We’ve received a fair amount of publicity recently for our 150 blog posts in 50 days content marketing effort. And we’ve since received a lot of requests from companies asking that we advise them on their own content marketing efforts.
We can help you with that!
In the next several days we’re going to outline the critical steps and keys to effective content marketing. Here’s our first installment: 5 Steps to Effective Content Marketing
1) Set Goals
This is where most marketing plans fall flat. Far too many marketers begin executing tactics before they set goals about what they want those tactics to accomplish. In other words, they start writing stuff before they determine what they’re writing about, who they’re writing to, and even what they want out of all this writing.
What is your goal? What do you want to accomplish? Do you want your blog readership to go up? By how much? Do you want to get clients and leads from your blog? How many each month?
Set these goals before you do anything else. Failing to do this will sink your content strategy before it is even launched.
2) Develop a Strategy
Content strategy doesn’t exclusively mean blogging. Webinars, videos, podcasts, pictures, memes, interviews, White Papers, eBooks and a host of other things could be part of your content strategy.
Our content strategy is centered around webinars and blogging. That doesn’t mean yours has to be.
You need to determine what tactics you want to employ (blogging, webinars, video, etc.) and then determine how often you want to employ them (weekly, monthly, daily, etc.).
3) Come Up With Titles
This might be the most challenging part of the whole process. It is easy to say that you want to write 100 blogs. It is harder to determine exactly what those 100 blogs will discuss and to come up with titles for each of them.
To get started we suggest coming up with a spreadsheet of titles and simply brainstorming. Look for ways to write multiple blog posts about the same subject. For example, instead of just writing one blog post about call tracking, we’ve written hundreds of blog posts on call tracking.
4) Produce the Content
If you’ve got the right people in place to help you, this isn’t hard. If you don’t, this is impossible.
5) Measure
Google Analytics should become your best friend. Obviously traffic–organic traffic, referral traffic, direct traffic–should be Key Performance Indicators of your strategy. Are they going up, or are they going down? You should establish short-term and long-term benchmarks for traffic. How much traffic do you want next week? How much traffic do you want next year?
In the medium-term you need to worry about phone calls. Calls are more valuable and better leads than clicks. Callers buy more often. And phone calls are simple to track with call tracking.
In the long-term, you need to worry about revenue. After 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, is your content strategy producing customers? If it isn’t, stop doing it.
Never be so ‘married’ to something that you lose the ability to rationally analyze data.
Why do we care about your content marketing?
Good question. We are, after all, a call tracking company. We’re not a content marketing company.
We care because we want you to get more traffic. If you get more traffic, you’ll get more phone calls and eventually you’ll need call tracking.
We care because we want you to buy call tracking 🙂
