Elizabeth Taylor, Senior Trainer at ClickAcademy Asia, shares her top tips when creating a Strategic Content Marketing, as opposed to creating content.
Content marketing is a strategic approach.
A brand needs a lot of content in order to be marketed, but that doesn’t mean that the brand is doing content marketing. In order to have a strategic approach, your content marketing should focus on achieving one of your business goals.
For example, if I were to run a gym, and I was trying to get increase brand awareness to people that hadn’t heard about my gym. Then pushing content out on existing channels is not a strategic approach. However, using content to engage with new customers either through partnerships, or paid advertising – is a strategic approach to getting brand awareness.
If you’re doing content marketing, and you’re taking a strategic approach, your content should focus on your audience. The business focus shouldn’t be on content creation, it should be about what your audience wants. A couple of things you can do – is to provide value to your audience, maybe solve a problem or a challenge that they might have or build an engaged community.
For example, someone who is running a restaurant and pushing images and videos out of the food they provide is not necessarily focused on their target audience. If, however, they try to ask questions to see what their favourite items on that menu were or to get feedback or maybe something they’ve taken off the menu that everybody really misses, then that’s building up an engaged community, and it’s focusing on your customers as opposed to content creation.
Strategic content marketing is also about having a planned and considered approach to influence your customer behaviour.
For example, if you run a travel company, you might use some content to do paid advertising to get customers onto your website – that’s the first stage. After that, you might want to keep them on your website and you might want to get their email address, in order to further influence their behaviour. So, you might want to create some content like ‘Top 10 Staycation Guide in Singapore’, and for them to download in exchange for their email address.
You might then want to do some content to inform them about your services and your products that you can send out an email, say, 1 to 2 weeks later. Then you might want to give them an offer or promotions – (i.e. if they refer a friend, they get a discount or they get a special product), so that you’d be moving them through the customer journey, in order to influence their behaviour in some way.
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Complete 4 two-day modules to receive a Specialist Certificate in Content Marketing.