1. Know Who You Want to Attract
Before you can create content that appeals to your target market (and potential clients), you need to know what they are struggling with, what they want to know, and how they want it. Do they want to read, listen, watch, etc? (Always good to simply ask your current clients and subscribers to learn the answer.) Once you know what they want and how they want it…deliver. If you seek clients dealing with food allergies, provide content relevant to this audience. Don’t be all over the place in your content generation…one day food allergies, the next about dieting, and a third about foods to reduce stress. Your target audience is dealing with food allergies, be consistent in what you right about to highlight yourself as someone who specializing in this area.
2. Be consistent with your publishing.
Certain pieces of content imply different levels of consistency when it comes to creating and delivering content. How often you want to publish may impact the form of content marketing that will work best for you. For example, consistency is expected with blogs, newsletters, magazines, and podcasting. Consistency is wise, but not required when it comes to videos, ebooks, webinars, and infographics. If you know you will be inconsistent, go with content where consistency does not hinder results, such as guest blog posting.
3. Leverage audiences of others.
Guest blog posting is a great example of how to leverage someone else’s audience. Someone else has taken the time to grow a following. If you provide a guest post/article that includes where to learn more about you, this is one strategy to grow your own following. Keep in mind, whatever content you provide to someone else needs to be of value to their audience…they are not going to accept just anything. Another example would be to teach a class hosted by someone else and to someone else’s audience.
4. Create it once and leverage it fully.
One piece of content can be re-used in many, many different ways. Let’s use a blog article as one example. This article can be broken down into tweets for Twitter, status updates for Facebook, group discussions on LinkedIn, read it and record to create a podcast for itunes, use the content to create a simple video of you sharing the article content as a tip or teaching point and distribute on YouTube….see how you create the content once and it can be used to reach a wide audience on many different platforms?
5. Analyze your results.
If you are going to make the time to create and distribute content as a marketing strategy, you need to analyze the results. Let’s say you are regularly posting videos to YouTube, but you are not getting traffic back to your website. If this is the case, you need to investigate what you are doing wrong…are you including a link back to your website? If not, add it. Are the video titles not grabbing the attention of your target audience? Tweak them…but you won’t know you need to adjust if you do not monitor results. Google analytics is a free and useful tool to monitor what websites are sending traffic to your site. Use it!
If you want to do the content creation and have someone else do the leg work to leverage it fully…check out our Content Marketing Package.