s not delivering the desired results. Gone are the days of having a Pinterest account because everyone else in the industry does. If it doesn’t work for your business, try something else or put more time and effort into the ones that are actually engaging your audience.
Create useful, relevant content
It seems that although specific content is extremely beneficial for SEO and brand awareness, a lot of people are creating informative pieces just for the sake of it, with no actual strategy.
Understanding the reason behind producing quality evergreen content will benefit you, both in the now and in the future. Before you start creating, think about the actual objective you want to achieve:
- Is it relevant to your audience?
- Does it offer value, or display something new within your business?
- Does it fit into your overarching goals?
Think about potentially updating older blogs or articles to include trending topics and relevance to the year you are currently in. For example, if you had a really successful blog post in 2018, consider refreshing it and keeping it evergreen. Using this strategy will allow you to maintain your SEO performance while keeping your audience updated with the latest information.
Understand your audience
The key pillar to any marketing strategy is to understand your audience – keep them up to date about their needs and wants before they even know themselves. If you understand your audience has changed over the last six months, then this needs to be reflective in your content – now and in the future. You and/or your team needs to spend the time analysing the data to understand your audience’s behaviour – this may be adapting to new technologies, adding new products to your catalogue or even new habits of those consuming your goods.
Improve your distribution strategy
Showing your content to the right audience makes sense, right? Agreed, but too many people forget this. Content amplification and distribution is a forever-changing market and understanding how to reach your audience best will allow you to spend the right amount of time across marketing on the right channels. Analytics across these channels will reveal the best time to posts, the devices your audience is consuming your content on, what messaging resonates better, and the actual journey of your consumers getting to your platforms.
Tools like Outbrain and Tabloola allow you to place your content on major news sites across the globe.
Although all of this may seem overwhelming, producing, analysing and becoming agile to your content strategy will reward you for years to come. Understanding your audience’s needs, and how they are consuming content, will help you produce quality informative content across your most high-performing channels.