It’s almost the beginning of a new year – a time when many people consider how they can get closer to accomplishing their personal and professional goals. If you’re looking for ways to make 2016 the best year yet for your company, you might want to evaluate your content marketing strategy.
Content marketing – the combination of advertising, storytelling, and technology – lets you reach and engage your target audience with relevant and high-quality content. Done right, it will bring many benefits, ranging from increased sales to better customer retention to transforming how customers perceive your brand.
If your company wants to bolster its marketing efforts in 2016, consider implementing the following five recommendations for effectively creating and distributing engaging content.
Create an Editorial Calendar
To successfully attract and retain customers through content marketing, it helps to have a strategy and a plan for the topics you’d like to cover to ensure you stay relevant and gain visibility. Create an editorial calendar based on how you can tie content creation to holidays and significant events in your industry. For example, if you’re in the healthcare industry, you can plan on building content around the Health Information and Management Systems Society’s annual health IT conference, the HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition.
Stay on Top of Trends
In addition to including holidays, conferences, and other events you can count on in your editorial calendar, it’s also important to leave room for trend pieces and content related to breaking news stories that spring up during the year. If you provide cybersecurity services and a major retailer experiences a data breach, for instance, you can comment on the incident and offer expert advice for other companies looking to avoid similar issues.
Pay Attention to Analytics
Successful marketing involves not just creating content but also using analytics to prove ROI and determine what works and what doesn’t for your target audience. Be sure to note which types of content generate the most traffic and engage potential customers the most. Does your target audience prefer videos, or are they more inclined toward long, in-depth articles? Knowing the answers to those types of questions will help you refine your content creation efforts.
Build Relationships With Influencers
Find out who is highly influential in your industry and work on developing relationships with them. Follow them on Twitter, comment on their blog posts, and/or reach out to them and let them know you’re a fan of their work and would like to potentially collaborate. Good influencer relationships can be the key to successful marketing and help your content – and your company – gain visibility.
Repurpose Existing Content
If you’re worried you won’t have the time to generate engaging content on a regular basis, remember that you can always repurpose content you’ve already created. If you write an ebook, you could turn individual chapters into blog entries, for example. You could create infographics based on blog entries. There are plenty of ways to recycle content you’ve already created.
If you’d like more information and/or need guidance for coming up with a killer content marketing strategy, contact the content marketing experts at Traffic Jams by calling (855) 599-9998 or emailing sales@trafficjams.com. We can help make 2016 a great year for your business.
