Poorly designed content marketing campaigns can make even the most ambitious projects crumble. Marketers get caught up in managing different tools and systems for multi-channel campaign delivery that they fail to recognize the most important part of this marketing mission: strategy.
Running a strategic content marketing campaign is essential for achieving business success. Period. It will change your fundamental approach to running a marketing campaign and help you stay focused on the ultimate goal.
So how can your marketing campaign benefit from a carefully designed strategic plan?
Here, we've researched and rounded up 10 tips on how to run your campaign more efficiently and without much fuss.
Content without a strategy is a dead-end street. By producing a huge amount of content without having a clear layout how to deliver your message, you are entering a vicious circle that usually ends up in a failure.
If you feel that you are lacking underlying strategy, try implementing a Curata Content marketing Pyramid. It is a framework devised to help you develop a predictable stream of successful content and coordinate all your marketing efforts.
Also, it is an excellent solution for any planned content operation, which, as you move higher in the pyramid, becomes more effective and sustainable.
Templates are a holy grail of any successful business as they can keep marketing assets consistent across campaigns and even departments. They are patterns that help you develop a detailed content marketing plan, which enhances your company's productivity and reduces overall stress.
There is a wide range of templates you can create but, according to Content Marketing Institute, there are a few essential ones that every marketer should use:
Companies that don't devote too much time on market segmentation or who take it for granted could be missing out on simple ways to boost key performance indicators.
Segmentation includes partitioning a desirable market into groups of customers and prospects, which have the same value and exhibit similar purchase behavior. The market can be segmented according to the following criteria:
The segmentation can help you increase profits without feeling pressured by the everyday competition on the market since you are marketing to smaller, more relevant groups.
For example, if you are facing a large consumer market that is driving high costs per lead, a market segmentation based on vertical industries and product offerings (where each page has unique content targeted to the ideal customer profile) can significantly decrease costs.
Only 12 percent of brands reply to customers on social media, which means companies are failing to capitalize on the inbound power that social networks offer.
It's a common misconception that companies need to post their content anywhere and everywhere. Instead, you should spend more time evaluating each social channel you are planning to use and opt for a few adequate ones and spend more time listening than talking. By hearing how consumers are talking about your brand and what they are sharing on your behalf, you can start to form a plan based on what is important to your end-users.
Today's market offers a huge selection of media channels. Sometimes, the message you are trying to convey is too complex or it needs to be in action in order to produce desirable effects.
According to some experts, we are 90 percent visual beings. Therefore, a video is an excellent way of explaining your ideas in great detail, in a fun, enjoyable form. Studies over the years have also shown that videos can increase purchase intent by a significant percent.
One of the top prerequisites for designing a meticulous content marketing campaign is your toolbox that will help you go through each step.
Strive to treat every single activity as a separate campaign and choose a user-friendly tool that will bring the processes to a whole new level and make them more user-friendly. For example, if you have a bundle of interesting ideas and a number of critical but tedious tasks to handle, the best possible solution is to get yourself a project management tool.
Also, if you want to track your campaign's performance, tools like Google Analytics or Kissmetrics can help, and with Moz, you can make sure your landing pages are search-friendly.
Whichever tools you decide to use, they will undoubtedly elevate your business and make your campaign run smoothly.
While the Internet is the endless resource of every imaginable information, it still can be a time eater when searching for sensitive research-based data.
Open the door to greater efficiency by creating your central library. That would be a place where your team members will be able to access any possible content or training materials. This should serve as a kind of a knowledge hub which will help your team stay attune with the latest trends and keep them in the loop.
Most people think that all types of meetups and seminars are a massive time-suck. They distract people from their work and, as a result, monopolize mental resources.
Webinars came in handy when you need to get some message across to your present and potential clients but you are in a lack of resources and time to do it.
According to Hubspot CMO Mike Volpe, the webinar in which they gave guidelines how to use Twitter in marketing industry which was launched in 2008 was a huge success. It helped Hubspot build social channels and the number of registrations skyrocketed to 3,000.
The customer is king. When creating marketing strategy, the most successful companies place their customers and customers' experiences as their top priority.
If you want to develop a successful strategy, your main concern should be a target customer. Instead of organizing your team around media channels, you need to make them realize how important it is to focus on a customer lifecycle as a whole and then move on to campaign segmentation, and finally, channels.
This will prevent any inconsistencies and make your clients want to continue collaboration on future projects.
Most companies, especially startups, who are mainly focused on delivering results, do not have a documented content strategy.
However, what many of them seem to forget is that they content marketing strategy is not driven by content, but by the goal they want to achieve.
You are already preoccupied with creating appropriate content, monitoring your channels and delegating tasks to your team. .
What you need is a documented content strategy, a playbook that specifically outlines customer profiles, content topics and marketing channels. It will make the onboarding process less painful and easier to chew.
Over the last few years, content marketing has become instrumental for any brand strategy. Long are the days when only traditional marketing strategy made waves in the world of consumerism. Content marketing has an immense impact on potential customers and those who decide to ignore it will tremendously fall behind. That's why having successful content marketing management is imperative.
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