Most novice content marketers dive into churning out lots of content because they believe the more content they produce, the better placed they are. But there is nothing further from the truth. Yes, content is king, but that is not to say that all you need is more content. The latest numbers from the content marketing institute paint a grim picture – only 30% of content marketers are positive that their content marketing strategy is yielding desirable results.
Meanwhile, 76% of the content marketers say they are not only producing more content, but they are also planning to scale up their content production in the next couple of months. Evidently, the answer is not in more content.
What you really need is a simple content strategy. A simple content strategy will help you be more effective in your content marketing even with very little content. The following questions can help you define and/or refine a simple content marketing strategy:
1. Why – if you do not understand the why of content marketing, your strategy has already failed. Understanding the why starts with knowing the objectives of the business. If you are running an online store, the primary business objective is to increase conversions. But there are other business objectives that can be achieved by content marketing e.g. branding, customer service, community building, market research and public relations. Before you embark on creating content, you must first establish which business objective you are trying to achieve.
2. Who – this question helps you to create content that is audience-sensitive. If content does not solve the need of the reader, your reader will most likely ignore it. Take time to understand your audience and what makes them tick. The idea is to create content that is specific to your target audience. For instance, writing content for a female audience is very different from writing for a male audience. But gender is still a very wide demographic – go deeper and refine the audience to more specifics e.g. the age groups, the geographic location, education level etc.
3. What – this question deals with the specifics of the content creation. After deciding the why and the who, you now have to determine the best type of content for your audience and organizational needs. Content must be both relevant to your audience as well as achieve your organizational goals. This is where most content marketers fail – you must resist from blindly following trends and just focus on what your audience really needs.
Effective content marketing is not all about creating more content. There are so many content marketing options and no company can afford to do everything – but you shouldn’t even be trying to do everything anyway. The modern internet user is already suffering from information overload, and it is therefore irresponsible to continue blindly adding to the content noise. Every content marketer should simplify their content marketing strategy because working smarter is more efficient and effective than working harder.
