Effective Content Marketing Strategies

5 ingredients for effective content marketing The big question in content marketing circles has always been …

“Which are the aspects that outperform the other – quality or quantity?”

An intelligent combination of the above two metrics with more emphasis on the effective delivery of branded content across strategic channels can be the answer to this question.

A branded content is the custom content providing useful information to customers in an engaging manner. It encourages customers to revisit the company’s websites, blogs, social media pages and other online platforms. These frequent visits will inculcate awareness of the benefits and value additions of the company’s products and services to its customers. The individualized content not only attracts the customers to buy products, but also helps to establish better relationships by advocating the brand’s customer-centric approach to deliver beneficial services to customers. The wise choice of content delivery channels, which is based on the target users will ensure better reach of content and its efficiency in escalating conversion rates.

Hence the success of content marketing lies in customizing the content and delivery platforms suitable for the target audience. In order to reduce time and effort involved in this process, content customization can be standardized with reusable workflow templates optimized for the organizational goals.

The effectiveness of a content marketing program is measured by the strategic planning and streamlining of the processes involved in content creation.

Listed below are the five key ingredients of a winning content marketing campaign: Developing a Content Strategy The task of creating a good content strategy typically includes thorough brainstorming of target audience, the nature of content that may be more useful to them, the appropriate tone and style of content presentation and the social media, websites, blogs and search engines commonly used by the target users. A content framework well-matching the above requirement needs to be designed and documented with the detailed specification of content type and style, distribution tactics and criteria for search engine optimization. The content development life cycle needs to be driven by this strategy.

Crafting a workflow A process flow needs to be defined with the roles and responsibilities including creation, optimization, review, approval and distribution of content. The workflow needs to include the communication of content strategy and the expected deadlines for the various activities with a clear mention of any interdependencies like implementation of suggestions and feedback after review, including keywords as per optimization requirements and presenting the content in various formats according to the technical requirements of the selected distribution channel and completion of all these activities with the final approval before the proposed campaign launch etc.

A well-crafted workflow clarifies the expectations and minimizes delays due to gaps in communication.

Delegation of content board A content board simplifies the process of assigning responsibilities to people. It is formed by delegating appropriate people to the roles defined in the workflow. The function of the board is to enhance communication and coordination between the various stakeholders and ensures smooth delivery of content. Another benefit of forming a content board is to maintain transparency across various stages of content development life cycle.

The members of content board can be selected prudently to include the specialists appropriate to the subject of the content. The board needs to incorporate a wide representation of people from different teams and different cadres. This will justify the target of creating workflow templates reflecting organization-wide objectives. One of the best practices is to assign a content owner to hold the primary accountability of ensuring efficient and timely completion of workflows.

Managing the workflow The purpose of workflow creation is to track the progress of content creation process and its validity against the planned strategy. The insight obtained can be used to verify how the formulated procedures and specified deadlines are practically adoptable. It plays an important role in redefining and improving the workflows before declaring them as standards.

One way of ensuring easy implementation of workflows is by educating the board members with the positive effects of workflows in creating content templates and emphasizing the significance of their contribution towards organizational success.

Conversion of workflows to templates The performances of the proposed strategy and process iterations of creating the campaign content need to be carefully examined and the results need to be analyzed. The lessons learned out of this observation can be used to enhance the content framework and the corresponding workflows.

The time and effort used to create the content can be made reusable by converting the content framework and workflows into templates for the relevant content category. Similarly a template can be generated for each category of content to enable periodical publishing of branded content in a quick and cost-effective manner.

The smart approach in planning the content and the organized manner of implementing the same are crucial in transforming content marketing endeavours into chapters of success stories.

Team Mango Media +91 - 44 - 24466454 / 55 Mail: projects@themangomedia.com