Hitting a Home Run on Your Content Marketing Strategy
A few years ago, I was sitting in a work meeting when someone blurted, “we need to be better content creators!”
Over the years, I’ve come to realize how important this marketing tool is and how much of it can be credited to the rise of the digital world. In the past, if we wanted to find answers to specific questions or find solutions to certain problems, we’d look to a newspaper or ask a neighbor. Assembling and finding information was much more difficult back then.
Nowadays, with a few keystrokes on our mobile devices, tablets, or computers, we have access to any and all kinds of information within seconds. The information floating around in the interwebs is overwhelming, but it can also be a powerful tool when sought after. Content marketing is a strategic approach to creating and distributing valuable or insightful content (blogs, articles, videos, and social media posts) with the intention of engaging potential customers.
Recently, I was reading a Forbes article, Top 3 Strategies For Elevating Your Content Marketing in 2020 which talks about the different ways today’s connected consumer searches for content. With the abundance of content online, it’s becoming more expensive and difficult to cut through the noise. The author highlights three successful strategies that I wanted to explore.
- Optimization for voice search
With over 50% of internet searches coming from mobile devices, and over 50% of those searches happening through voice search, brands need to re-think their keywords and SEO approach. Instead of key phrases, the searches will be in more complete sentences. The author recommends FAQ pages with similar questions so your content gets hits. This is something that is so crucial to get ahead of in today’s market where the way of finding information is changing. We as marketers need to continuously put ourselves in the shoes of our customers.
2. Transparency
Today, brands are a big part of a consumer’s lifestyle and identity, so it makes sense that we value transparency and authenticity in brands we associate with. The author recommends using content marketing to pull the curtain back on corporate social responsibility, employee testimonials, and highlight user-generated content. In other words, encouraging companies to be authentically true to their values through the content they put out. We’ve discussed a personal brand and how important it is to be authentic. The two go hand in hand.
3. Personalization & Interactivity
The future of optimized content marketing is the creation of highly targetted and personalized content through data analysis. The better we understand the customer, the better we are at sending them the right messages. Leveraging different mediums and channels to optimize that message delivery to the target customer is crucial.
So the big question is, what kind of content works best for the customer we are targetting? In a report released by HubSpot in 2017, video content ranks high on the preference list for most age groups. Plus, video content is the type of content 62% of video users say they consume thoroughly. If you’re in a pickle about the type of content to dish your dollars on, video might be your best bet. Happy content-ing!
