Do you experience uncertainty when it comes to crafting and distributing content or selecting topics for content marketing? Are you struggling to maintain a steady flow of ideas? The task of constantly generating new content that resonates with your audience can become overwhelming and draining. However, don’t worry; this is a common struggle. There may come a point when you experience a creative block, but it’s not a cause for concern. Instead, take a brief break, reassess your content marketing strategy, and then proceed.
Documenting Your Content Strategy
Going beyond just the surface level of the content you produce, it is important to document your content strategy by considering the reasons behind why you are creating it, who the intended audience is, which channels will be utilized to promote it, and how it will contribute to the overall content marketing strategy. It is surprising to know that merely 42% of content marketers put their content marketing strategy into writing.
In case you’re struggling with selecting a topic, what approach can assist you? To assist you in selecting suitable topics for your Content Marketing Strategy, here are five content marketing hints.
1. Define and understand your organizational goals
Establishing a strong foundation and comprehending your organizational goals are the first steps to selecting appropriate content marketing topics and setting relevant goals for your content. It is imperative to understand the purpose of your content marketing strategy. For numerous B2B and B2C companies and brands, lead generation, boosting brand awareness, and stimulating engagement are the top organizational goals. This forms a solid starting point, and an array of content marketing options are available to select from, depending on the unique goals and requirements of your organization.
Once you’ve reviewed your content marketing strategy’s goals, utilize your analytics to identify which content your audience prefers. If you’re struggling to decide on suitable topics, take a look at your most successful pieces of content and give them a fresh twist.
Utilizing analytics is beneficial in directing your choices concerning your content marketing approach. An effective solution that numerous companies are presently examining is a completely integrated CMS or content management system. As an example, Hubspot’s CMS enables content marketers to easily design and regulate their content, enhance it to generate outcomes, and assess the performance of their content.
By examining your social media insights and analytics, you can acquire valuable information for generating innovative content ideas. After pinpointing your most successful posts, determine if they share a common theme. Additionally, analyze the level of user engagement (e.g., likes, comments) on these posts and consider if a certain content format (e.g., text, image, video) consistently performs better than others.
3. Ask your audience
Another recommendation for selecting appropriate content marketing topics is soliciting feedback from your audience. Ultimately, your audience is the group actively interacting with your content, making it crucial to comprehend their desires and preferences for content.
You have various options for approaching this. It could be uncomplicated such as creating a survey or publishing an inquiry on any of your social media platforms. Inquire of your followers about the kind of material they wish to view and accommodate unstructured responses.
One way to generate blog topics is by utilizing your FAQs. Reviewing the questions that are frequently asked by your intended audience can aid in selecting appropriate topics for your content marketing plan. In addition, FAQs have the potential to adapt to current trends, so they can continue to provide fresh ideas and topics even when you feel short on inspiration. As time progresses, the FAQs may alter, revealing emerging trends, obstacles, and subjects that you can potentially explore.
It is necessary to adapt to the evolving role of the customer and involve your audience in shaping your content marketing strategy.
4. Be Prepared for these 10 Biggest Challenges in Content Marketing
It can be difficult to maintain the relevance and appeal of your content marketing due to the vast amount and diversity of available content. To ensure that your content stands out among the vast amount of posts being made at any given moment, be aware of these ten common challenges and take the necessary steps to overcome them.
- Thinking outside the blog
- Lack of resources
- Battling quality over quantity
- Competition never sleeps
- Harnessing the power of organic content effectively
- Unrealistic expectations
- Getting burned out
- Providing legitimate value, not just fluff
- Balancing creative instincts and SEO needs
- Planning and tracking results
5. Define a digital marketing goal for each individual content piece
When creating content, it is important to assess how it aligns with your organizational objectives and select appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) for tracking and measurement. If your primary aim is lead generation, focus on creating content that appeals to customers at various stages of their purchasing journey, such as e-books, white papers, or case studies. Additionally, if sales are a top priority, ensure that your content actively contributes to increasing sales by building trust with customers rather than merely providing information.
Developing an effective content marketing strategy requires strategic planning to map out and select the appropriate topics. It’s imperative to familiarize yourself with content that has performed well and resonated with your audience. Additionally, you should document your content marketing strategy and adjust it as necessary to keep up with evolving content trends. Selecting the appropriate content marketing topics is crucial to the success of your overall strategy.
BONUS: How to Choose the Right Digital Marketing Strategy for Your Business
The implementation of online marketing is now essential in order to achieve a thriving and competitive business. Nevertheless, the abundance of digital marketing tools and platforms may seem daunting. There’s no guarantee that what works for a specific company or industry will also work for your enterprise.
To select an effective digital marketing approach, it is essential to comprehend your product or service as well as your target audience in order to create a tailored plan that will deliver intended marketing objectives. In this article, we will examine the measures you need to take to determine the most appropriate digital marketing strategy for your business and provide additional online marketing knowledge.
How to choose a digital marketing strategy for your business
To achieve a successful digital marketing strategy, relying on the latest trends or simply guessing what your customers may want is not the answer, but rather following insights that are based on data.
According to Jess Reilly, the chief marketing officer at Rebel Interactive Group, the key to achieving scalable digital marketing success is through people-based advertising. This refers to the ability to deliver the right message on the right platform at the right time to the appropriate audience.
To select a digital marketing approach, you must create profiles of potential buyers, establish objectives, select appropriate digital marketing utilities, and evaluate your strategy’s effectiveness.
1. Build buyer personas to understand your target audience.
The concept of buyer personas involves creating imaginary individuals that embody the characteristics of typical consumers who would be interested in your brand. These personas are useful tools for promoting your goods and services to this particular demographic.
Reilly stated that the development of buyer personas would aid in the formulation of marketing plans by shedding light on the identity of buyers, the predicaments they encounter and, above all, the objectives that the audience seeks to achieve, thereby guiding the messaging strategy.
When constructing customer personas, take into account the subsequent details concerning your intended audience.
- Job type
- Interests
- Age
- Gender
- General demographics
- Most-used social platforms
- Beliefs and values
Subsequently, adapt your plan according to these specifics.
A helpful suggestion is to gather survey data online or through email or text, in order to comprehend the pain points and desires of a certain market and obtain customer feedback.
2. Identify your goals, and align them to your strategy.
Can you outline your objectives for your marketing strategy? This could involve developing brand recognition, enhancing product sales, or attracting a wider social media audience. It’s important to clarify your goals so that you can focus your efforts in the right direction. Let’s examine some specific instances.
If your goal is to heighten brand awareness:
Do reputable brands tend to be the sole choice of your intended audience? Is your intended audience familiar with your brand? Are they confident in its credibility and familiarity to complete a purchase?
If your primary objectives include promoting brand recognition and enhancing the standing of your business.
If your goal is to raise consumer awareness:
Low search volumes for your target keywords may indicate that consumers are not aware of how your product or service can enhance their lives, leading to their lack of interest in seeking out your company.
In case your sales process or website traffic is not the issue, it is possible that there is a deficiency in customer knowledge. In such a scenario, the objective of your digital marketing strategy should be to enlighten prospective customers about a particular problem they face and present your solution as the remedy.
If your goal is to increase traffic:
Most business owners consider traffic to be a priority because it is a crucial key performance indicator (KPI) that can lead to more sales leads and actual sales if the traffic quality is high.
To achieve maximum traffic, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, a well-executed search engine optimization (SEO) plan, and email marketing should be your top priorities.
If your goal is to increase leads:
It’s not rational to anticipate customers to make their first purchase of an expensive or intricate product online. Rather, concentrate on creating leads that can be pursued by your sales team.
If your goal is to increase sales:
Utilizing email marketing strategically and driving traffic to your website landing page are likely necessary steps to increase sales.
3. Choose digital marketing tools based on your primary goals.
Different marketing instruments, such as content marketing calendar templates, social media platforms, and email marketing software, possess individual advantages and functions. Therefore, selecting the appropriate tools will depend on your objectives.
Prentiss explained that each business has unique requirements or deficiencies. They may lack sufficient reviews, have low rankings on Google, or require a website overhaul. As a result, they need a diverse range of tools to fulfill their specific needs.
Arrange your objectives in order of importance and scrutinize your financial plan to identify the most profitable ventures. When there is significant distance from a transaction, opt for low-cost methods like emails and social media updates as there may be considerable loss in your sales process. You can later test and explore other tools available.
4. Audit your current digital marketing strategy.
To audit your digital marketing strategy, you need to assess past successes, experiment with current tactics, and identify areas that require changes.
- Discover the true ROI of past efforts. You’ll need to measure ROI for digital marketing campaigns you ran in the past. Reilly advised business owners to ask how much “lift” each marketing channel provided in previous seasons. “Using a combination of customer purchase data, digital tracking data and any traditional media buys you have, you can dive into the data to discover what your true ROI was in the past and opportunities to grow in the future,” Reilly said.
- Test new strategies. Before going live with your new strategy, test it to see what might work and what won’t. Spend time figuring out if there are aspects of your strategy that can be fixed or improved.
- Determine what needs tweaking. Prentiss recommended monitoring your progress to determine what might need shifting. “We set daily, weekly and sometimes even monthly reminders to check on the progress we made,” Prentiss said. “The daily and weekly check-ins on what we created are very important in the beginning so we can adjust what we are doing. This truly ensures the success of the campaign.”
In essence, if the expense incurred to acquire one lead exceeds the revenue generated upon completion of a sale, then the return on investment is not satisfactory and adjustments should be made.
