How effective is your content marketing strategy? If you’re among the majority of brands, your content marketing efforts aren’t as effective as you’d like. Despite feeling at least somewhat ineffective, most companies are planning to create more content year over year. According to CMI, the top priority for 72% of marketers is to produce more engaging content.
If producing more engaging content is your priority, do you have a plan to improve content engagement in the future? If you don’t, or even if you do, we’ve identified five questions to ask and resolve before you start writing to ensure you’re producing content your audiences will love.
What determines the style, tone, and voice for
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If your brand doesn’t have a style guide that includes tone and voice, you may have an audience that’s confused and content that only engages some of the time. Not having a guide for style, tone, and voice is particularly problematic for brands that have teams of content creators that span a variety of mediums and distribution methods. If you’ve attracted someone to your brand on Twitter, that person shouldn’t get to your website and wonder where the brand they engaged with has gone.
Although there are some differences in the way you deliver content on various channels and on your website, there shouldn’t be any confusion about the personality of your brand. Determining a consistent voice and tone over all your communications will help to synthesize your messaging and strengthen your brand by creating messaging that resonates with audiences wherever they find you.
what-is-your-content-style
Having a documented style guide makes transitions and changes in staff or the additional of a freelance writer or outside agency easier and less time consuming. You may also find that giving content creators a style guide reduces the need for multiple editing and revisions.
Here are some things to include in your style guide:
Voice – what is your brand’s personality
Playful and fun
Humorous and entertaining
Serious and authoritative
Helpful and instructive
Inspiring and creative
Straight forward
Determine your voice based on your audience preferences and how your brand fits into the industry ecosystem. Your voice may be a combination of things that go well together. For example, you may want to be helpful and instructive while maintaining a sense of humor where appropriate. Determine your voice based on audience research to make sure your tone resonates with your target audience.
Tone – what is your brand’s attitude toward the
The types of words you use, your point of view, and the level of formality in your writing determine tone. Some things to include in your tone guide include:
Formal or informal syntax
Relationship to your audience
Example: “We’re in this together” or “We understand your problem”
Casual or formal tone
Choosing a tone can be critical to your acceptance by your audience. For instance, if you’re in the financial markets, you may not want to take an ominous tone when discussing retirement options.
Style – your brand’s preferences for how to abbreviate, capitalize, use contractions, vocabulary preferences, etc. If you haven’t determined any preferences of your own, you can always refer to the AP Style guide as a place to start.
Instead of creating your style guide in a vacuum, collect data on your target audiences and let their preferences help you determine yours. Use search data to find out whom your audiences are, where they’re looking for information, what words they’re using when they do look, and who else they’re finding to help solve their problems.
How do you determine future content topics
If inspiration for content creation is coming from every person in the organization who gives you input on what content they think you should be creating, you might want to step back and think about why you’re creating content and who you’re creating it for.
Although sales and support teams are good sources to discover the questions customers and prospects are asking, you should also be looking outside your organization to find your audiences and identify their needs.
A good place to start is with your own content and keywords. Identify the keywords you’re already tracking that are growing in popularity and match the ones that are improving in rank to existing content. You may find that the content that’s driving traffic to your site is older, outdated content that you want to refresh. You may also find that there is room to create new content to expand your content offerings for those topics and keywords.
If you’re getting a lot of interest from a particular topic and you only have a blog post written about it, try creating other types of content such as videos or slide shares. You may even decide that the topic is worth spending a little extra time to create a larger eBook or white paper.
Besides the keywords you’re already tracking, there may be associated keywords your audie
Why are we still differentiating lead generation and demand
Isn’t the goal of any marketing effort to generate awareness, create loyal audiences who become sales leads, and then lead those audiences to conversion? While there may be some technical differences between lead generation efforts and demand generation efforts, the end result should be an increased awareness of your brand and more qualified leads about the challenges and prospects and conversions for your sales team. After all, a lead generation goal of gathering more email addresses and a demand generation goal of getting more people to visit your website and consume your content – ultimately have the same bottom line goal, or at least they should.
As content marketing becomes an integral part of every marketing program, it’s time to start considering its usefulness beyond the awareness phase and create a customer-centric journey based on understanding your potential customers and current customers and their needs.
User segmentation and content hubs to fill the funnel
Since its inception, content marketing has been appealing to audiences who don’t respond to push messaging, who don’t want to be interrupted, and who don’t want to be cold called. Today’s customers are looking for solutions to the problems and needs they’ve self-identified. As they seek out solutions, they educate themselves all along the way until they are as knowledgeable as the sales person. By the time they’ve contacted your sales rep, a majority of prospects have enough information to give them leverage and confidence about the choice that they want to make from a product perspective.
To reach these audiences, content marketers must map the customer’s path to purchase and provide content to answer the questions they have all along the way. Using an enterprise SEO and content marketing platform, marketers can discover what audiences are doing, how they’re interacting with our brand on social and on our site, what content they’re consuming and in what order they consume it.
Creating a customer-centric program
depends on knowing your audiences and focusing on the needs of individual users. Instead of just creating a bunch of content and expecting that to be a successful strategy, we need to understand the needs of our individual customers and respond to those needs by providing the content they need in the way they want to consume it.
Users aren’t coming to your website to read a blog or consume a white paper or watch a video, they’re coming to your site to get the answers they need. So, why not create hubs of content based on the solutions your users are looking for. Provide blogs, videos, slide shares, ebooks, webinars, and white papers grouped together by the solution or audience usa b2b list type they address. Fill your content hubs with content focused on the buyer’s journey and provide specific pieces of content to address everything from awareness and education through lead generation, nurturing, final consideration, retention and then, hopefully, evangelism and referral.
How is content marketing not just top of the funnel?
In its maturity, content marketing has evolved from a tactic to increase awareness and education about your brand and your industry to a strategy that’s intertwined in all marketing efforts. In fact, I would go so far as to say that everything marketing produces is content including:
Emails
Advertisements
Videos
White papers
Website landing pages
Forms
FAQs
Customer success resources
Blogs
Slide decks
Speaking presentations
Everything from traditional marketing offerings, such as email sends to new content assets, such as video, are content and everything is measurable. From that perspective, you can start to look at content marketing as both a lead gen and a demand gen strategy that touches every aspect of the customer journey.
Given the level of noise and the competition for your content in search results, maintaining the customer-centric approach and getting noticed will require brands to differentiate and offer something that’s unique. One way to do that is to stop relegating certain types of content to specific places in the traditional sales funnel. Use search data to. Know your audiences, the. Questions they’re asking and how they like to consume their content. Then, be different and offer something unique to your audiences that bring value.
Use the data you collect to learn:
Are audiences taking the time to comment?
What do comments tell you about where they are in the journey?
What content will help them take the next steps?
Use the insights from one channel to inform content creation on. Other channels or the creation of different types of content. If a topic is trending on social media, use those insights to create a video that lives on your website, post a. Presentation on SlideShare, or write a blog.
Content that works in every phase of the customer journey A goo