Supercharge your content marketing in 2020

With the new year just around the corner, it’s the perfect time to start thinking about how you can make improvements to your marketing strategy, a time to review the past year, what’s worked for you and what hasn’t, to take stock and look forward to the year ahead.

In this blog we explore content marketing, how it can benefit your business and we share our tops tips to supercharge your content marketing in 2020.

So, what is content marketing?

Content marketing is one of the most effective methods for spreading brand awareness, attracting new customers and creating loyal followers for your business. It’s the part of your marketing plan that demonstrates what you’re about and the expertise you bring to your industry. It helps you engage with your audience on different levels, keeps them interested and ultimately helps you drive more meaningful conversations with your customers.

The Content Marketing Institute (CMI), define content marketing as:

“A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Content can come in the form of a video, podcast, webinar, email newsletter, social images, blog articles, infographics, presentations, eBooks, case studies or templates to name a few!

According to the CMI, the most successful B2B marketers reported spending 40% of their budget on content marketing in 2018. The rise in popularity of content marketing has meant that the competition is fierce, and this brings its own set of challenges, as businesses compete for increasingly limited attention.

A well-planned content strategy is key in order to maximise the impact content marketing can have on your business; we’ve shared some top tips below to help get you started.

Mzuri’s top tips to create a strong content marketing plan

1. Conduct a content audit

How is your current content performing? Review your top and lowest performing content and get a better understanding of what’s worked and what hasn’t. Which social channels are working best for you? The more you understand your current performance, the more knowledge you’ll have to feed into future content marketing plans.

Take a look at what your competitors are doing, are there any gaps that you could fill? How can you differentiate yourself from them?

2. Set out your goals

Consider exactly what it is that you want to achieve via content marketing – are you looking to build brand awareness, create loyal followers, generate leads? Whatever your goals, make them SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound), to ensure you set effective and reachable goals.

3. Know your audience

Who are you hoping to reach and what content will your customers/prospects want to engage with? What types of content should you be using? What channels should you use? By researching your audience, you can begin to create persona types to help you target your content accordingly.

4. Identify relatable content

Focus on the key interests of your target audience, think about what your prospects will react to and what will keep them coming back from more. Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself ‘What’s in it for them?’.

What content types will work well for your audience? Social images, webinars, blog posts? Experiment with different types of content and monitor the results and engagement levels you receive and use this to continue to refine your plan moving forward.

5. Create a content calendar

Regular, scheduled content that consistently delivers for your audience and against your goals will help maintain interest in your brand, and encourage your followers to come back and share the content on their own social channels. Creating a content calendar is a great way to ensure you are regularly delivering content across all your channels. It will give you a useful visual overview of your content marketing activities, allowing all team members to follow the progress of each piece of content, making the process more manageable and efficient.

A great place to start is Google Sheets, where you can create a shared document, allowing all team members to edit, update and view upcoming scheduled content.

6. Consider the delivery and promotion of your content

Now you’ve created your content, you need to consider how you’ll promote it. Whether that’s through your social media platforms, a regular email newsletter to your subscribers or via your website. Remember, it’s not just about a blog, they are one piece of the puzzle, all channels should be considered.

Take advantage of timed blog posts in your CMS, marketing automation and social planning tools like Hootsuite and Later to forward-schedule where possible to save time and keep you on track.

Don’t forget to complement this digital activity with more traditional marketing activities, such as print advertising, direct mail or PR to engage consumers on all levels.

7. Measure your success

Once your plan is in place and you have started executing it, you need to ensure you track its performance. What you measure will depend on the goals you set at the beginning of this process. You can then monitor what’s working and what’s not and this should allow you to adjust your plan accordingly, ensuring it has maximum impact.

8. Ask the experts

If this all sounds a little daunting and you’d like some help creating fabulous content, then get in touch. We’ve created successful content marketing campaigns for many of our clients and continue to create, manage and deliver content calendars for our clients across all industries. Get in touch with the team today.