Quick, how many times do you pick up your phone in a day? Research says the average adult picks up their phone 58 times per day. For a company, that’s 58 chances to draw a potential consumer, establish brand awareness, and close on a new customer. With the rise in competition and audiences who are more discerning, it is incredibly difficult for brands to stand out.
With such a dense content landscape, how do you stand out? Here are some best practices to ensure that you’re constantly winning in the content marketing game by standing out above the crowd:
Prioritize Data
The importance of data is growing each passing year as it is critical to determining what channels, mediums and types of content perform best.
Big companies are leaning more on efforts that look to expand brand impact and often rely on content creation groups, who tend to have experience creating content for developing mediums. They then take data from those experiments to see what works and then apply that towards establishing a brand presence over the new media.
Doing this might mean taking some alterations to what your content is actually saying over these platforms. However, if you have a strong brand voice and can make the connection between the topic and what your organization is doing, it can be a powerful way to make compelling content. Done well and the company establishes itself as an authority on that topic or area.
Data is also critical to identify areas to enhance the product side. Companies can notice trends in usage by looking at how consumers use products, and then work with partners to more effectively position the product to increase revenue.
Taking the information you know about your market, a company can use the data to determine growth opportunities. Once that opportunity is recognized, you can develop a product and launch strategy that improves the bottom line from the gathered data.
It’s important to consider different data sources when forming your strategies. In taking a wider lens to your data inputs, it provides a more comprehensive competitive landscape and leads to better campaigns.
If you’re looking to break into this space, look for practical ways to gain experience using data. Even if it isn’t purely for marketing, show you understand how to gather, analyze and create actionable plans from that information.
Don't be afraid to recycle content
With customers being better equipped to navigate the ever growing mediums and content for those mediums, content marketers must have a diverse set of content which can be ready for reuse for different parts of the marketing process.
Preparing content to be adaptable for both annual and quarterly needs can be done by taking account of what the needs are for those specific time frames, and then adjusting content according to your goals.
Determining those needs in part takes some reflection of your potential customers. Being able to clearly map out how this content can potentially impact a customer is important for figuring out how to link what customers are looking for with your brand’s core message.
There isn’t one right way to go about this process. Some of this content generation can be paid and some organic, and the themes don’t necessarily have to be the same for every content piece. Success is dictated on how content can be adapted.
The bottom line is you don’t have to constantly be creating brand new content. Look at what content is performing well and then figure out different ways to present this content so you don’t have to constantly be starting from scratch.
Have content that focuses both on product and values
One of the recent trends in marketing has been “purpose-driven marketing” and the notion that consumers want to be affiliated with brands that share the same values and ethics as the consumers.
While effective, these methods need to be balanced with using marketing to highlight the product or service. Too much value driven marketing and you risk losing consumers and losing your companies own values. Too little, purpose driven marketing and consumers don’t feel connected to the brand.
Ultimately this balance can be achieved through clear articulation of your organization’s product and purpose.
Learn to love automation
Great marketing is more than simply using great content to build a brand. It is also measured by how it impacts total business expansion. To have content that efficiently converts visitors into customers, more marketers are turning to AI.
One of the ways AI can help with content marketing is having different variations of what a visitor might see. Instead of having to manually manage all the different ad links and corresponding landing pages, artificial intelligence can manage that process for you.
While it can be difficult to give up control of these areas to someone, or something else, using AI to take over some of your operations can allow your company to run much smoother.
Always be thinking about engagement
You might think that content can only rest as text on your website. Think bigger. For starters, finding dynamic ways to highlight your company and brand is a great way to engage current and new customers. Multimedia, video and audio (in the form of podcasts) is a great way to show customers what your company is about while engaging different mediums.
Social media here can play a big part of this as well. Social media is especially valuable for having User Generated Content (UGC). Sometimes your customers can do a great job of creating content with your product or service. By highlighting these creative efforts you are also creating a sense of loyalty between your brand and your customers.
Want to get hired creating cool dynamic content?
Let us at JobPrepped help you launch your marketing career quickly. At JobPrepped, we not only train you on how to create amazing content, but we also give you immediate work experience which is a big reason why 94.3% of JobPrepped students get marketing interviews or job offers within 3 weeks. If you’re ready to launch your career, check out JobPrepped as we’ve helped 3,000+ people get their first marketing job and we’d love to help you get hired quickly too!
Good luck out there!
By Guest Writer,
Eric Saltzman
