It seems that every (marketing) man and his dog is writing about content marketing these days, so amidst this mass of content marketing advice, what is the real formula for content success? Does one even exist? And if so, how do we as B2B marketers cut the cr*p and create content that really counts?
Forbes recently published its top five tips to take your content marketing up a gear: Quantity over quality, campaigns over individual posts, frequent use of video, and application of key SEO terms to optimise your online presence.
These are useful tips regardless of the business you’re in or what your organisational objectives are. Ultimately though, the content you create has to positively impact your business performance. If it doesn’t, it won’t generate value for your brand, and is nothing more than content for content’s sake.
To help you assess whether your content is king, and whether it is creating value for you and your key stakeholders, we’ve put together five quick fire questions:
1) What is the single content area you want to own? You’ll likely have more than one, but we recommend keeping this to fewer than three. How much of this niche content is evident when you look at your content bank?
2) Does your content convey personality? Think about the tone that is most relevant and unique to your customers.
3) Does your content actually reach your target audiences and provoke engagement? Are your key influencers engaging and commenting on your content?
4) Have you specified SMART objectives and metrics to measure the results that your content generates?
5) Does your content support the achievement of your organisational objectives? Does it generate leads?
Whether your answers verified that you’re hitting the content mark, or confirmed there is room for content improvement, these questions do highlight the need to continually assess, measure and control the content marketing cycle. In doing so, your content will evolve to meet changing market and audience needs, and positive outcomes will follow.
Of course, our quick fire questions are just the tip of the content iceberg. To help you delve deeper, we’ve produced a Content that Counts whitepaper which features a useful ‘how-to’ content channel guide. Hot off The CommsCo press this week, our whitepaper will also give you some ideas for lead generation, and focuses on using marketing to demonstrate clear ROI. We thought we’d share this here with our industry peers to gauge your thoughts and see what others are doing with their content.
If you’d like some help to make your content count, then do drop us a line or give us a call today. We’d love to hear from you.