5 Reasons Priorities Are The Key To Effective Content Marketing

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What’s the most important part of your business? Which industry topics do your clients care the most about? How do you measure their interest? There are many questions you need to answer to create an effective content marketing strategy. While the answer to each one of them is different, they’re all based on priorities.

Content marketing has become a big part of most digital marketing strategies, with every business looking for ways to draw in potential clients and build their own online content resources. The trouble is, many of these companies are only creating content because they know they should, they haven’t defined exactly what the content is supposed to do. As a result, their content strategies often end up a little disjointed and their returns fairly mixed.

You can generate traffic, and sales, with an unfocused content marketing strategy. All content has a certain level of effectiveness. But the results alone don’t prove that you’re strategy is fulfilling all of its potential. To truly realize the potential in your content marketing strategy, you need to ensure you are prioritizing correctly.

You’ve Got So Much To Say

The goal in content marketing is to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise, while fulfilling a client’s immediate need. Your sales team then follows up to meet the short, medium and long-term needs that follow. The natural assumption is that your content should cover every facet of your business. And it should, but not straight away. If you try to cover everything, you will get bogged down in issues that are unlikely to generate revenue. Whenever you consider topics for website pages, whitepapers or blog posts, make sure you have a clear strategy on who you’re targeting and why. If you’re creating content on a topic simply because you haven’t covered it yet, you may need to reconsider.

You Have Access To Everyone

You need to prioeitize because, technically speaking, your content could reach anyone. If oyu keep cranking out content about your industry, some people will read it and some may even interact. But if there is no clear sales and marketing strategy behind that content then it may not be reaching the right people. Every piece of content should have a clear, identifiable target client in mind. Otherwise you’re creating content for content’s sake. That strategy is rarely effective.

Focused Beats Comprehensive (Every Time)

The point here is that every business has a market in which it is most effective. Your content is the same. If you offer IT consulting and the majority of your new clients need troubleshooting advice, your content should be based in that area. You may offer network setup and maintenance services but content in that area holds little value against troubleshooting content that regularly generates sales.

Not All Social Channels Are Created Equal

The same goes for social media strategy. While it’s important to have a presence everywhere, each social network has its own unique user base. You should always prioritize the community most likely to create revenue. Analyze your traffic from each social media channel and push your focused content through the most effective channels. If you’re spending time creating and sharing content that’s generating little actual value, that time may have been better applied elsewhere.

Your Online Presence Will Evolve

The mistake most businesses make is in assuming that they need to create an online presence in one hit. In truth online presences evolve on a day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute basis. You can add to a solid base of content, you can always grow your output. What you can’t do is run your business on future revenue. Create a focused, effective presence and nurture it. Otherwise you’ll finding yourself working on a comprehensive content strategy that may never come.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Eoin Keenan
Media and Content Manager at Silicon Cloud. We help businesses to drive leads and build customer relationships through online marketing and social media. I blog mainly about social media & marketing, with some tech thrown in for good measure. All thoughts come filtered through other lives in finance, ecommerce, customer service and journalism.

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