How to plan a Content Marketing Campaign

There is a well-known saying that “content is king” and in today’s global virtual market nothing comes closer in describing its importance than that exact phrase. In an era where information and communication are channeled through a variety of venues, the value of solid content used to promote one’s business can’t be emphasized enough.

Effective and efficient content marketing campaigns need a strategy that is well designed up front, a strategy combining both content marketing and SEO goals that will pay dividends in the long term when it reaches the right audience.

The right kind of content will ensure that your business builds a lasting connection & engagement with your target audience while seizing opportunities to inspire customer action and develop a strong brand awareness.

The right strategy is rooted on four important steps: Analysis, goals, audience, content.

Analysis

Before you set out to build your content it is vital that you conduct a comprehensive data collection regarding: the company, the product (s), the existing competition, the target audience (who are they, how old, where do they live, what’s their educational level), your current positioning in the market, your SWOT analysis(which will look into your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), and the environmental factors (economic factors, socio-cultural developments) that can affect your campaign in the long term.

Goals

When setting your campaign goals make sure that they align with your business goals in order to create a cohesive content-product dynamic. There could be a variety of goals you may focus on such as an increase in sales, penetration in new markets, better brand awareness, promotion of offers and even building trust in your target market.

Usually a good brainstorming session with all the stakeholders involved is a good start in setting your goals; just make sure that your chosen goals are time and business specific.

Audience

Regardless of how magnificent your product or/and content is, it is certainly of less worth if it is not tailored to address your target audience. Collect information such as:

What is your existing audience?

When do they interact with the existing content?

What is their socio-economic and educational status?

What type of information seems to attract them the most?

If you are mapping a campaign for a new company or product make sure that you answer some basic questions first:

How would you know what your potential customers might prefer?

How do you built a communication bridge between your potential customers and your company in order to achieve maximum compatibility when the campaign launches? (venues such as the company’s customer service and department of market research that collects demographic data as well as the use of tools such as Google Analytics can be a major ace up your sleeve, just think outside the box and be creative).

Content

In building your future content, it will probably make sense to evaluate your current content so as to ensure that it aligns with your newly formed goals and target audience. In addition conduct a comparative content review to get an idea of the content used by your competitors.

Only after the completion of the analysis, the establishment of your goals and the assessment of yourexisting and potential audience should you start to put together the actual content and start choosing the texts, the images and videos that will go along with it.

A basic SEO analysis will provide you with the base of the keywords that will need to be embedded in your content and you can start building around them.

The promotion of the content can take place with smart and catchy posts through the social media arena where it seems that people have more and more access. Just remember to keep them short, easy to digest and to the point.

Some basic ideas about the content might include

Evergreen content

Evergreen content is one that will always be relevant to your audience. Blog posts that are already performing well for a long period are a great pool for new posts with related content or close enough to match the vast array of your audience’s differing needs. These posts will have internal links from the original good posts in order to pass PageRank and help readers meet their needs for information. Another example of evergreen content is old posts that require modifications to stay relevant and up to date. Finally timeless posts are another great way to help webmasters build a trusting relationship with their audience and bring constant traffic and new potential customers.

Guest blogging

Guest blogging brings a direct connection and communication with your existing or potential customers by giving credibility to your site without the waste of extra time and resources. You can employ guest bloggers to explicate about the specifics of the products you are promoting. It is essential of course that you “walk the talk” meaning that your blogger is a well known expert in the area and carries enough credibility that people will actually take his suggestions into account.

It is also important that guest blogging takes place in other popular sites with similar content sometimes as well, so as to attract new audience and potential customers.

Conclusion

Building an effective content marketing campaign is like launching a new business where all steps are coherent, building on the existing and new structures you are attempting to form. Skipping the steps or underestimating the power of a solid foundation can take you back to square one again and again.

So, make sure you follow a solid plan, respect the steps needed to get to the actual launch and make sure that you evaluate the content periodically to ensure proper alignment with your goals and audience and re-adjust accordingly if needed.

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Friday 18 July 2014