Marketers claim that content is king and with good reason. In fact, content marketing is the most effective and most efficient type of marketing today. Not only does content help business engage with their target audience, but it also gives customers something of value, such as information, education, and entertainment. Businesses that leverage content marketing is renowned for having customer’s needs in mind and not just for pushing sales pitches.
However, content used in marketing campaigns has to be highly relevant to the customers. 61% of consumers in the U.S. stated that they prefer relevant offers, while 70% of consumers claim that they get annoyed when they receive content that isn’t relevant to them.
That’s why it’s of the utmost importance to create content that will not only be relevant but informative, entertaining and top quality as well. Nonetheless, designing an effective content marketing strategy that can truly capture the attention of everyone you’re trying to reach, demands a lot of attention, effort, and dedication.
source: Pexels
What is quality content?
Quality content isn’t just an interesting article that you post on a famous blog or a website; it’s a sum of every type of digital content that you include in your marketing campaign and that you deliver to the customers.
That consists of, display ads and banner ads posted on various websites, landing pages that have specific design and messages to encourage visitors to perform the desired action (CTA), visual aspects of your content, such as images, videos, infographics that will engage customers. Even personalized emails that promote updates, sales, discounts or personalized offers are part of your content. Not to mention interactive content, such as games quizzes and contests. In short, quality content is every bit of content you will use in your campaign that will help you pique your customer’s interests and help you engage with them.
That’s why creating an effective marketing campaign requires you to design a funnel that will capture the interest of your audience and lead them towards what you want them to do while supplying them with quality content each step of the way. However, creating such a funnel requires detailed work and a well-designed workflow will help you realize that goal much more effectively. Here’s an example of a good workflow.
Create a content plan
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Creating a content strategy plan is essential in defining your goals and determining how to achieve them. To create such a plan, you must bring your content marketing teams together and decide what needs to be done and how. For instance, a cloud project management tool can greatly assist you in assigning specific tasks, managing time, visualizing steps and updating your teams in real time to improve their effectiveness. Designing a plan requires detailed research. For example:
- Who are you creating content for? – Who is your target audience? What are their buying personas? What type of content appeals to them the most? What are their preferences?
- Why are you creating content? – Are you attracting new customers or engaging with existing ones? Do you need more conversions or are you trying to drive loyalty?
- What type of content do you need? – Who are you creating the content for and for what purpose will determine what type of content you need? For instance, guest post articles with visual content combined with promotional videos and social media contest can be used to drive new product sales. Also, how much value must content offer to customers, to engage them.
Identify assets
After determining what kind of content is required for your campaign, you can focus on giving it form. For example, how will you try to reach your audience: social media, your blog, email newsletters, forums and what content will be most welcomed such as article posts, images, videos, ads, etc.? Once you have a list of assets required for the campaign you can assign roles to members of your teams.
source: Pexels
Assign tasks
You can assign a specific task to your teams to improve their collaboration and effectiveness. For instance, social media marketers to create buzz on the social media platforms, email marketers to design promotional email and create a list of contacts, designers to create visual content for the campaigns including videos, pictures, banners, etc., writers to write articles and social media posts, editors to make sure articles and posts are in order and so on and so forth.
That way, every team has a specific task and they can focus on that task more efficiently. After all, when everyone knows what they have to do and what needs to be done they can collaborate to maximize their efforts.
Set timeframes
Determine how long it will take to complete specific tasks and schedule them so that you can create a reasonable deadline. That way everyone will know when their task is due and can focus on completing it. Also, you’ll give your stakeholders insight about when will the marketing campaign be ready for launch.
Test and measure
Once your campaign is ready for launch, you can perform A/B testing to ensure its effectiveness and measure your success rate. That way you’ll know if your campaign will do what it’s supposed to do and you’ll know whether it needs improvements or not. Make sure you pay attention to headlines, images, and calls to action (CTA) when performing testing.
Workflows can really help you out in creating a truly awesome marketing campaign. Just make sure you identify all the key points of your strategy and design a workflow that will best suit your teams.
Oscar Waterworth is content marketing and link building professional, a writer and one of the editors at Bizzmarkblog. I have been building links and writing content for the past 3 years.