With so many similar brands jostling for space, it becomes necessary to create a unique brand experience or your target market. But are marketers even understanding their audience, leave alone creating the ideal content for them! There are several ways to engage your audience, but all of them revolves around content. It is essential to act as a thought leader and ensure that your brand gels well with the target market. It is crucial to have a consultant to help you strategise the content to respond to your target market's requests.
Studies show that around 96% of brand managers state that content has helped them build credibility with their audience. You would need to understand more about what your prospects search on the internet. It will help you create targeted content and help you to personalise your messages for the audience. Content can also help to reach out to a larger audience, albeit at a lower cost. It will also help to improve your RoI while also increasing your pipeline.
Do proper research
Content managers must do proper research before starting to create their content marketing plan. They must understand the target market's search patterns to understand the content they must include in their plan. They can use free software like Google Keyword Planner, or Google Tends to understand their audience. Another option is to have a sneak peek into what your competitors are writing. You can either visit their blogs manually or utilise specialised software to help you. Your competition is the ideal starting point to know what to write. Also, visit their social media channels to find out what content they are posting.
Formalise a content plan
Understandably, an annual content is not feasible. It is better to create a plan for a shorter period. A quarterly plan can be your starting point. Your plan must be detailed enough with the topic titles and an abstract of what it will cover. You must also have the personas of the target audience.
The keywords you will cover in the article and the channels where it will be posted must be covered too. You must have the frequency of the type of content in place as well. The plan must also have the channels where the piece of content will be posted. A detailed plan will help content writers to create focused content. It will also help you to finalise the KPIs that you can use to tweak the plan too.
Create engaging content
The abstract or outlines should be guiding enough to allow your writers to create engaging content. It is essential to think like your customer when creating the content. It should address the queries that the audience has in mind. It is equally necessary to understand the stage the visitor is in the buyer's journey. As the buyer's journey entails several steps, the content must cater to various stages too.
Content managers must understand that the competition may also be writing content on similar topics. It is necessary to have a distinctive tone and tenor in the content. It should be witty enough, and facts and figures can also help the audience understand the topic better and relate more with your brand.
Create different types of content
It is necessary to understand that specific people are at different stages in the buyer's journey. Moreover, various social media channels also require you to create different types of content. Only creating blogs and articles will not do. There must be a right mix of images and infographics too. It is because humans can relate more with pictures, and it helps to recollect information better.
Videos must also form an essential part of your content strategy. It can help you to connect with your audience. Having different types of video content can benefit the target market to understand more about your portfolio of products and services. It is necessary to formulate a proper storyboard that will form the basis of your videos. You can post them on specific channels like YouTube, Vimeo, etc. You can also post videos on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc., you must create shorter videos for these channels.
Take the help of influencers
Influencers are a new introduction to the content strategies of most brands. They are a set of people who can amplify your reach. Moreover, we prefer to listen to a third entity that listens from any brand ambassador. As a result, more brands are taking the services of influencers for propagating their brand messages. You must formulate a proper strategy before approaching an influencer. You must discuss the types of content and the messages to be sent out through the content with the influencer.
Conclusion
As brands try to stand apart from the competition, they increasingly moving towards creating engaging content. But how can you be a thought leader and enthuse interest in your audience? You must formulate a content strategy that will help reach out to the audience and cater to their changing behaviour. Moreover, as we are moving towards newer techniques to marketing brands, brand managers must keep themselves updated with the latest content techniques to carve a niche for their brands.
