You will surely not be surprised anymore by the fact that there are hundreds and thousands of content media marketing strategy plans out there. And all of these plans and strategies have the same objective — to grow traffic, generate meaningful content, generate leads, and make more sales.
The question remains how will you level up your content media marketing strategy game if you’re following the same old plans and strategies.
In this post, we will explore few tactics that will take your content marketing game to the next level.
Top 3 tips to level up your content media marketing strategy
Your brand plays a crucial role in building relationships and trust with your target audience. We have highlighted before how creating valuable content can help in reflecting the core values of your brand. But now we would like to delve even deeper into that specific aspect — content. When a brand publishes content, the target audience relates that to whatever the brand is thinking or acting on and what they feel about that brand.
To break it down, the content you write or your writing approach determines what the readers think or feel about your brand.
Here are eight valuable tips that will help you define and level up your content marketing strategy in no time.
Build a consistent tone
Yeah, we got it that you need to build trust with your audience through your content marketing efforts. But how will you do that in real?
Well, there are quite a few factors. For a reader to be able to trust your content, they first need to trust you as a brand and relate to it. And your brand doesn’t necessarily need to be a big organization. It could be a handful of people in your team or just you.
Not to create a brand identity, you need to consider the following:
- What forms your beliefs?
- What goals are you trying to achieve?
- What are you doing to achieve them?
The answers to these above questions will reflect in your work. Now you will write content in a way that impacts your audience. This will then extend to your use of colors, logos, and so on.
Take, for example, the brand called Neil Patel Digital. Now take a look at his Facebook profile page. You will see the picture of a man with a bald head. Then take a look at his blog, Neilpatel.com, you will see the same picture on the sidebar there. If someone has read the content published by the brand and connected with it in some way, irrespective of where they see their content next, they will be able to trust the information and make an informed decision.
Make sure your content strategy is focused on sales
Many content marketers put their content in different categories, such as this content is meant for educating readers and the other content is for sales.
We don’t deny that some of the content can be categorized in similar ways, but most of the content that you see on the web has a good mix of both. Content that has a sales pitch is not necessarily bad but when you put content in any of these extreme categories, it reflects your mindset of associating ‘value’ with something good, and ‘sales’ with something bad.
It’s also one of the reasons why you will find many beginners comment or express themselves by saying, “I will never be able to succeed in sales.” But if you consider carefully, sales is also about providing; only when you provide value, you will be able to add value to the life of the user who is already facing a challenge and looking for a solution.
The next question is how do you produce such hybrid content. Two types of content could serve the purpose.
Type #1: Webinars — The content for your webinars should offer great value. You could choose to use the first 40-50 minutes to teach some of your most valuable lessons, personal and business objectives, processes, and strategies. Towards the end of the webinar, you can put forward a slight sales pitch about your product. As you have already given them so much value more than what any blog post could offer, imagine the conversion rates to be insane.
Also after you have uploaded your content onto the web for your users and others to consume, you need to make sure everyone can access the content. While some prefer to watch videos or listen to audio, others would like to receive the transcript of your webinar. Now it could be time-consuming for you to rewrite everything that you spoke during your session. In such times, audio to text converters come as Godsend and we know that time is money.
Type #2: Case studies — Case studies are another great way of showcasing your products. Irrespective of whether it is an information product or a physical one, case studies always work wonders for your conversions.
Case studies also encourage you to share some of your best content and at the same time show what value great content can bring to the table. If you can bring out the transparency in your case study by highlighting the challenges, benefits, and impact, your audience will love to a great extent. And if they can see the results and the value of your product, they will make a purchase. There will be no need for hard sales.
There is nothing bad in making money. While providing value is a great objective, the objective of increasing your revenues is great too. Selling your product will help you give back more to your users and the community.
Evaluate your content based on how it could help someone
How would you evaluate that the content is good? There could be plenty of ways to do that but one thing you must ask yourself while going through the content is whether you would like to share what you are consuming with any of your friends. If it’s a yes, then you have your answer.
We all know that it is a constant struggle to deliver good customer service. Sometimes the customer service representatives find themselves buried in those issue tickets and find themselves answering the same questions again and again. At this time the thought of scaling the customer support also arises quite often.
Enter customer education, best known to everyone as a knowledge base. It is nothing but a library of information about your product or service offering. It encourages the customers to find the resolutions to their problems on their own and a good knowledge base can also scale out the entire customer support program is done well. If you know how important customer experience is to the success of a business, you would also know that 90% of consumers rate their experience as a primary factor when deciding whether or not to purchase from a business.
This is where a knowledge base comes in handy. It’s like creating self-service customer support for your business on recurring issues, topics, and themes. There are several ways to create a knowledge base. Knowledge management software is very useful in this scenario as it helps to store, manage and share all the data.
Now coming to talk about offering value, how much value is too much value? Just saying that create great content can be too vague. Now, there are two tactics that work well here.
- Add an incredible depth: This means that content marketers should look at adding details in the process of transforming good content into something great. Try to share as many details as possible. Generic content is everywhere but if you share the finer details you are already providing value. Along with that, also share your experiences to make them more relatable.
- Make the user or reader feel special: Readers already know the fact that if they share something with their folks, it will reflect on them and they always want to be portrayed as good. Any person in their senses would not want to recommend bad content just like they will never recommend a bad movie. Never title your articles like, “Internet Marketing for Dummies or Idiots”. People never want themselves to reflect or sound like dumb or an idiot when they purchase your product. Also, make sure to add values and good traits through your products and content, such as something that improves the lives of people.
Conclusion
It’s always a great idea to try and test different content media marketing strategies. But the tricks and tips could be useless if you don’t know how to effectively use them in your content marketing campaigns and plans.
To create an effective strategy, the first and foremost thing you need to understand is the different types of content. Then the next step will be to understand what content works best for your product or service offering.
And then only the above mentioned concepts will make sense and you will be able to use them effectively in your content marketing plan.