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Five Principles of Content Marketing
We caught up with Kirstie Smith at The Marketing Meetup. As the Founder of Social Circle, she has practical experience of successful Content Marketing. Here are my key impressions from her talk.
Before pumping yet more content into the world, take the time to understand your own values first. Doing so will enable you to position yourself clearly to potential customers.
“Why are you here?
What do you want to achieve?”
There are many resources to help with this. ‘Start With Why’ by Simon Sinek is a popular choice, but the important thing is to choose a framework that works for your company.
Move beyond segmentation. It’s easy to lazily target generalised demographics. This may yield some results, but a vague understanding of your audience will lead to a vague marketing message.
“Who are you creating content for and how will they benefit?”
Buyer personas should be more than a list of attributes dreamed up by your marketing department. They should be based on actual market research. Make good use of surveys, focus groups, Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, UberSuggest or any other tool that works for you. This allows you to combine relevant data with your intuition for better results.
Great stories are built around strong themes. Great content is no different. Develop a unified strategy using key themes that run throughout your content.
“What specific, unique and valuable ideas will you build your content around?”
Your themes should be at the intersection of ‘Things You Have Permission to Talk About’ and ‘Things Your Audience Needs to Hear’. Thankfully, you should have discovered these things as part of researching your Purpose/Goals and Audience.
Structure the rollout of your campaigns with a content calendar. Drawing up a plan enables you to visually check that you are using a variety of formats to reach your audience. These include email, blogs, infographics, ebooks, webinars and, of course, video.
“How will you structure and manage your processes to activate your content plan?”
Remember to repurpose, reuse and reformat your content. You might commission an in-depth video case study for your website. A shorter edit can be used on social media. The transcript of could become the basis of a blog. The audio can be used to make a podcast. Rather than constantly reinventing the wheel, maximise the impact of the content you create.
It’s never been easier to measure your results. However, access to so much data can sometimes make it harder to gauge true progress. It’s easy to get hung up on vanity metrics that don’t lead to any increase in revenue. Establish your key objectives and focus only on the metrics that relate to them.
“Find meaning in the maths and establish a ‘need to know’ hierarchy”
Generating reports can be done at the touch of a button. This means that care has to be taken with how data is presented - and to whom. While your Data Analyst might want to drill down into minor changes in your conversion rate, your Chief Executive just wants to know if you’re going to hit the quarterly sales target.
Content Marketing is a hugely cost-effective method of customer acquisition.
Explore our site to learn more about promoting your company with video content.
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