If it’s not obvious by now, the rules of marketing have changed forever.
Traditional marketing no longer works the way it used to because the consumer is now in complete control. If they can’t easily find you and you don’t provide a reason for them to pay attention to you, they won’t. Like never before, telling interesting stories is a much better way to get attention and engage with new prospects and existing customers.
A new requirement to always be publishing.
To succeed today, every business must now continuously create compelling and valuable content. In addition, they must distribute this content through a variety of online channels, as well as actively participate in online communities where they can influence others to further the reach of their content.
The practice of creating relevant and compelling content in a consistent fashion to a targeted prospect, focusing on all stages of the buying process, from brand awareness through to brand evangelism, has come to be known as Content Marketing. It includes strategic planning, content creation, distribution, and analysis of the multiple stages of the buying cycle to targeted customer personnas.
Always be branding—wherever your prospects happen to be.
Today, a complete content marketing strategy should take a holistic approach to meet an organization’s overall marketing goals. And that means that content marketers should be “channel-agnostic” and consider every channel to engage with customers including online, mobile, in-person, and traditional media.
It has become abundantly clear that there are no silver bullets in marketing today. Because achieving meaningful business and marketing objectives is often solved with a combination of efforts, not by just putting all of your eggs in one basket.
To that end, I offer a short list of some best practices to follow to help you stretch your content creation efforts in today’s never-ending requirement to market your value and influence a target audience.
1. | Write an original blog post
As William F. Buckley, Jr. once said, “If you can’t write, you can’t think.” And today, the written word carries more weight than ever. Especially if it is full of key words that are aligned with the value that your offer so that people can find it as they search the web. Great written content can be wasted if it is not optimized for search by integrating proven SEO techniques.
2. | Turn key points into a slide show
Bring your content to life with images, graphics and visuals that enhance the opportunity for your target to remember and retain the essential elements and key thoughts. Presentation specialist, Nancy Duarte (and some of her team), offer some great tips on storytelling and how to make a presentation engaging for an audience.
3. | Record a podcast summary
Is there a better way to tell a story than to use your voice to tell the story? Turn the written copy in your post into a podcast audio recording that provides all of the opportunity to use pacing, inflection and audible volume to enhance the key elements of your post in a way that is memorable and different from the ordinary. To create your own podcast, check out this post by Ed Grabianowski that breaks down the gear, process and basics to get you started.
4. | Mash your mp3 audio and slideshow into a video
With simple tools like iMovie, you can combine your podcast and slide show into a compelling video that brings together sight, sound, and motion to make an impression and impact on your audience. And once that video is in the can, posting it on YouTube is the best way possible to extend its reach as YouTube is now the third most popular search destination on the web.
5. | Curate related blog posts into an eBook
Listening has never been more important and finding related content has never been easier by searching the web. Curating, editing and turning what others have created on your post topic can extend the reach of your content by providing additional perspectives, insights or points of view that you may not have addressed. Organizing and integrating that into a downloadable eBook is easy with applications like Adobe Acrobat Pro. Including links to the original source content can help with content credibility.
6. | Use post parts to respond to blog inquires and comments
If you’ve invested in creating great original content, make sure others benefit from it by including links to the content in reply’s that you make to other blog posts or community forums. It’s a great way to foster thought leadership and support your position as an expert in your domain of expertise.
7. | Snip you post into engaging Tweets
One of the best channels available to broadcast your value and generate awareness of your content is Twitter. So take full advantage of it by slicing up the key points of your blog post and turning them into bite-sized, 140 character Tweets that include a link back to the post that has all of the details of your content.
What are you doing to stretch your content value?
Share your thoughts or techniques and we will include them on our list. Looking forward to hearing from you!
As president and creative director of TeamworksCom, Paul develops brand strategy, engineers content to express customer value and creates integrated online and content marketing solutions to help businesses succeed. Connect with Paul, send an Email, or just call 415.789.5830.