Founder, Hummingword
Why do brands often fail at content marketing? Are you investing enough time in preparing a well-thought-out strategy for content marketing?
Around 94 per cent of small business marketers use content marketing while only 9 per cent experienced success.
Content marketing can only reap benefits if we can create content that is purposeful and have direct contribution towards achieving business goals.
As we start the year 2020, we need to analyse the effectiveness of content marketing activities in 2019. For instance, what kind of content inspires people to read and share across social media platforms and sparks discussion. The trends of content marketing keep evolving and will continue to evolve with the changing behavior of consumers, the advent of new tools and tactics.
Keeping up pace with these changes requires incorporating the following strategies in 2020.
Creating optimized content
How we optimize content to attract our target audience? One of the best ways is to create a list of hashtags used by users in social media. This practice will help you generate ideas to create content which is optimized for the target users. Social media has become a relevant source of information for users to consume content from the millions of posts published every day.
Enhancing the content distribution strategy
Once the content is published online, the next step is creating an effective distribution strategy to increase the visibility of the content. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp are considered to be the efficient channels to grab the attention of the consumers. However, to ensure the better reach of the content, it’s imperative to post the content with the trending hashtags relevant to the topic. After the posting is done, the next step is to analyse the different aspects of social media metrics such as unique visitors, views, likes and engagement rate.
Emphasizing on creating video content
Most of us only stop by when we come across an appealing video rather than clicking the link to read. Office goers and even students prefer to consume content on the go because watching video is more convenient than reading content. People might not end up making the buying decision by watching the first video but it will intrigue the customers to know more about the products and services. Around 90 per cent of people say they discover new brands or products on YouTube. Sometimes, you might avoid the idea of producing video content pondering over the cost of creating it. However, with the availability of do-it-yourself tools, making videos has become much easier and more affordable.
Always prefer quality over quantity
Quality always wins over quantity when it comes to writing compelling content. In the digital world where a random search with certain keywords shows hundreds of content pieces, consumers long for authenticity. Before putting your head down to start writing content, think of the uniqueness you can incorporate to intrigue consumers to stop by whenever they come across your content—be it in the form of social media posts, blogs, videos and audio (podcasts). Though consistency in publishing content creates buzz for your brand, don’t lose focus on the quality in order to maintain the quantity. Publishing blockbuster content twice or thrice in a week always outweighs publishing inefficacious content every day.
Creating eye-catching visuals
Are you forgetting one of the important elements of content marketing? Yes, it’s visuals which resonate your brand message along with the content. Creative and interactive images sometimes speak more than words which directly connect customers to your brands’ value proposition. Moreover, digital natives or social media addicts spend most of their time on platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. According to a survey, Internet users are now spending an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes a day on social networking and messaging platform, according to a report. While browsing through different mediums, if social media users come across a post with an attractive image, it’s intriguing enough for them to click the link. To make your post stand out in the crowd, it’s advisable to create more and more infographics that can feed valuable insights to users without having them read the whole content.
Podcasting: The new norm
If you are creating a content marketing strategy for 2020, don’t forget to add podcasts which are eventually gaining the mindshare of consumers. Since the podcast is a very convenient medium for users to get exposed to various types of content (business, motivation, self-help), it will certainly occupy a lot of space in the playlists of everyone’s devices. The number of podcast listeners has grown significantly in the past few years and will continue to grow as the statistics say so. Year 2018 saw 48 million weekly podcast listeners as revealed by Statista data. And the number is expected to grow to 115 million by 2021.
Leverage metrics and data analytics
Metrics such as social shares, likes, page views and visitors enable you to comprehensively visualize how your content marketing campaign is performing. These metrics help you comprehend the consumers’ interest towards your brand, whether the content you publish resonate with your audiences, position yourself as a reliable source of information for your prospective buyers, the conversion rate from visitors to customers or getting closer to the marketing goals. It’s recommendable to review analytics every month to identify what kind of headlines are more clickable and what kind of content engages customers to spend more time on that page.
Topics are not only the crucial aspect of writing a blog or creating any other content piece. Making your content stand out among the thousands Web results is the important task.
Interesting, creative, informative, actionable and aesthetically appealing content will keep your target audience come back to your website again and again. Creating quality and various forms of content (includes audio and video) is non-negotiable if you want to achieve success in content marketing.