3 Tips for Flexing Your Content Marketing Muscles

First things first, what exactly is content marketing? Content marketing involves creating relevant and valuable content to attract and convert a narrowly defined audience. Businesses of all sizes servicing a wide range of industries are now leveraging content marketing to grow their businesses and ultimately, impact their bottom line.

Research on the Front-End

Clearly defining your strategic business objectives and target client are two key steps to developing an effective content strategy plan. Further along in the process you’ll want to take time to develop your buyer personas, a representation of your dream client created from information gleaned from you research and development efforts. Once you’ve established your goals and target customers, it’s time to boil down your offerings. How are you uniquely positioned to help address the challenges your clients face? Content marketing is all about narrowing your focus. Defining your brand and specific offerings is the goal here, not offering a broad range of general services.

Establish Thought Leadership

The goal behind developing thought leadership is to deliver value to prospective client as they look for answers to their most burning questions. Providing answers to these questions helps solve their problems while establishing you as a thought leader in the field. To go a step further, establishing branded promotional channels such as a blog can be an effective method to growing your reach. If your clients are especially active on social media platforms, growing a presence in this space may prove fruitful as well. Not quite ready to take the plunge? Publishing a guest blog on a respected industry-related blog can help get your feet wet.

Consistency is Key

We hate to break it to you but an effective content marketing strategy requires on-going work! This isn’t a to-do list item you tackle once and scratch off the list; it requires consistent testing and attention. Do you have someone at your company solely dedicated to advancing your content marketing goals? Develop a promotional plan that clearly outlines who will generate content, how you will promote it and who will manage deliverables.

An effective content marketing strategy isn’t just about throwing content at a wall and seeing what sticks. It is a strategic, data-driven strategy that can help businesses reach their long-term goals. Whether you’re just kicking off your content marketing initiatives or you’re a content marketing maven, the team at Branding Plus can help refine your strategy to optimize your efforts.