“Content is king.”
We’ve all heard about this statement. The questions is, what have we done so far to capitalize on content that would make our website rank up to the top?
A content management strategy is an important piece of the digital marketing puzzle as it plays a major role in driving people towards your business, both online and offline.
As a business website owner, you need to adapt a publisher’s mindset. The way you use content can impact enterprise communications and can dictate how the audience will react to your brand. Content can be informative, creative, educational, vital, entertaining, shareable, consumable, and so on.
Content should be leveraged to achieve the following:
- Brand reinforcement. Brand reinforcement refers to an activity associated with getting those consumers who have tried a particular brand to become repeat purchasers along with attracting new users.
- Customer engagement throughout the customer lifecycle
- Desired business outcomes and objectives
Before, content is one directional. Companies created brochures, white papers, advertisements, and other types of articles that were pushed or published them to a broad audience. Nowadays, content that we create proliferates touch points, how it’s consumed, where it is consumed, curated, and most importantly how it is shared. Companies are now taking strategic perspectives and are focusing on content as an engagement tool, wherein it can generate brand amplification.
More and more companies are embracing digital, now making it as their companies’ primary communications, sales, marketing, and channel of choice. Digital marketers have now chosen digital over traditional as their weapon of choice across channels, devices and touch points. A good content management strategy can fuel digital in creating a highly personalized, data driven, experience.
Content is now used to entertain, inform, and bring value to the reader. Once the organization achieves these, part of the rewards will be recognition by a company’s target audience, which means amplification at a rate of speed and magnitude that paid media would find difficult to replicate. There is no one size fits all formula for digital, as one solution may not be right for every company.
How can we do this? There are four steps to develop a strong content management strategy.
- Identify and understand your audience – It is important that you define who your target audience will be and how will they be reacting once they see your content.
- Make sure your content reaches the proper touch points – Is your content placed in the right channel? What are the expected outcomes?
- Stock up on content – Create a content calendar and build up the content based on this calendar.
- Measure, analyze and optimize – Is your content effective? Are you reaching out to the right audience? Are you sending the right message? You may use a variety of analytic tools made available to you by your chosen channel. Once you find out what makes your audience tick (what makes them consume, share, and engage with your content), create more similar content to attract more followers.
Your content management strategy must create good customer experiences, through the delivery of valuable and timely information to your target audience. Content should be relevant and informative.
Content should not be hard-selling, it has to be credible and useful for your audience.
If your audience does not see the value of the content that you create, chances are there will be less shares, less likes, less mentions, less retweets and less recommendations. Good content can drive more traffic to your site. More traffic can mean more chances of conversions. In closing, I would recommend that we all embrace content it will create engagement and loyalty, a competitive edge, amplify your brand, and drive better outcomes.
Source: Rox Sarthou (CEO & Lead Strategist), Social Media Butterfly
