While it is important to develop content for your companies blogs, videos and social media accounts, I have always been a big believer of quality versus quantity. I ask you to take a moment and think about the “why” behind your content creation. Does it align with your business strategy and goals for development?
Here are five tips I recommend to keep yourself on track and focused when it comes to your company’s content marketing strategy.
- Align content with development goals.
First, what are your business development goals? Are you looking to increase business and gain more leads? Are you looking to maintain the existing clients you have and educate or up-sell them on “all” the products and services you offer? Or possibly you are trying to break into a new target market with a whole new service?
Your content should be aligned with these goals. Create articles, videos, and social posts that are focused around these specific items.
- Reuse and Repurpose. I love to repurpose and reuse old content! Why recreate the wheel, when you have an abundance of copy at your fingertips through your existing website pages, brochures, sell-sheets, presentations, testimonials and photos. The first thing I do when working with a client is to sit down with them and gather all the marketing material at their disposal that we can utilize into their content strategy.
What things do you currently have lying around that you could re-use?
- Create once, adjust, and post everywhere! I see clients struggle with needing to post on multiple platforms; such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. They have a need to be everywhere and often make this an overwhelming task when it comes to content management. This often leads to failure before your feet even hit the pavement. Once you outline a message (aka your content for a post), slighting modify this for each platform you want to post on. For instance, Instagrams image will need to be square. Hashtags should be utilized for Twitter and Instagram, but not necessarily for LinkedIn. Facebook’s message can be a bit longer in length, but Twitter will need to be reduced to 140 characters. Adjust wisely and please, please please, use visual imagery!!
- Stop posting one and done messages! Time and time again, I see clients develop a great blog article that they post once on social media and it is never to be seen again. You want to think of your content strategy to be like any other marketing strategy. You want to develop multiple ways to relay the same message over and over again to your target audience.
Ever hear of the Rule of Seven? It is an old marketing adage that says, a marketing message must be seen or heard seven times before they take an action to buy from you. Some examples on how to post multiple times pertaining to one offer/topic:
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- An article highlighting a specific product or service.
Tip: Take it a step further and add a landing page for a free consultation pertaining to this product or service so you can collect their information. - Create a short 45 second video on this topic to reel people in.
- Develop a handful of social posts grabbing tid-bits of information (taken from the article) and link to the article to “learn more.”
- Is there a great visual of this product or service that you can include? A before and after photo or possibly a photo of the product or service being put to use?
- Grab a testimonial and highlight their raving review.
- Do you have statistics on how this product or service has helped reduce overhead? Increased sales? Etc? Could you turn these statistics into an interesting infographic?
- If you are not good with videos – do a live webinar, or pre-recorded powerpoint presentation instead. If you hate being in front of a camera, visually recording power-point slides while you talk in the background is a great alternative.
- An article highlighting a specific product or service.
- Don’t overthink things. So many business owners are paralyzed to take action. Fear of being recorded in front of a camera. Fear of being judged or not coming up with the “perfect” content. While you sit on the side-lines over analyzing an article or social post, your competitors are out there alerting the world of their products and services. Create content around your business strategy, distribute that content while it is relevant, and adjust and get better with time. As the saying goes, keep things simple, stupid.