Do…set goals for your content strategy. What do you want to accomplish? How many leads do you want to generate? You need to set goals before you can begin strategizing.
Do…give someone the ‘lead’ on content marketing strategy. As you begin content marketing, you need to ensure that someone is in charge of the strategy. Either hire a content manager, or give someone already on your team the task of managing content.
Do…blog regularly as a cornerstone of your content strategy. No content strategy can be complete without a blog. It is the hub of your content. We’ve written a separate article called The Dos and Don’ts of Blogging. I recommend you read that.
Do…create video as part of your social media strategy. Videos can engage your target audience better, perhaps, than other medium. You can create very simple how-to videos on your smartphone and upload them to YouTube and Facebook etc. in no time. Or you can use a very basic video editing tool (most Macs have them pre-installed) and create some great content. Don’t worry so much about HD or picture quality. This generation is used to shaky YouTube videos. Creating video is more important than creating HD video.
Do…create larger consumable pieces of content like White Papers and eBooks. These should be items that visitors to your site will want to actually download. They need to be full of valuable information. These pieces of content will be your primary source of lead gen. They need to be good.
Do…try a webinar or Google+ hangout of some sort. Try sharing information with your audience en masse. We have a very successful marketing webinar series. You’ll have fits and starts. When you start, you probably won’t have very many people show up to your webinars. Don’t worry. Eventually people will starting coming to your webinars. And no matter how bad your first webinar is, don’t give up. It can’t be as bad as our first webinar.
Don’t…start and then stop your content strategy because it is too hard. For example, it is easy to blog everyday for a week. It is hard to everyday blog for 6 months.
Don’t…JUST do content marketing. Every good content marketing strategy needs a bit of paid advertising as well. Don’t think that just because you’re blogging, that you can stop doing everything else you’ve always done to market your business. Keep marketing in other ways as you ramp up your content marketing strategy.
Don’t…be afraid to stop things that aren’t working after a few months. We noticed that our video content wasn’t generating many visits to our website. In a perfect world we would continue our video content efforts until it started working. But, we don’t live in a perfect world. Instead, we live in a world with limited resources and finite budgets. So, we focused on areas that are working: the blog and our webinars.
Don’t…get frustrated. Content is hard. Don’t give up. Persist.
