Developing Your Online Content Marketing Strategy
As each New Year approaches, zealous campaigns are created to boost the lead generation, brand awareness, and social engagement goals of inspired businesses. Is your business conceptualizing its marketing strategy?
Ask yourself the following:
Are you launching a new product or service?
Do you need to improve – or create – social media platforms?
How important is content marketing to your marketing agenda?
How much of your marketing is mobile friendly?
What are your brand awareness goals?
Who is your target audience?
Every business will have a unique set of responses to these questions, but all should answer them when it comes to formulating a strategic marketing plan that incorporates the most effective marketing tactics for achieving unique lead generation and client engagement goals.
Whatever your plans are for marketing, remember to take the best interests of your business to heart. In all of your marketing efforts, you want to share content that is timely, relevant, and working on multiple fronts to generate leads, optimize social media, and support all other marketing strategies in play.
To help formalize your marketing plan, consider these 9 tips:
1. Get Organized
Detail specific marketing activities you intend to activate and create goals to measure your success. Are you focusing on content marketing initiatives or Pay-Per-Click online marketing strategies? Determine your objectives and goals and use this information as the foundation for your marketing strategy.
2. Identify Your Audience
The goals of any marketing strategy are to create awareness, generate leads, and convert leads to new clients. To be effective, you must intrinsically know your target audience – buyer persona. Who is your buyer? What interests them? What are their buying habits? What are their seasonal buying requirements? Research your buyers to tailor a marketing strategy ideal for communicating – and converting – the right people.
3. Build Awareness
The goal of any marketing campaign is to create awareness for your business, expertise, products, services, mission, and philosophy – your brand identity. Once you confirm your ideal audience, confirm the best paths you want to take to reach them – blogging, online advertising, creative videos, website redesign, social media engagement, determine what works best for you. Set realistic goals for creating an awareness campaign that best reflects your business and your brand.
4. Create Awesome Content
Content marketing is the backbone of today’s most progressive marketing strategies. Businesses today have content directors and content strategists. What does that tell you?
Content marketing is huge. Whether you refer to it as brand publishing, brand storytelling, social media engagement, blogging, podcasts, webinars, ebooks – it’s all content. What else is content? Your newsletters, website, engagement in online communities, white papers, and even branded events are all content generators. Determine the best content pathways for sharing your brand’s identity with your targeted buyers. Then, deliver the content!
5. Inspire Your Team
Your best intentions for marketing success mean nothing if you do not have a driven, dedicated team leveraging effective marketing tactics. Make sure all marketing team members are engaged and aware of messaging.
Stipulate who on the team is responsible for each activity and what the consistency, goals, and deliverables should be for each task. Allow wiggle room for new ideas and opinions, but keep your team informed and focused on the marketing plan you believe will result in measured success.
To keep your entire team on the same page, it’s beneficial to create a brand library that you can reference at any time.
6. Go Mobile
Whatever your precise marketing tactics may be, make sure to keep in mind the mobile user experience. Mobile-friendly content is widespread, as the use of smartphones and tablets is increasing daily. According to Forbes, 87 percent of connected devices sales by 2017 will be smartphones and tablets. You have to make your marketing mobile. From ensuring you have an alternate mobile version of your website to creating consistent content to engage mobile content sharers, make sure your marketing can engage the mobile buyer.
7. Get Visual
Incorporate visual content marketing into your overall marketing strategy. Keep in mind, today’s mobile users are glancing quickly at social platforms, websites, advertisements – the average attention span is eight seconds.
Unique visual content will help capture your target audience. Make creative visual content a mainstay in your overall marketing strategy.
8. Harness Online Advertising
Is online advertising going to help you accomplish your engagement and conversion goals? Whether a B2B or B2C business, online advertising is an effective component of a marketing plan.9. Optimize Your Site for Action
Your marketing efforts, from blogging to social media to online advertising, all lead back to your website. Your website needs to be the ultimate sales funnel for your organization. Make sure your website masters Calls To Action (CTAs) and is optimized for user engagement. Research inbound strategies and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques to best position your website to be a portal, delivering new leads that can be converted to brand loyalists.
Creating a marketing strategy is complex. If you need help with formalizing your content marketing, online advertising or any component of your unique strategic marketing agenda, we can help! Contact us today.
