Give people great content and they will give you their
time, their attention, their loyalty, even their money. But there’s a
catch? It isn’t easy to create great content. For every viral Volvo advert featuring Jean Claude Van Damme
doing epic splits across moving trucks, digital platforms are awash
with thousands of videos that nobody watches and articles that nobody
reads.
Ok so you might not have the budget to pull off this kind of thing, but it doesn’t just come down to money.
The truth is that the majority of content
marketing out there is doomed to relative insignificance. Creating
great content is just one aspect of creating great content marketing
campaigns. There are many more considerations to bear in mind and
ignoring any one can mean the difference between failure and success.
Below are our 12 steps to creating epically good content campaigns.
1. Focus your aim
What do you want your content to achieve? Do you want to sell more products, drive traffic to website pages,
get likes or retweets, raise awareness of your brand, explain details
of a new product or position yourself as a thought leader? You can’t
create high performance content without addressing this fundamental
question. It helps your campaign stay focused and shapes the types of
content that you will create.
2. Be true to your core values
You can’t be something you’re not. Volvo
isn’t a sporty car brand. A Stannah Stairlift isn’t a cool home
accessory. To create great content, you need to work with the essence of
your brand. Are you funny or serious? Important? Well-liked? Expensive?
Useful? Isolate this value, cherish it and use it as the foundation of
your content.
3. Understand your audience
It’s critical that you don’t skip this
step. A great content campaign isn’t a fire-and-forget broadcast. It
needs to be targeted to reach your intended audience and potential
customers. But who are they really? To answer this question you have to
look beyond the cold demographic data sat in your market research files.
Where do they hang out and what platforms do they use? What type of
content do they consume the most? Do they read long or short articles,
watch YouTube videos or Vines, engage with Facebook discussions or
Twitter hashtags? Attention spans these days are low but tolerance for
boredom is lower even still. You could have only one chance to hook your
intended audience in, so make sure you get it right first time.
4. Think like a publisher
A great content campaign works in a cycle
– entertain your audience, attract new people, keep those people,
encourage them to come back for more and stop them from going elsewhere.
Don’t trust to chance. Don’t make things up as you go. Think like a
publisher and put an effective strategy in place to plan what you will
say, how you will say it and where you will publish it.
5. Tap into emotion
What sets great content apart from
ordinary content? Emotion. Great content stirs something primal inside
its audience – happiness, sadness, excitement, disbelief, curiosity,
wonder, anger, agreement, and so on. Balancing logic and emotion in your marketing,
across all your content, is key to both informing the world about your
amazing product or service whilst building genuine brand personality.
But whilst it’s important to convey the facts about your service or
product, if your content doesn’t elicit an emotion, then you’re doing it
wrong. Go back to step 3 and try again.
6. Make the right type of content
Emotion is your hook. Virgin Atlantic’s
curated Instagram galleries give viewers an inspirational insider’s view
of Tokyo and San Francisco. While Intel’s IQ website spins away from
Intel’s processor business to explore the outer edges of tomorrow’s
exciting software and technology innovation. Hook your reader with
emotion first, encouraging them to seek out more facts and detailed
information later.
7. Let other people do the work
Making great content is hard work.
But you don’t need to do it all yourself. Repurpose and recycle
existing content into new formats on new platforms. Encourage people to
talk about it and share it. If the content is ‘great’ enough, people may
even pay to be associated with it.
8. Be more social
Don’t broadcast. Instead, take part, be genuine and engage with your audience.
9. Create content guidelines (and stick to them)
Ensure the consistency of your content
and your message by creating a set of guidelines that cover tone of
voice, design, attitude, use of humour, words you can (and can’t use),
spellings and appropriate visuals. The Content Marketing Institute’s
blog guidelines, for example, show the type of posts that they are
looking and the key elements that those posts need to be accepted (e.g.
real-life examples; videos, photos, charts, screenshots and other visual
content; specific and actionable recommendations for readers).
10. Plan it out
Make a content map. Define the type of
reader or viewer that you’re hoping to reach and the stage in the sales
funnel that the content fits into – e.g. building awareness, creating a
deeper interest, helping them to evaluate your product or service, and
supporting them after they have committed to you and fulfilled the
content goal.
11. Don’t just press publish, shout!!
Every minute, on average, Google receives over 4 million search queries per minute, 70 hours of video get uploaded to YouTube and Instagram users post over 200,000 new images.
Your content won’t stand out unless you shout about it. Spend 10-20% of
campaign budget on seeding. Think digital ads, Youtube ads and blog
placements, plus blog write-ups, digital PR, retweets and social media
outreach.
12. Measure and change
Define how you’ll measure success? Look
back at your goals (step 1). What metric matters most to you? Is it
views, visitors, retweets, click throughs, an increase in traffic or a
reduction in bounce rate? Use appropriate tools (Google Analytics,
Hootsuite, etc) to track the performance of each piece of content you
create and use the data to assess whether it succeeded or failed in its
goal. Did you succeed? Then do more of what works. Fail? Change your
approach and try, try again.
This post was written by Jon Mowat,
who is a former BBC film maker and now runs British based video
production and marketing company, Hurricane Media. You can follow Hurricane on Google+, Twitter or Facebook.
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