Just like eating a healthy breakfast, having lunch at a certain time of the day, drinking plenty of water, and getting lots of sleep are all essential elements of maintaining a healthy lifestyle, posting your brand’s content (old and new) across your social media channels on a regular basis with appropriate content mix is essential to healthy marketing.
If you are not getting the results you desire and keep wondering what is wrong with content marketing, let me assure you that it does work. Sometimes, a quick introspection and few tweaks here and there will bring your content marketing back on track.
Content marketing is one of the tenets of your brand’s digital marketing activities . But, as I’ve mentioned in previous blogs and articles, it can’t be just any content.
It is important that the content you generate should be engaging, humanizing, relevant, and should build relationships with your prospects, followers, and your target audience.
Your content must also be native to the underlying social media channel. It provides defined purpose and specific value in terms of inspirational, entertaining, or informative.
And remember, everything you choose to post should be determined by the nature of your brand and the products, services or information your brand offers. i.e. it all has to tie-in neatly with your brand’s goals and objectives. Otherwise, you’ll miss the boat.
Regardless of if you are big brand or an amateur who is trying to establish a robust social media presence, follow below best practices to manage your content creation process easier and to get most out of your content marketing.
Best Practice #1. Create An Editorial Calendar
Editorial calendar is crucial for maintaining the efficiency of your brand. An editorial calendar will become your best buddy if utilized correctly.
Don’t go by its simplicity.
Whether you are a mature brand or an upcoming startup trying to get most out of your content marketing, creating an editorial calendar is a must-have.
It can be created using simple Excel, Word document, Google Sheets, or you can take advantage of certain apps.
An editorial calendar not only keeps you on track and instills rigor but it also helps in variety of different ways such as:
It establishes the content you’ll create.
It keeps you focused on why you’re creating that content.
It lets you know who will create each piece of content.
It establishes when that content will be due.
It helps keep all your content ideas and projects organized.
And
Its openness promotes team collaboration and fuels new content ideas/topics that can be brainstormed as a group.
Best Practice #2. Establish Consistent Posting Habits Across All Social Media Channels
Consistency trumps everything. It does not favor if you are an amateur or well-established brand. Even if you are a newbie or an amateur, if you remain consistent, you can reap the rewards over time.
Creating a consistent brand identity requires consistent posting habits. Nothing hurts your brand more than simply creating social media accounts and then not posting to them.
When prospects, customers and your target audience search your brand on the Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or on Google and discover that you have not posted in a month or if you content is stale, they could easily assume that you either are not serious about your brand, don’t care about customers or you went out of business.
There goes your business revenue and there goes your business credibility.
Don’t complain then as to why your competitors are succeeding.
Your brand needs to fulfill the expectation of your audience. For example, if your audience expects certain content mix (videos, blogs, memes, pictures, podcasting, eMails, infographics) to be delivered to them at certain frequency on certain social networks, you need to fulfill it.
Don’t keep them wondering. Leave the guesswork out.
Best Practice #3. Repurpose Content
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time you create content.
Repurposing content will save you time! Look over your existing content and put a new spin on it. That’s what content repurposing is all about.
Most of the time required for creating content is spent in researching new content topics, digging into the facts, finding relevant pictures, etc.
Why on the earth would you only use it once?
You can easily turn a text-based blog post into a nifty looking infographic. You can use all the same statistics, but visual content will resonate with a new audience. Or you can create an educational video and convert that into an insightful blog.
You can take your lovely blog and break it down into different tweets or convert it into nifty looking microblogs that you can post on Instagram.
Taking a piece of content and let it manifest in different forms and styles is a great strategy that you, as an amateur, can readily adopt. And the best part is that this strategy also allows you to keep costs of production down while letting you increase the quantity of your content.
You see what I’m getting at?
Overall, create value for audience through different content formats. Be creative.
Play with it. See what works and what doesn’t.
Have some fun with it.
In summary, my advice is to inculcate and maintain a steady diet of healthy content marketing habits. Regardless of if you are an amateur or a seasoned company, it’ll help you sustain your brand’s tenure and credibility. Not only your team will appreciate it but your customers and target audience will thank you.
To your success!
