Want to know how to get the best out of your content marketing? Follow the top tips for developing a top-notch content marketing strategy.

What are the benefits of content marketing?

Consistent and useful content can solve many marketing objectives - brand awareness, demand generation, conversion, customer loyalty and retention and even help develop customers into brand evangelists. Here’s the truth...our customers are inundated with over 5,000 marketing messages per day. How do you cut through that clutter and build long-term relationships with customers? By telling compelling stories. Be interesting to your customers and stop talking about your products and services so much.

Where should this content be distributed?

There are lots of options, but it depends on your goals. If you have a content strategy worth its salt (meaning that you know the core marketing objective and you know what’s in it for your customer), then you can look at your channel strategy. According to Content Marketing Institute research, almost 9 in 10 companies distribute content through social media, about 7 in 10 have a corporate blog, about 8 in 10 distribute content through enewsletters. The point isto find out where your customers are hanging out online and look to distribute that content where they can access it. For example, there may be an opportunity to distribute those stories through print.

What content marketing mistakes do companies usually make?

They tend to talk about their products and services too much, aren’t consistent with how they distribute the content and don’t put enough marketing behind it. In fact, they lack any kind of strategy at all in many cases!

What is the most effective kind of content marketing? (i.e. images, writing, videos etc)

Content that solves people’s specific problems, and entertain while doing so is usually most effective. This could be in any format (textual, video, etc.). But honestly, you can have the greatest content in the world, but if you don’t have an audience no one is going to see it...so whatever you do, focus on a subscription strategy for your customers so you can work toward regular readership.

How do you come up with ideas for content?

First and foremost, it is about talking to customers. Any company that is out of ideas for their content marketing aren’t talking to customers enough.

What are the best tips / advice that you can give a company wanting to create a content strategy?

a) Stop creating any more content until you have a documented strategy. Most companies don’t, which is why they fail.

b) Focus on a subscription strategy, specifically for email. There is nothing wrong with Facebook fans and Twitter followers, but you don’t own those. Focus on assets you can own (like an email database). Your main call to action from the majority of your awareness content should be to sign up as a subscriber.

 

By content marketing expert, Joe Pulizzi. Interview extract taken from The Crowdsourced Guide to Business.

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