(1) Successful content marketing is intentional.
In the past few years, with the increasing popularity of content marketing, many startups feel pressure in the process of taking content marketing as part of the company's marketing strategy, which is understandable. However, if you do content marketing for the sake of content marketing, or want to do content marketing because you see other companies doing content marketing, this will be one of the biggest mistakes you make.
Like many other jobs in the process of starting a business, the question here is not whether content marketing is correct, but whether content marketing is suitable for your company. Therefore, the first step in making a successful content marketing plan is: first, find out why you want to do content marketing.
Before making a content marketing strategy, you need to understand why you need to create marketing content, otherwise you will become a media company that makes content purely for content's sake.
It is very important for all companies to determine why they need to create content. I found that companies that just want to create marketing content, but don't know why, usually can't achieve good results. To formulate content marketing strategy, we must first understand why we should create content, so that we can use content marketing to achieve commercial purposes. If there is no content marketing strategy, you can also produce a lot of content, but all this work may be in vain, because you have not produced the right content for the right people.
(2) Successful content marketing is customer-oriented.
Creating the right content for the right target group brings us to the topic we are talking about now. Just like making sure you know why you create marketing content, find out why your target customers read, watch or listen to it.
Finding the intersection of your business goals and user needs can make your content marketing an art and science. If you do well in this respect, you can produce high-quality, creative, valuable content that can capture users' imagination, strengthen the relationship between users and your brand, and promote their deeper interaction with your products.
A method that can be used to judge whether content marketing is a very effective marketing strategy: if your company's business is in the field of high knowledge. In the fields of finance, fitness and even fashion, users are likely to look for information and suggestions. If you can position your brand as a source of information that users can trust, you can further strengthen the reason why they should trust your product more. The same applies to services and B2B business. Create more content that can show your professional knowledge, and you will position yourself as an expert trusted by customers.
To determine your user base, you can't just point to the user base data chart and say, "These are the people." There are many people outside who haven't bought your products, haven't heard of your products, or may have seen some of your products but haven't found your company yet. Your users must have some inner desires, and you must quantify their desires to get these users. You need to be clear about the characteristics of the target user group you want to acquire, for example, what age group are they? Where do they usually live? What websites do they often visit? What content are they most interested in? How many times do they usually watch advertisements or soft articles about a product before making a purchase decision? You need to know these users through data as accurately as possible.
Your initial content marketing plan needs to be based on the above understanding of current users. Are you only going to do plain text content marketing? Can you do cross-media marketing? How often do you do content marketing? The answers to all these questions need to be finalized according to your knowledge of the target users. You should regard the content you make as a product, so you must ensure that the content matches and meets the needs of the target users.
Successful content marketing needs to match the content with the market demand.
If you hear the customer ask the same question more than twice, be sure to record it. This will be a very good writing material for marketing content. In addition, let your sales team participate, let them feedback the questions they heard from customers in time, and create a hot issue icon according to the collected feedback questions. Dig up these materials carefully and determine what you should write.
After doing some of the above work, you may find that you don't need content marketing, or now is not the right time for you to do content marketing. Therefore, before deciding whether to recruit a specialized content marketing specialist, you'd better make a full analysis of the target users before deciding whether to recruit. If you don't attach great importance to digital marketing, or most of your customers don't get it through digital marketing channels, then don't waste time and money on digital marketing. If your product has not been verified to match the market demand, then it is also recommended not to do content marketing for the time being, because all your work should be on product/market matching at this time. If you change the product direction, all your previous content marketing work will be in vain, and even the best content will not do you any good. You must be honest with yourself at this stage.
(3) Successful content marketing is evergreen and will not be out of date.
One thing that is often overlooked in content marketing strategy is the life cycle of your marketing content. The most successful content marketing strategies all have the same feature: they focus on producing evergreen content that will not be outdated.
What is evergreen content that won't go out of date? Refers to the content that can bring repeated value to your brand. No matter when and where you publish these contents, they can bring value to users who read them. It's like you can get a better return on investment in a Halloween costume, because you can wear this costume year after year, so this costume can bring you value every year.
Evergreen content that will not be outdated is usually in-depth content that has been deeply studied and created. In order to create eternal evergreen content, you may need to invest more time and resources. But the investment is worthwhile. Throughout the life cycle of content, outdated evergreen content can help you turn into thousands of sales leads, not just a few or dozens.
However, this does not mean that you can't publish hot articles on hot events at the right time as part of your content marketing strategy, especially when this hot event or problem is completely consistent with your brand and what you do. However, you can't completely rely on one-off content to build your content marketing strategy. Such a content marketing strategy is like using only kindling, and it can be ignited without fuel. Of course, you can use only one kindling to make a fire, but you must constantly add fuel to it to keep the fire from going out, and those high-quality, solid, deep and eternal evergreen contents are wood fuels that can make the fire burn longer and more luxuriantly.
(4) Successful content marketing is continuous and rhythmic.
Like social media marketing, one of the biggest problems faced by people who have just started to do content marketing is: how long is it appropriate to publish a piece of content? People who ask this question usually want a clear and direct answer. But the fact is: there is no clear hard and fast rule about how long an article should be published. It all depends on your own brand. For some companies, publishing content once a month is enough. If you publish more frequently, it will be too much, and you need to hire an extra person to manage the content. Considering the double expenditure of new personnel, the return on investment is not double.
In fact, what is more important than the frequency of publishing is the persistence of content publishing. I found that the biggest mistake many people made in this respect was that the publishing frequency was very high at the beginning of content marketing, but it soon dropped, and then it didn't take long to give up completely. Do it once a month for six months, and then increase the frequency to do it twice a month for six months. You can only stick to it. This method is much better than doing it twice a week but only for six weeks. Find a rhythm that you and your team can keep, so that you can output content continuously. In this way, your target audience will know when they will see your content again, so you don't need to rebuild your audience every time you send a new article.
Many companies that have just started content marketing want to run before they learn to walk. Many people will think, "Well, according to our content marketing strategy, we need to build a blog, do social media and create an email list at the same time, all at the same time. Let's get to work! " This is a typical example of trying to run before learning to walk. Before doing content marketing, the first thing you need to think about is to make a content marketing plan that you can implement 100%. Usually 1-2 posts per week.
Once you can see the measurable traffic, you should find out whether it comes from official website or other places. If they come from other places, where on earth are they from? This is the first question you need to find out. Secondly, you need to start collecting visitors' email addresses in an appropriate way. Even if you only have 10 subscribers' email addresses, the email address list is still the best choice for you to build a good feedback loop in the early stage. You can ask visitors who have visited the website before to visit your website again by email. You can spend 20-25 minutes making a draft email content and sending it to users, which can provide you with a lot of useful data.
In fact, in most cases, email is more valuable than social media. I have seen many companies and brands invest a lot of resources and energy in the content marketing of social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and publish them several times a day. However, the most effective way to get target users to take action is to send marketing content directly to their mailboxes. Because email is something more personal. Even if you have no idea who will open the marketing email, it doesn't matter, because there are many people. If you often do email marketing, you will find that your email address list will get longer and longer, and the previous traffic will continue to bring you more traffic.
Marketing content can only be effective if the content publishing frequency, content style and style tone are consistent.
In order to acquire users through content marketing, it is very important to conduct marketing with a regular and reasonable rhythm. This is the same reason that you need to be consistent and consistent in a relationship. You must remind users regularly that you are there, that you care about their needs, and that you can create value for them. If you can do this, then after a period of time, people will begin to expect to hear and see news about you, and they will feel as if they know you.
For a company or a content marketing expert, time consistency allows you to better test many different variables, such as title, format, use of pictures and type of story. You can control the time variable to see if these other variables will have an impact on the marketing effect. For example, you still publish the content at the same time every day as before, but change the original short article into a long article, and all other variables remain unchanged, to see if the length of the article will have an impact on the marketing effect.
When testing the influence of other variables on marketing effect, it is also important to use a tone similar to the previous one. Once you find the content tone that suits you, you must stick to it. If your users can't recognize you by their familiar tone, how can you expect them to establish a long-term relationship with you?
Once you feel that you have found a marketing content style that can resonate with customers and win their trust, you should write down the specific characteristics of this style in words as a guide for writing marketing copy in the future, and match as many real cases as possible. Then anyone who writes marketing content for you in the future can follow this guide to write marketing content.
(5) Successful content marketing needs promotion.
If a tree falls in the forest, will it make a sound? I won't. By the same token, if you just publish your marketing articles on your blog, and let these contents be quickly forgotten and submerged in obscurity, your content will not be able to make a sound.
Promoting your content is a very important step. I found that many people's biggest mistake is not to promote their own marketing content, and the wine is not afraid of the alley. You try to create some good content, and then you wait for the world to respond, but no one notices your content. It's like you had a party and no one came. This is a very painful thing.
There are two ways to avoid this sad situation. If your budget is sufficient, you can consider spending a little more money to buy a little traffic, and then learn how to retain readers on this basis. If money is tight, you can publish marketing on some free content publishing platforms, such as Medium and LinkedIn, and start your own content marketing engine on this basis.
How much time and energy should you spend on the promotion of marketing content? In the field of content marketing, there is a saying that if you spend every hour creating content, you should spend three hours promoting it. If your content can't be seen by the target audience, then the marketing content you have invested a lot of time, energy and money to create is worthless. So try to promote your marketing content.
So how do you promote your content? At first, paid social media advertising was a good choice. Paying to promote tweets or Facebook posts is a good way to increase the exposure of content. In addition, it is also a very good way to promote your content by talking with those partners and opinion leaders in your industry, if they are willing to publish your content on their platforms. Thoroughly sort out all the tools and channels you can use now, and dig deep into some influential Weibo V you may know. At this time, try to ask them to help forward the content on your Weibo. Send an email to your investors and ask them to help forward and share your content. Don't be shy when you need it, or be embarrassed to ask them for help.
As long as you can maximize the value of every penny you spend and iteratively optimize your marketing methods according to what you have learned in the process, it is no problem to use Facebook, LinkedIn, outreach and other channels to pay for readers. This requires you to make assumptions about readers' reading preferences quickly, so that you can verify your assumptions every day and quickly abandon the wrong assumptions.
In the early stage of content marketing, cooperation with some media and blogs in the market is a very effective way to get readers. You wrote a good article and voted for some media with good traffic (preferably similar to your brand). You can submit a series of articles in the form of columns by the founder or CEO of the company in the media, or you can just publish a single article. You can write an industry analysis article on the hottest topic at present and send it to a certain media. In order to avoid the strong advertising nature of the article, you should not introduce your company or product too much in the article.
To know whether a media will agree to publish your manuscript, you need to do a realistic investigation first. If you want to publish your articles in The New York Times, Fortune, Techcrunch, Venturebeat or 36Kr, you may be disappointed in many cases, because these media are very professional and have special requirements on the quality and content direction of articles. If you start with second-and third-tier websites that can match your company's business, your contribution hit rate will be much higher, and you can get more core users, so that your content marketing engine can be started. If you do a good job in this area at first, then you can aim your contribution at those websites with heavy traffic.
When combing the potential media websites that can contribute, you need to do some preparatory work. First, make an Excel spreadsheet or whatever you think is useful. Find those popular articles that are similar to your upcoming manuscript in various potential submission websites and arrange them in the table. In this way, when you contribute to the website editor by email, you can directly say in the email, "Hello, I found that two articles on your website with the theme of Z, X and Y are very popular with readers. I just wrote an article, which is similar to X/Y articles, and I believe it is also an article that readers like to read very much, so I want to contribute and publish it on your website ... ". When you say this in the email, the editor of the other party knows that you have done research and preparation before submitting the manuscript, and that you have considered the interests of the other party in your submission. This can greatly improve the possibility of successful submission.
In addition to the ways mentioned above, you can also publish articles on websites that can be published directly for free, such as Medium and LinkedIn. The purpose of publishing articles on websites other than your own website is to improve readers' awareness of the brand, and at the same time help you bring a certain amount of traffic, make you everywhere, and make potential customers feel that they can often meet you everywhere, thus leaving a deeper impression on them. In this way, a certain number of customers will be moved.
(6) Successful content marketing is an investment, and it will take some time to see the return.
In content marketing, not promoting content is one of the biggest mistakes made by many companies. Another mistake that many companies often make is to give up the content marketing strategy before they have a chance to get a return on investment. Compared with other marketing strategies, content marketing is an investment, because it takes some time to see the return on investment. Many companies' brands can't see the return after doing content marketing for a few weeks, then they feel uneasy and then they will give up the content marketing strategy. The fact is that content marketing usually takes a long time to get a return, but when content marketing really brings a return, it usually brings a huge return.
Many times, in the initial stage of content marketing, a marketing article or a marketing video can only get dozens of hits. If you do it for a while and find that you have not achieved remarkable results, then you give up. Then you will never succeed in content marketing. To do content marketing, on the one hand, of course, you need to measure the marketing effect and get returns, but on the other hand, content marketing needs continuous investment, and you can't see huge returns overnight.
If you are the first content marketing specialist in your company, you should first set a reasonable expectation. Getting traffic through content marketing is a long and difficult process. If the content marketing is successful, it will bring very rich returns to the company and itself, but many people are too hasty and impatient.
Company founders and CEOs always want content marketing to be immediate. However, content marketing experts should relax. You know, bosses will recruit themselves because they know little about content marketing knowledge and skills. If the content marketing specialists in the company are really enterprising and are really trying to promote the growth of the company, then they have certain freedom and rights to set their own more sensible content marketing milestones. They should be able to use the least resources to promote content marketing. In a vacuum environment, content marketing cannot be successful.
Set a goal for the amount of marketing content that needs to be created. At the same time, a benchmark should be set for the active participation of content. For example, how many percentage points will repeat customers of blogs increase? If you don't reach your goal, you should adjust what you are doing and try again. This is a process, not perfection.
At present, most of the work done in content marketing has failed, because the content used for marketing is too poor, and there is no clear indicator to measure whether the content marketing work has achieved results. Many brand companies have done content marketing for a period of time, and found that it has no effect, so they completely gave up any form of content marketing.
Don't question the effectiveness of any content marketer's work before he has done it for less than six months. A three-month probation period won't work here. You should remember that you rely on others to do content marketing, so you must keep experimenting and accumulating to see which method works. After six months, you need to show your achievements in content marketing. If you still can't do it after six months, it's natural for the boss to question you.
(7) Successful content marketing is measurable.
For those who pay too much attention to indicators, don't worry. Although it is very difficult to measure the effect of content marketing, there are still some indicators that you can track and you should track. For example, if your main goal is to promote growth, then the independent visitor index must not be ignored. In addition, the user participation rate is also crucial.
If we only track and evaluate the click-through rate and exposure of articles, we will lose a lot of other useful data in vain.
Engagement is a combination of several other indicators, including page stay time, readers' scrolling behavior (whether readers scroll the article page to the end of the page or near the low end of the page) and repeated readers (whether readers will return to the website to read more content in the future? ), the power of recommendation (can an article prompt readers to click on another article or choose email subscription? )。 You need to rank articles according to their participation, and put those articles with the highest participation at the top of the website.
Digging into these data carefully, we can find out which articles are most popular with readers and are most helpful to acquire readers and users. In this way, you can invest more money in such articles or produce more similar articles, so that the effect of your content marketing will be better and better. Similarly, if you find that some articles are not read at all, then you should decisively stop producing such content.
Besides, you cannot underestimate the importance of collecting valuable feedback from readers. You need to follow these feedbacks carefully. In the early stage of content marketing, it will be very exciting if the other party says that they like your content very much in the process of communicating with potential customers.
(8) Maximize the effect of content marketing through design. Only when the design is beautiful and pleasing to the eye will readers take it seriously.
Contributing on other media and blog platforms will certainly have certain effects, but if you want your content to have the greatest effect, you still need your own content platform, so that readers can directly interact with your brand in the process of reading your content. As for whether to be an official blog, website or WeChat public platform, it's up to you.
No matter what content platform you decide to make, you need to design it beautifully. Of course, practicality is more important anyway. The design optimization of your content platform (such as website) will have a very important impact on the effect of marketing content. Good design is very helpful to improve the reading and sharing times of articles. I found that some websites are designed like this: after reading an article, continue to scroll down, and you will scroll directly to the next article without any other clicks, and the page can scroll down endlessly. Such a website design will encourage readers to read more articles on the website. Similarly, the social sharing button on the website scrolls with the page, and more readers will click the sharing button to share. If you want to build your own content website platform, Wordpress is a good tool choice, and its various plug-ins and functions should meet the various functional requirements of your website.
You can create a list of skills that can be used to maximize the effect of reading and sharing articles. In addition, the design of other aspects of the website should be as simple and clean as possible. In the process of website design, it is easy for people to fall into their own thinking, regardless of the readers' real feelings. Do you want users to read it? To share? Subscribe? To buy? If so, then you should make sure to guide users to take appropriate actions according to different content. Step by step, don't rush it. If you want to get too much from readers, or want to show readers too much content at once, it will often backfire.
At the same time, design is also the best weapon to produce content that can fully represent itself, and it will not appear exaggerated. Many content websites are very successful in design. Their content websites are designed to make people look independent of the brand, but at the same time they can link to the product pages in a random way. This has several unique advantages: first, it can avoid the suspicion of advertising when readers read your content, and read it purely as an interesting story; Secondly, you can show the outside world that you attach great importance to producing high-quality content; Third, encourage readers to regard you as a platform similar to other media they appreciate and add you to their RSS readers. In this way, you can make readers have a subtle psychological change.
This sounds very good, but we should pay attention to the discretion and temperature, and we should not go too far. You need to make the design of the content website set off your core brand, but you can't just copy it. For example, use the same tone, visual effect and font as the brand in website design. You need to make readers subconsciously think of your main products while reading the article. Don't use your Logo too much to ensure that users can easily navigate between content and websites. If readers believe that you have become a valuable source of content, and if they finally feel that you are selling products to them, then you have destroyed their trust. Once trust is destroyed, it is difficult to restore it.