There is rarely a dull moment in the life of a content marketer. These digital professionals can easily breeze through an eight-hour workday dabbling in everything from social media to video production and still feel like they barely put a dent in their workload.
The reason is simple. Content marketers are responsible for creating a wide variety of content and distributing it through popular destinations in order to attract and engage audience members, with the ultimate goal of driving conversions. To achieve that lofty goal, they must not only be versatile in their digital abilities, but must also have superior time management skills because both quality and quantity of content matters. This is why the most successful content marketers start their day early and efficiently.
Content marketers should begin their morning by consuming content along with their breakfast. By scouring through news feeds, social networks and news wires, these digital professionals can generate inspiration for the day by researching trending topics, keywords and images. Even though research is a necessary step of the day, it is imperative for content marketers to stay on topic and not get distracted.
Luckily, many available services can help content marketers stay focused. For example, content marketers can leverage tools like Monitter or Twitterfall to observe conversations pertaining to specific keywords or topics on Twitter. By using these resources, those responsible for content can stay current with what their audience is interested in and actively sharing, and then optimize their own content to better attract readers' attention. Moreover, content optimization tool InboundWriter can be used to conduct research on popular topics and obtain insights from readers, but we'll talk more about this handy service below.
After the morning brainstorming session is complete, content marketers should jump directly into producing as much quality content as possible. Remember, both the quality and quantity of content influences success. Just as dull articles won't generate much impact, a minimal amount of intriguing content also won't keep an audience satisfied. To assemble share-worthy articles, content marketers should follow writing best practices. The aforementioned InboundWriter helps writers do this by giving every article within the platform a score based on aspects like topic focus, title, images and most frequently mentioned terms. This helps writers identify areas for improvement to increase both visibility within the search results and higher engagement rates amongst audience members.
However, writers not leveraging a content optimization platform like InboundWriter can still create potentially viral content by keeping a few best practices top of mind. Best practices consist of regularly including keywords within articles, giving each article an intriguing title, and breaking up long text with images, headlines, bulleted lists or other types of visually focused content.
After reenergizing the mind with a hearty lunch, it is time for content marketers to put their multimedia skills to the test. After all, the job of a content marketer is to create and promote a variety of content in order to reach as many people as possible, which can include anything from blog posts and videos to infographics, webinars and podcasts.
The best ways to produce multimedia content quickly are to pair current articles with something visual like an infographic or recycle the content from previous popular blog posts. For example, a content marketer for a pet store could recycle a post about "Training Tips for Puppies" by creating a short video that repackages the training tips into a visual demonstration. Additionally, the same content marketer could pair an article about the "Winter Dangers for Pets" with an infographic, which can easily be assembled with tools like easel.ly, infogr. am or Piktochart.
After spending the last five hours focusing on content creation, distributing content is typically a welcomed late-afternoon task. However, the abundance of channels that content marketers need to distribute to, such as Facebook, Twitter and email (to name a few), can be a bit overwhelming. Luckily, there is an abundance of tools available to assist with this process.
For example, content marketers can use a social media management dashboard, such as HootSuite or Sprout Social, to distribute content into multiple social profiles simultaneously. These dashboards are especially valuable because users can schedule social messages in advance. However, it is important to remember that you must entice users, both on social sites and through email, to share your content. The best way to do that is with catchy subject lines or status updates that quickly get to the point. SavePublishing, for example, recently launched a bookmarklet tool that helps users find the "tweetable" sentences on any Web page, while Worldata offers SubjectLine.com to help marketers optimize their subject lines to get the best results in the inbox.
Many content marketers continue working after hours by networking with industry professionals and niche experts. While this might seem a bit overzealous, making industry connections can actually help ease a content marketer's workload. This is because industry experts occasionally contribute exclusive content to publishers, as well as help promote the content to their own audiences. Working after hours can certainly help lighten some daily content creation tasks; however, it is safe to say that the true work of a content marketer is rarely ever complete.