Know Your Best Content and Focus on It

Content marketing SHOULD generate 3 times as many leads as advertising…

…if yours isn’t, you probably aren’t focussing on your best content. Discover how…

How successful are you at using your content strategy to work in favour of your brand?

It seems that numbers go in favour of content over advertising, since it can produce three times as many leads and costs 62% less. Has your most brilliant piece of writing produced results anywhere near those stats? Possibly not. 

Content Marketing can produce three times as many leads as advertising and costs 62% less!

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Most brands today are overwhelmed by the idea of content diversity.

The market is big on the idea of putting different kinds of content out there to please all kinds of customer preferences. And yet, if you know your audience and what they respond to, why deviate and waste time and resources on producing subpar content pieces that don’t deliver?

Although there will always be perks to abandoning your content comfort zone and broadening your creative horizons, the benefit of knowing what makes your audience engage and what makes your brand pop will always be significantly greater.

So, how does a business strike that fine balance between diversity and consistency? And how can your brand produce stellar content without becoming stale? Here are a few useful pointers for businesses of all shapes and sizes to ace your content strategy with ease.

Contents

• Conducting a Content Audit
• Researching Industry and Audience Preferences
• Tune in on the Social Buzz
• Refine Your Schedule
• Conclusion

Conducting a Content Audit

Way too often, businesses publish for the sake of the word count, the keywords, and the schedule. The tick-tock nagging sensation pushes them to spew another blog post with a catchy title, without ever looking back.

What’s wrong with that picture? Everything, of course.

The research that goes into every piece of content you produce cannot and should not end there. As a marketer at heart, you need to monitor the performance of each piece you post, track your KPIs, and do a thorough brand-wide checkup of your content output. 

Maybe there’s a piece of content you’ve written back in the day that could use some refining now, and it would actually make for a brilliant piece relevant to your audience today. Perhaps certain blogs have been underperforming and wreaking havoc on your SEO results.

You’ll get to see which topics your readers go back to the most, which articles receive the most feedback through shares and comments, and which ones get the crickets. 

To know your content, you must consistently monitor its performance, and use the data to fuel your future writing efforts. Let the data speak for itselfbefore you rush to write another piece that will collect dust at the bottom of Google’s search results never to be opened or appreciated for its voice.

Researching Industry and Audience Preferences

Writing great content takes time, skill, and experience, but writing effective content also takes research and wisdom. You might know all there is to know about your brand, but can you venture outside of its comforting embrace and into the wide, wide mysteries of your industry? How about all the questions that your customers have asked? 

Since few brands have the luxury to post cat videos alone and get away with it to reach greater visibility, you need to make sure that your content has a purpose in addition to quality.

If you’re a fashion brand talking about leather, you’re years behind on trends, and you need to get in on the latest faux fabric scoop, voice your opinions on slowing down fashion, and making a positive impact on the environment. 

If insightful fashion designer biographies and interviews are your forte, mix it up and talk to models, influencers and less famous designers waiting for their five minutes of glory.

Always dig a little deeper to add a layer of authenticity to what you have to offer in your content. 

Tune in on the Social Buzz

When you treat content like a one-way street, you miss out on so many opportunities to interact with your readers, get to know your audience, and learn from their vantage point.

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Too often, businesses that write for search engines fail to remember that they are writing for people, too. And while their keywords are perfectly placed and dispersed, their content still fails to generate the interest that business needs. Even if it does inspire some interest, shares, and engagement, failing to reciprocate and respond leads, once again, to missed opportunities.

One very useful, yet profoundly simple way to get a better idea of how your content and brand are perceived is with the help of social networks. This is where the most vibrant conversations happen, the most intriguing questions are asked, and where the most forward-thinking brands respond and let the engagement flourish.

By implementing social media monitoring as a part of your overarching strategy, you can discover unfiltered feedback that can fuel your future content efforts. 

Find out in what contexts your brand appears, spot ongoing debates where you can contribute, nurture curiosity in your readers, and suddenly, your content becomes a two-way street. One that can thrive with the help of its audience while you skilfully nurture your brand reputation through such interactions. 

Refine Your Schedule

Would you ever head to a nightclub at two in the afternoon expecting to see a crowd dancing their hearts out? Or knock on the doors of a library at three in the morning? Sometimes even the most riveting content pieces will be quickly forgotten if you fail to take all other aspects of your strategy into account. 

While quality, quantity, and consistency will get you so far, you also need to make sure to factor timing into your content strategy, as well. Go back to the data you have on your audience and see when they actually visit your site and your social pages ready to read the latest post, when they just scroll past everything (but the cat videos) on their newsfeed, and when they are most open to communication. 

The art and science of scheduling your content is somewhat of a fickle beast. Just like trends, relevant topics, customer preferences and many other aspects of your content output, scheduling will vary based on what your audience and your search engines like. 

Conclusion

It boils down to the fact that every aspect of content creation, from research, the actual writing, all the way to publishing, comes with a steep learning curve.

To achieve consistency in something that can be capricious in nature is indeed a lifelong business battle.

Invest time and effort to find that curve and make sure you’re willing to learn so that you can use your creative genius to put your brand on the map.