Content Marketing is a bridge that allows businesses like yours to be easily discovered by prospects or referral sources and is one of the cheapest and most efficient ways for companies to increase their reputation within the marketplace and increase their web visibility. When you create and distribute quality content, the ride over the bridge can be smooth and sweet, rather than the bumper to bumper, two lanes closed, nightmare we have all experienced. Living and working in the New York Metro area, we all would love that perfect trip from point A to point B without any hassle. Google recognizes websites that have reputable, relevant, and reliable content for every search term out there. If you’re providing the right stuff, Google will get your customers to you so you can showcase your expertise or product.
Content marketing can be the easy and convenient first step as part of an overall integrated marketing plan for a company. The company can easily leverage staff from all departments, such as sales, operations, and finance to provide meaningful and relevant content that can help increase its web traffic organically. As with all things, one of the keys is to have a Content Marketing Plan. A good framework for a marketing plan can be the CSCR Model (Consistency, Showtime, Collaboration, and Review).
Consistency
Find a comfortable amount of web content that you can push out consistently. Ex: 12 times a year would mean once a month, 24 times a year means twice a month, etc. Frame that out first and work from there. This calendar can be an excellent guide for planning but doesn’t mean it should be a strict schedule to follow. Any urgent industry news or events which could allow for quick advisability are an excellent opportunity to push out content. Your plan should allow room for creativity and both internal and external engagement. In developing content, don’t forget to consider adding content from your strategic partners as well as your internal staff.
Showtime
When it comes to content marketing quality vs. quantity; quality always wins the race. Look at your competitors. You’ll see larger companies forcing out content like a sledgehammer for higher traffic, but you read it and know it’s not high quality. Yes, traffic is increased, but today, customers appreciate experts taking their time to provide real meaningful education. This increase in marginal and meaningless traffic is a short-lived gain that often does not convert to growth. It is important to be seen as an expert and provide insight to your audience. This builds loyalty and influencers, which can lead to your conversion rate increasing rather than just having higher useless traffic. Curate a content bank based on these two important categories:
- Evergreen – this content has no expiration date. It can be used for long periods of time and can be updated later on if it’s getting good results.
- Temporal – this content has short-term relevance. These are your high ranking key-word search terms that are trending right now.
Collaboration
This can be considered a “jam” piece: when two or more experts collaborate together creating content for a targeted topic and audience. These can be done through so many mediums such as podcasts, articles, webinars, whitepapers, seminars, and newsletters. Both experts can draw from their bases to increase overall exposure without much-increased effort and can also lead to additional marketing channel relationships between companies. When collaborating its important to find partners with similar values, customer profiles, and marketing efforts to yours.
Revisit and Review
An important component of any plan is take time to evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts. Your company should focus on what types of content are generating responses and focus more efforts toward those channels that are the most effective, whether they be a specific type of marketing (blog posting, podcasts) or some type of specific content. Expansion of this content should generate a positive impact for the business and for its creators. Google Analytics provides a comprehensive dataset that can be used for this analysis, but also inquiry of current, and new customers as to what is driving them to your website, can provide much needed non-quantitative inputs.
Your objective should be to become perceived as a thought leader and generate clients that will engage in the content you’re providing. Consider your current and prospective clients and focus on their pain points and their goals. More importantly, have fun with this and be genuine. You can always reach out to me if you have any questions or suggestions for a topic you would like to hear more about. I look forward to hearing from you about how your content marketing is going.
This article was also featured in our newsletter The Bottom Line Vol. 18