Maximizing Content Marketing Effectiveness

Since its emergence a few years ago, content marketing has become a fundamental aspect of every digital marketing campaign. No matter if you own a startup or a global enterprise, this field of marketing allows you to boost customer conversion rates, generate more sales and, most importantly, drive traffic to your website. Given all this, it’s not surprising that 93% of marketers have employed or are planning to employ at least some of the content marketing strategies. However, you need to keep in mind that the content marketing landscape is constantly changing. Here’s what you need to do in order to keep the pace with these changes.

Target your Audience to Deliver Custom Content

Today, customer experience is the key to your success. This simply means that, in order to stand out from your competitors, you need to provide your target demographics with contextualized content. A comprehensive survey by CMI backs this statement, showing that 61% of consumers feel better about a company that delivers custom content and are more likely to make a purchase. Of course, in order to cater to a specific social group, you analyze your target market and determine who your average and your current customers are, how they found out about your company, what their expectations are and why they need your product or service. Only this way will you be able to create a highly customized content and deliver it to your audience through the channels they appreciate the most.

Deliver Interactive Content

If you want to deliver content that is innovative, reliable and relevant, you need to keep an eye out for the industry trends. For example, one of the greatest challenges marketers face today is creating and providing content that engages. Apart from good old articles, your paramount should be creating highly interactive content that gets your readers to actively participate.

• Infographics. Human mind processes images almost 60.000 times faster than text. In addition to this fact, numerous studies point out that readers are more likely to look at the information-carrying images than read the text that accompanies them. Put simply, infographics enable you to take complex data and present them in a format that is easier to share and memorize.  
• Video marketing. Putting together text, image and sound, videos are certainly one of the most assertive methods you could use to tell a story about your brand.  Additionally, as the number of sophisticated and yet affordable video-making tools has rapidly grown, small businesses are now given the opportunity to implement video marketing with their content marketing strategy on a tight budget.
• Interactive micro-content. Micro-content, such as memes, GIFs, micro-videos and quote graphics are best explained as short-form posts that are most commonly used and shared on social networks. As it is highly clickable, sharable and, after all, amusing, micro-content is an effective way to grab your customers’ attention and engage both their mind and eye. Giphy, MemeGenerator, Burst and Canva are just some examples of numerous free content creation tools you can use to improve customer engagement.

Distribute your Content via Social Networks

Once content is created, it needs to be easily accessible to your target audience. As the majority of your customers are already online, you need to focus on sharing it via social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest or Snapchat. Only this way will you be able to build strong relationships with your customers, facilitate communication with them and, most importantly, build an extensive online community. Additionally, in order to synchronize your social networks and share your content regularly, you should use social media productivity tools like Buffer, Tagboard, IFTTT, Quill Engage, HootSuite and Meshfire.

Implement Influencer Marketing

In this oversaturated entrepreneurial community, people choose to put their trust in brands they recognize. For the majority of small businesses that are still finding their place in the market, this is one of the major challenges. That’s exactly when influencer marketing jumps in. The advantages of implementing this fast-growing marketing branch are countless. Apart from contributing to your content’s popularity, influencers also help you boost your reach and address the right people, in the right way.

But, getting influencers to participate is harder than you think. According to some recent reports, about 75% of marketers find it difficult to engage the influencers in their niche. In order to do this properly, you need to develop an extensive strategy, which includes doing a research, setting goals, as well as building a pool of influencers, creating personalized outreach and negotiating prices.

Conclusions

Regardless of your company’s stage of growth, a strong content marketing campaign is a must. However, building it is just a half the job done. The other half lies in constantly improving its effectiveness. By employing these strategies, you will manage to attract more customers, generate more revenue, personalize your content marketing campaign and, above all, stay competitive.