A Great Content Marketing Strategy Revolves Around These 3 Principles
Finally, people are beginning to understand the value of content marketing over traditional advertising.
Instead of telling the masses how awesome a product or service or company is, companies are opting to show through content. And it makes sense considering how easy social media makes Internet-marketing.
Content marketing is, hands-down, the best way to stimulate growth of your brand, business, product — if done properly.
But that’s the problem.
Companies have realized the why of content marketing, but can’t figure out the how.
They see competitors spewing out content left and right and decide to do the same. The mentality almost seems to be “regardless of how to do it, get it done.” Not only is this approach a waste of time, but bad content marketing is ugly, obvious, and unprofessional, and can harm you or your company’s reputation.
If you want to do content marketing the right way, start by following these 3 principles:
1. Use strategies that makes sense for your company, brand, product, service.
If you choose to take the content marketing route — regardless if it’s used in conjunction with or instead of traditional advertising — you need to use the content strategies that fit.
This might sound blatantly obvious, but there are plenty of companies who try to promote their product or service through media that doesn’t match their brand or business. The explanation is often, “Well, everyone else is doing it, we should too.”
It’s a terrible way to approach content marketing and entirely counterproductive to everything you’re trying to accomplish.
For instance, content marketing for a new, canned cold-brew startup should look a hell of a lot different than content marketing for an established data analytics company. The coffee startup might want to utilize social influencers and Instagram stories while the data-analytics company would benefit more from having one of their founders speak frequently on podcasts.
So, before you start that weekly vlog or start an Instagram campaign, ask: “Does this approach really make sense for what we’re trying to accomplish?”
2. Have good content.
Think I’m being sarcastic?
I’m not.
It’s incredible how many poorly-written articles, sloppy social pages and horribly edited video content I see on a daily basis. People are so worried about getting out more content that, aside from putting it in the wrong places, they fail to realize how sub-par their content actually is. It needs to stop.
Every single content piece you put out needs to have a reason. If you can’t identify or understand the value it’s adding to your overall strategy, don’t do it. The “why” of your content should be easy to understand and provide immediate value.
Be critical of the content you create for each medium. Challenge your marketing team to come up with higher-quality content. Before you publish anything, ask, “why.”
If you want to be effective in your content strategy, you need to have good content — simple as that.
3. Maximize volume.
There is never a reason not to publish more content.
After all, content marketing is about providing customers — both old and new — with valuable insight. It isn’t in-your-face sales-y, demanding people to buy a product or service, but rather educational and entertaining, like my friend and mentor Nicolas Cole likes to say. And the best content marketers are the ones who can provide that value day-in and day-out without fail.
Once you’ve got your strategies in place and understand what quality content for each strategy looks like, you need to publish content all the time.
In fact, that exact approach is what led Cole to leave his 9 to 5, move to L.A. and start Digital Press, a thought leadership and executive writing agency for CEOs, founders and serial entrepreneurs. After finding his strategy (writing), establishing a personal brand, and understanding what it means to push out quality content, Cole climbed his way to 50 million+ views, his own column on Inc., features in nearly every major online publication and even started a company on the principle of maximizing volume.
One well-written article or semi-viral podcast feature isn’t enough.
Having a lengthy portfolio of quality content you can point to is what’s is going to separate you from every other company trying to figure out their content marketing strategy.
