If you’re going to have success with content marketing, you’ve got to be in it for the long haul. That’s a sentence no new prospect likes to hear, but we’d be lying if we said that it’s possible to build a reputation as a brand that produces dynamite content within a few weeks.
If businesses go into content marketing with the wrong mindset, likelihood is they would decide pretty quickly that it’s not for them, before all the benefits of adopting have had a chance to come to fruition.
Even if you do dedicate the appropriate amount of time and resources to your content efforts, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee success, which is why so many businesses are outsourcing to content specialists.
Here at M2 Bespoke, we deploy certain methods, tricks and practices that we believe will provide our clients with every possible chance of achieving content marketing triumph, which don’t look too dissimilar from those offered up by the Content Marketing Institute:
1. Place an emphasis on quality
It was once the case that if you were producing lots of content, you’d have a better chance of rising to the top of the rankings, but search engines soon realised that this was of little benefit to web users craving the best content the internet has to offer.
With that, Google and the like have tweaked their algorithms so that brands are rewarded for the quality of their content, rather than the quantity they are churning out.
In order to facilitate high-quality content, you’ll need to hire high-quality writers who are capable of composing content which is: insightful, long form, visually appealing and readable.
2. Learn from the best
Don’t just sit back and admire the best brands’ content marketing strategies, set about emulating their success. Perhaps they have adopted a tone that would work well for your business, or they have displayed a particular storytelling technique that is super engaging – feed off their creativity.
There’s no shame in taking outside inspiration; some of the best ideas are a sum of an individual’s influences. You’re probably best off keeping distance with your direct competitors, however, as the last thing you want is a rival pointing the finger at your business.
For small businesses, the ability to produce content that is perceived as pushing the envelope could prove very beneficial indeed.
3. Play to your strengths
With the wealth of content platforms available to brands, firms need to be careful not to do themselves a disservice by signing up to all of them. In such cases, you run the risk of deploying watered-down content across the board, as most firms only have a finite amount of resources and personnel to call upon.
Instead, identify which platforms work best for your business – where your content is getting most engagement – and forget the rest.
The Content Marketing Institute makes mention of the “sunk-cost fallacy” – persisting with something simply because you’ve already invested so much time and money into it – which is a way of thinking brands can often be guilty of harbouring. Keep this in mind the next time you’re assessing the effectiveness of your content marketing campaign.
4. Prioritise your objectives
When you sit down at the start of the year to discuss objectives, you’ll probably walk away from the meeting with a list of around ten goals for your content marketing campaign. Ultimately, however, some objectives will be more important than others, but this might not be reflected in your strategy.
Start prioritising your objectives and concentrate on the single goal you’d most like to achieve over and above the rest.
The Content Marketing Institute quotes Gary Keller, author of The One Thing, who wrote: “You need to be doing fewer things for more effect instead of doing more things with side effects.”
You’ll be amazed how much easier it will be to create winning content by going in with a more focussed mindset.