Ever thought about why your business should consider content marketing? What we are seeing now, especially online, is a land grab for audiences. Advertising is inefficient and mostly ineffective in a lot of cases. If you are going to vie for attention and build an audience, think of that audience as your future customer list. Once you build that audience, you are ready to navigate clearly through the bushes of social media through content marketing.
Content marketing is the most economical form of marketing. You could spend a ton of money with Google and Facebook to get a tiny bit of reach to an audience that may spend seconds with you, or you could invest that money in building content that could potentially work for you forever. While the shelf life of a lot of activities you do for paid or organic social is concise, a blog post you write today could still draw an audience to you years from now. The long-term potential is massive.
To get results with content marketing, you must consistently create indispensable content. Adopt the mindset that you can be the leading expert in something and will be creating content that’s different from what everyone else is doing.
These 5 steps in content marketing strategy will help you figure out why you are doing content marketing, what kind of content makes sense for you, and who your audience is.
#1 Identity Your Sweet Spot
The first step is to find your sweet spot. This involves identifying what expertise you can offer pinpointing what your audience is struggling with and making connections between the two.
On one side of the page, list your skills and expertise. You are the best judge of yourself. You know more about your business than anyone else. What do you know more about than anyone else? Next to that, write down the pain points of your audience. What keeps them up at night? The intersection of these two lists will give you a good starting spot for creating the best content ideas that will mesh with your audience’s needs.
#2 Find your Content Tilt
Your sweet spot is just the starting point. Now you need to take it a step further and find your differentiation area, or “content tilt.” You can’t just create the same content that everybody else is offering and expect to stand out. You need to find an area with little to no competition where you can break through all of the noise and build an audience.
#3 Choose a Platform to focus on
Now you need to pick your core platform to build your audience. Based on who you are targeting and your content tilt, choose your content type—audio, video, or text plus image. Then select your home base. YouTube for video? Apple Music or Spotify for your podcast? A WordPress blog for your text plus image? Instagram for your pictures?
#4 Build an Audience
The 9-12 months you spend focusing on the base leads to audience-building. This is where social media comes in. If you decide you are going to be on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, remember that you don’t control any of those connections. Those followers or subscribers are Twitter’s, Facebook’s, or YouTube’s, not yours. The platforms are letting you use their audience right now.
You need to have a plan to ascend the subscriber hierarchy and move into the email. You are moving from rented to owned. If you have built your platform on YouTube and have amassed 10,000 subscribers, start building a plan for some kind of email offering down the road.
To know more about social media marketing and how it can be your charmer read here
#5 Generate Revenue
For the first 9-12 months, you do not want to have any revenue expectations. It doesn’t mean you won’t get revenue. Just keep your expectations low because it takes time to build a loyal audience.
After about 12-18 months, you will be in the revenue sweet spot. With the loyal audience you have developed, you can generate revenue in lots of different ways. You could sell advertising sponsorships, do conferences and events, sell premium content like books, ask for donations, and use affiliate marketing.