October 22, 2022
These days there are so many ways you can use content in a creative way to achieve your marketing and business goals. The thing is, in a world with so many options, how do you go about choosing the right content options for your marketing mix? And how can you improve your content strategy to maximise the content you’re creating?
Don’t fret - we’ve put together four quick tips to get you started on your content journey. But first, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page (haha!) in understanding what we mean by the term ‘content’ and ‘content marketing’.
What is content marketing?
The Content Marketing Institute define content marketing as:
“Content marketing is 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.”
In marketing when we talk about content it can refer to a few different formats:
- Written word: blogs, social posts, thought-leadership articles, newsletters
- Visual: video, reels, stories, infographics
- Audio: podcasts, voice recordings
And that’s only naming a few!
The key thing to remember when creating and publishing content is to ensure your content is of value to your audience. Content marketing is less about pushing your products and services, and more about helping your audience along their journey in the marketing funnel.
If your content is useful to your audience, it will help influence, drive your goals and contribute to your marketing objective.
When you use content to help with those marketing efforts, surprise surprise, it’s called content marketing.
So how do you use content to drive your marketing goals and maximise your strategy?
1. Have a quarterly content focus
Maximising your content means having a plan. We recommend thinking about content each quarter, and planning it out in advance. If you focus on a quarterly content plan, it gives you enough time to make the plan, create the content and assess how it performs. It’s enough time to allow you to execute and short enough that if you need to pivot quickly you can.
It also allows you to embrace new trends and channels, and to create content that is timely and relevant to what your audience needs (and demands!) at the time.
At this stage in the quarterly content plan, it’s good to make sure you’ve taken the time to define the basics:
- Who are you talking to?
- What channel?
- What type of content do they like to consume?
- How will your content be of value?
- How frequently do you need to show up to reach your audience?
- How does your content support your overall marketing goals?
At the end of each quarter, take the time to assess your performance and use these insights to shape your next three months - what worked, what didn’t? Each quarter, you can grow your content strategy, slowly building on the learnings from the past and nurturing your audience along the funnel.
2. Repurpose your content
This is the number one most important thing to do in content marketing (in our humble opinion!). Creating quality content takes time and money, so you want to be able to get the most return out of each piece. We recommend picking one or two ‘hero’ pieces of content each quarter, and then breaking these down into smaller content pieces for distribution across your channels.
For example, you may write a blog as a hero piece of content. From there, you can easily take snippets and paragraphs to use on social media, create an infographic summary, use a shortened version in an email, tweak the blog into a podcast and so on. It’s essentially the same content, but provided in multiple formats to help reach your audience.
Audiences typically need to see an item seven times in order to comprehend the messaging, and with social media algorithms constantly changing, your content may not be seen. By repurposing and reusing quality content, you’re simply giving your audience more chances to see and consume your message. And you’re giving your content more opportunity to have an impact and achieve its purpose.
Don’t do all the hard work in creating great content, only to let it die a lonely death after being published once (too dramatic?). Sharing is caring, at least when it comes to providing valuable content to your audience, so get repurposing and let your content come to life!
3. Flip it
Run out of ideas for your content? Sick of thinking that you’re simply saying the same thing over and over again? We hear you!
A great way to take a new angle on a familiar topic is to… flip it!
Take your standard piece of content and try writing an entirely new piece from the opposite angle. People don’t all consume content the same way, and for some, by flipping the angle, you're answering a whole new set of questions or pain points they may have.
4. Share your opinion
Sometimes it can feel like you don’t have any new content to create. After all, hasn’t everything that needs to be said about a topic already been said by someone who possibly did it better? Probably.
But no one is (insert your name or company name here), so no one has created content with your unique perspective. When it comes to creating original content, sharing your opinion on an existing topic can allow you to show thought leadership. After all, not everyone likes the same things. What makes you unique is what will also make your content unique.
So speak up and have an opinion and add your voice to the mix - as long as it’s of value! Otherwise, sit down, enjoy a cuppa and stay quiet!. You’ll know if you’re doing the right thing, because don’t worry, your audience will tell you. You’ll either get engagement, or you won’t. And that’s how you learn and keep building your strategy.
Want to learn more about content marketing?
We’ve taken our own advice and ‘repurposed’ content, so you can check out our podcast on the topic below (you can also listen on Apple and Google Podcasts):
Good luck with your content! You've got this.
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Photo credit: Mikael Blomkvist
