No matter what your brand is and what you do, one of the most important things is what content you provide to your customers. A successful marketing strategy will boost your business, and its absence can even lead to bankruptcy. One of its most important elements is content. No matter what type of site you make, you've probably heard the term "content is king." On the web, it can lead to quick success and vice versa - its low quality or lack thereof can fail you. Although these are skills acquired by professionals over the years, in this post we will try to formulate the 10 most important things in the content that you need to follow in order to be successful.
Depending on the site you run and the business you have, the content marketing plan may include your blog, your social media posts, videos, infographics, your various affiliate media posts in the form of paid advertising, and so on.
Some important things before we share with you the 10 most important steps include setting goals, finding where your audience is, and realizing exactly where you can find it. With this, you have to decide for yourself in what form your content should reach the audience.
Set goals
Whatever you plan to publish, it's important to decide exactly what goals you want to achieve with your content marketing plan. It is good to choose a strategy to follow, not to decide something different every week or change what you aim for. Once you start creating something, it's a good idea to build on it, not wander in different directions. In this regard, it is good to give yourself answers to the following questions:
Why did you decide you needed to build content marketing?
What will you offer your customers through it?
How will the content be useful to them?
What benefits will you derive from what you create?
How will you measure whether the effort is worth it?
What is your audience?
When making a plan for your content, it is very good to consider exactly what your customers are and the people to whom you are creating. There are many things you can do in different ways. It all depends on the age, gender of your potential customers, the way you shop and even your geographical location. This is a step on a whole separate topic, but let's say if your customers are mostly young people, you might be able to successfully upload a video to YouTube; if your customers are people who prefer to read - focus on your blog posts; and in some variants, Facebook may also be the best option. It all depends on your judgment and you will then be able to judge whether you have made a mistake and whether you are addressing the right people with the content you offer them.
Determine your most successful content
It is very important, if you have already created some content and are not starting at the moment, to analyze well which of your posts reach the most people. You need to analyze everything - from the number of readings to the reactions on social networks, including comments; which is well received, provokes debate, likes and ultimately leads to contact with you, promotion of your brand or even direct sales.
Select CMS
If you already have a website, you probably already have a well-established content manager on it or on your blog, but if you're just starting out here, this is probably the most important step. There are many free and paid offers on the market, but we can safely say that one of the best solutions is WordPress. This is the platform with which you can do the most things, get help from the most people and in general is the CMS that undergoes the fastest changes or various optimizations in the content, if over time it occurs to you to do something else with your site. Of course, there are other options such as Joomla, Drupal, Magento and many others. One day we will pay special attention to them to analyze their advantages and disadvantages, but the universal and best option at the moment is WordPress.
Think about the content
The more you think about what you are about to create as content, the fewer mistakes you will make afterwards. You will not make unnecessary efforts and your work will not be in vain. Ask relatives, colleagues, and why not clients what they need. This can be a section with tips, news, instructions for something in your business or demonstrations of the features of the products you offer.
Find out exactly what people are looking for. There are various tools on the web that allow you to view current Google searches, for example, but you can also keep track of popular news topics, current posts in various forums, and other trends.
Decide what content to create
There are many platforms you can use and ways you can reach your readers and customers. The classic example is blogs, but it is becoming increasingly popular to create audio recordings such as podcasts, videos, online courses, social networks and more. What is the best thing for your customers to accept? What do they need?
Many offer blogs, social networks and even entire e-books that can be downloaded from the company's website, which contains important information for customers. This is a very bold strategy, but it often works. It is always successful to offer something that will not only be useful to people, but also one that will encourage them to share. So many more people will learn about you. If you make a video that shows your product in an interesting way or presented by a famous person, you can count on people to start sharing it. Also if it is something useful like "how to do it".
Define a team for your content
It is good to distribute the tasks well in the beginning, so that the content is created by your people, but still located in a certain structure. You will save yourself a lot of trouble if you organize well the structure and importance of each author, so that you do not have problems if someone leaves, or if he fails to finish on time what you plan to publish. There are many different levels of access on social media and in CMSs like WordPress. Our advice is to use them so that everyone has their place and does not break the hierarchy.
Schedule
One of the most important things, whatever you create as content, is to have a set schedule to follow. Find out when your things are read or watched the most and publish them right then. Be regular in your actions so that you make it a habit for people to follow you. Keep track of your shopping time if you're offering something, or the upcoming holidays, vacations, and anything else you can think of. If you're offering something to shop over the weekend, it's a good idea to use the middle of the week to post something, but not Monday. Respectively, if you offer beach accessories, maybe in December your posts may be less. You know your customers - publish when they are interested in what you offer them.
Content is king
Always strive for what you post to be more than just a "trick" but something that will have value for your readers and customers. If you give them the impression that you are publishing things just because you have to, they will soon stop following you. Post things that will help them in a situation or from which they will learn something new.
Do an analysis
At a certain time, you decide to do an analysis. Keep track of how your content channels are evolving. Now is the time to consider which information about your company is shared more often on social networks, which blog posts are read more. The same goes for time. You can track when your users are more active and when your published material remains of low interest. This will help you a lot in developing a strategy and successfully pursuing it.
You can keep track of things like:
- Do you have more visitors than in the previous period
- How much time do people spend on the site
- Are your site's performance improving?
- Are your sales increasing?
- Do you have more traffic from social networks
- Does the site's newsletter increase the number of subscribers?