The retweets. The things of trolls. The writers, the editors, the producers. The people who understand design, UX, how to create and have digital savvy to boot. So it takes an experienced litmus to understand what consumers want to see; what they gravitate to; and what draws them in to lead the charge around how content gets created, deployed and promoted. Authentic interaction, transparency and social impact are being demanded like never before in the content game.
Three holy grails. Another key trait is understanding the moment. The culture. The political atmosphere. And what has the best chance at working… now. It took a bit of balls to risk alienating a decent chunk of the country by using the former NFL quarterback as the centerpiece of this campaign.
As a result, they inspired boycotts throughout the social media world and the real one. But they also showed the power of taking a stance. This move was from a new playbook and much different than the time Nationwide insurance scared the hell out of America during Super Bowl 49 showing a kid talking about his imminent death. Here are some of the deliverables required from each major type of content strategist:.
Common majors include English, journalism, communications, marketing creative writing, technical writing and information management. Content strategists usually work during normal business hours, although freelance strategists may have more flexibility. Pay for content strategists, like most jobs, is based on experience. The following skillsets are beneficial for content strategists to use on a daily basis.
Which ones do you have? And which ones are you missing? The writing process is the most important part of content marketing. Know who creates your content whether internal or external and how well they understand your business. You need to have solid copywriting skills to know how to direct, plan, design and edit this content. The ability to see the big picture and build a storyline across a website or campaign is also key for a content strategist.
For websites, reaching this goal often starts with laying out the existing content architecture to identify where content is located and how it functions.
For campaigns, research the mindset of your users and perform testing. You won't need to scour the internet to find new content ideas anymore. Instead, you can go through your curated list, compiled from news sites, newsletters, and social media. Want to discover popular content and content ideas? This company offers a number of market research tools, one of which uses social media shares to determine if a piece of content is popular and well-liked.
This information helps you see which content ideas would do well if you were to create content about them. This tool works a bit like Mad Libs, but instead of joke sentences, it shows you common headline formats with blanks where you can fill in the subject you have in mind.
This brainstorming technique helps you put general ideas in contexts that would be appealing to your target audience. Once you have a headline you like, BlogAbout lets you add it to your "Notebook" so you can save your best ideas.
All you need to do is enter general topics or terms you'd like to write about, and this content idea generator does all the work for you. This tool analyzes headlines and titles and provides feedback on length, word choice, grammar, and keyword search volume. If you have an idea in mind, run a few title options through the Headline Analyzer to see how you could make it stronger, and to move your idea further along in the brainstorming process.
This is a great tool to use when you want to see where you're at with your website and SEO efforts. The Website Grader grades you on vital areas of your website performance and sends you a detailed report to help you optimize.
With this tool, you can figure out how to make your website more SEO-friendly and discover areas of improvement. Your marketing plan should go beyond the types of content you'll create — it should also cover you'll organize your content. With the help of an editorial calendar , you'll be on the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website.
Then, create a social media content calendar to promote and manage your content on other sites. Download for Free. Many of the ideas you think of will be evergreen i. That being said, you shouldn't ignore timely topics either. While they may not be the bulk of your editorial calendar, they can help you generate spikes of traffic.
Most people count on incorporating popular holidays, like New Year's, in their marketing efforts, but you don't have to limit yourself to these important marketing dates. If there are niche holidays that might appeal to your audience, it could be worth publishing content on your blog or on social media. Check out this ultimate list of social media holidays — keep an eye on it when you're planning your calendar.
Ready to get started with your own content marketing strategy? Download this helpful workbook. It includes key readings and activities to help you fine-tune your plan and develop a robust strategy. You'll learn how to:. To understand what a content strategy is, let's explore some examples of real-life content strategies based on a few various business goals. Let's start with Evernote, a note-taking app, that developed an SEO-driven content strategy to attract new prospects to their website.
I'm a huge fan of Evernote's blog, which offers a wealth of knowledge around the topic of productivity. People interested in reading content related to productivity are likely the same people interested in downloading Evernote's note-taking product. On the contrary, if Evernote's marketing team simply created content for the sake of increasing traffic — like publishing "Our 10 Favorite Beyonce Songs" — it wouldn't be considered a content strategy at all, it would just be content.
A strategy needs to align content with business goals. In Evernote's case, the strategy aligns content blog posts on productivity with the business goal of attracting leads people interested in note-taking to their site.
Let's take a look at another example to see how a good content strategy can help businesses with sales enablement. Consider the following scenario: A prospect calls a sales representative at Wistia and asks questions related to Wistia's video hosting service.
As the Wistia sales rep speaks with her, he learns her business is using a few other tools to convert leads into sales, including Intercom.
Once the call ends, the sales rep sends the prospect a follow-up email with a blog post about Wistia's integration with Intercom , which enables Intercom users to further personalize messages to prospects based on video-watching data they collect through Wistia. On the surface, it might seem odd that Wistia has dedicated content regarding another business' tool. However, this content is a great resource for Wistia's sales team, particularly when prospects have concerns regarding how Wistia's product can integrate with their existing software or processes.
Now that we've explored a few examples of content strategies, let's dive into the types of content marketing assets you can develop. These are the eight most popular types of content marketing you can create for your readers and customers.
If you haven't already noticed, you're currently reading a blog post. Blog posts live on a website and should be published regularly in order to attract new visitors. Posts should provide valuable content for your audience that makes them inclined to share posts on social media and across other websites.
We recommend that blog posts be between 1, and 2, words in length, but you should experiment to see if your audience prefers longer or shorter reads. Check out our free blog post templates for writing great how-to, listicle, curation, SlideShare presentation, and newsjacking posts on your own blog. So, topic clusters are like concentrated buckets of relevance.
They help search engines understand the context, relationships, and hierarchy of each page within a family of content. At the same time, they help your audience find answers and related information easily. Another content strategy that can improve organic search performance is content atomization, where you produce multiple content pieces from a single content source.
For example, you may create a research report as your base piece of content. With atomization, you can then break the report into smaller, snackable components and distribute related video, audio, reports, white papers, webinars, presentations, data visualizations, and other types of content.
As long as you are careful not to cannibalize your SEO results, content atomization can be an effective content strategy that fuels SEO reach, traffic, and engagement by ensuring the right audience finds the right type of content. Looking for a content strategy example that can have an outsized impact on your SEO performance? Develop online tools. When you provide your audience with a free, valuable online tool, in many cases they will link to it, strengthening your backlink profile and therefore your organic rankings.
Goals compel action and drive your content strategy, so build your goals around the outcomes you want to achieve. These two types of goals support each other and help to define your strategy.
Here are a few S. As you can see, it would be hard to achieve a stretch goal without a structured digital marketing plan in place. Similarly, the S. This step is critical because developing a content strategy that targets the wrong audience wastes time and money. And the more targeted your marketing, the more likely it is to be effective and efficient.
There are many different types of criteria and demographic data you could use to segment your audience, depending on what your business sells and how diverse its reach is. For instance, buyer persona characteristics for B2C marketing might include:. Use that data to define your target audience segments and then create personas within each segment.
A buyer persona is defined as a semi-fictional representation of an ideal customer based on common audience attributes. These may include pain points, needs, interests, demographic information, as well as other factors as listed above. The main difference between a buyer persona and an audience segment is that buyer personas force you to think about your audience as an individual, rather than a group. And within each segment, you may have multiple buyer persona examples.
A buyer persona within that segment would include further detail, such as:. If you find a gap in the market, why not produce content that entertains your audience? You may be able to cut through the noise with something that tugs at the heartstrings, excites them, or drives them to think more aspirationally.
Execute a content audit to identify and inventory all existing brand content and to evaluate its effectiveness. An audit helps you to determine if you have:.
In order to have a strong and differentiated content strategy, you should also do a competitive analysis. Major e-commerce brands often lose traffic to review sites and industry blogs with a strong SEO strategy. Financial services firms often lose search engine rankings to lead generation sites and publications. For example, an inventory of your blog posts might reveal that some are outdated, not aligned with business goals, or not performing well in organic search.
You can then decide whether you want to:. Additionally, what questions do they ask themselves when they search? Alfred L. Yarbus, a Russian psychologist, conducted a study on eye movements. Participants were asked to look at paintings. Yarbus asked a certain question, then he tracked the eye movements of each participant. What he found was that participants looked at completely different parts of the painting depending on the question they were asked beforehand.
Essentially, our brains are hardwired to find solutions to specific questions we ask ourselves. The post may answer key questions and offer potential solutions. Or, it may be an entertaining or intriguing piece meant to expand reach and capture attention.
Another blog post may target the middle of the funnel when the prospect has done their initial research and begins to engage with various brands or vendors. At this point, the prospect may want more detailed and customized content focused on specific products, services, solutions, features and benefits. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, prospects want to compare options and make a final decision.
To turn their curiosity into a conversion, provide an ROI calculator, detailed case studies or offer a free trial or coupon. Whether your primary goal is B2B lead generation or to increase ecommerce sales, you need traffic.
You need to optimize for keywords too. Keyword research is the foundation of an SEO-focused content strategy because it guides you to the most valuable topics and keeps you organized.
That means more traffic, more engagement, and more conversions. Where do you begin? Use tools like Ahrefs and Semrush to uncover the topics in which your audience is most interested.
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