How do you create killer content that cuts through the clutter and outperforms the competition? In part one of this two-part series, Daniel Benton, GM – Search, Salmat discussed the fundamentals of content marketing planning, getting to know your target market and building a relationship.
Now, in part two, Wasif Kasim, Sales & Marketing Manager – Salmat’s MessageNet, looks at:
- Getting the format right
- How to make content easy to share
- Measuring your content marketing success
- Ways to repurpose, reuse and recycle content
Step 5: Get the format right
Great content marketing is not only about what you say but how you say it. You need to consider the format (blog, video, infographic, etc.) and channel (YouTube, Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook) before getting down into the nitty gritty of the length, headlines and images you will use. To help you through this minefield, some kindly content marketers have worked out some best practices with regards to format. Here are just a few:
- Length: It’s easy to get carried away with your content marketing. You have so much to say that, before you know it, your video is 45 minutes long and your article could rival the Lord of the Rings trilogy. To keep people engaged, there’s a fine line between too little and too much. Research by Medium shows the ideal length of a blog post is 7 minutes, which equates to roughly 1,600 words. That said if your post is full of photos and graphics, the word count comes down to around 1,000 words. There is also anecdotal evidence that article length can be a ranking factor with Google.
- Headlines: With the amount of content on offer for free a headline must grab people immediately. According to KISSmetrics, we generally absorb only the first three and last three words of a headline. So if you want your entire headline to be read, try to keep it to six words.
- Structure: The key here is to have some. There’s nothing that will send people away faster than an impenetrable wall of text. In addition to the introduction and conclusion, make sure you have short sentences, short paragraphs, subtitles, bullet points and lists.
How to get started: Get to know and apply these simple best practices for each of your content marketing pieces. You’ll soon find it comes down to a lot of trial and error, which is where step 7 becomes important.
Step 6: Make it easy to share
Social media needs content, and content needs social media. They are nothing without each other, so working out how to use them together is essential to your success. First, your content needs to be designed and built for the social web. This means making sure social sharing buttons are prominent and easy to find, and showing how many times the article has been tweeted or shared. It’s also critical to populate and customise the open graph tags within the pages metadata (if the content is published on a website you have control of) to make sure its descriptive and accurate when appearing in users news feeds. Lastly you also need to share the right mix of content on each of your social networks. This means testimonials and random (yet relevant) content, as well as your own original branded content that is valuable to your audience.
How to get started: Look at every piece of content and ask, “Can the audience easily share this amongst their networks?” and if shared “will the image, headline and snippet attract enough attention to win the users click”. It’s equally important to make sure the share buttons are always easy to find and use and that the open graph data is customised, descriptive and compelling.
Step 7: Measure content
There’s no use in investing in content marketing if you don’t know its impact on your audience and your bottom line. Content marketing needs to drive online conversions – leads, closed sales, organic search and referral traffic must be tied to real business results if you are to prove any return on investment. This means your content must be properly optimised to convert and measure all traffic and leads, not just search visibility and ranking. However, according to the Content Marketing in Australia 2015: Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, 44% of Australian marketers struggle to measure the effectiveness of their content marketing.
How to get started: There are a number of simple ways to measure your content:
- Gauge the rise or fall in your brand sentiment through social media, by measuring status updates, tweets and more.
- Measuring an increase of organic traffic from search engines to your website and then measure the quality of user engagement (bounce rate, time on site, depth of visit). This determines whether your content is attracting the right kind of traffic.
- Measure if the content you are publishing is attracting inbound links and citations. An objective is to craft content that attracts organic inbound links for blogs, forums and other websites which can have a huge positive. impact on seo
- Measure quality social interactions for each piece of content, so you can see if your content resonates with your audience.
- Monitor the amount of tweets, retweets, shares, likes, mentions, comments, and more.
- Look at the on-site engagement generated by the traffic. Where is the audience going after they read/view the content?
- Measure increases in lead generation, subscriptions to email lists, and social media followers.
Then continuously test, measure, and refine your content marketing to get the best results.
Step 8: Reuse, repurpose, recycle
One of the biggest misconceptions of content marketing is that once a content piece has been released and promoted, it is finished with. Oh, what a missed opportunity. Old content has the potential to be reused long into the future and in many ways.
How to get started: Don’t let your good content go to waste. Use your content marketing schedule to plan ahead and recycle old content:
- Change the format: Transform a blog post into a presentation, podcast or video
- Refresh: Update content with new information or add new material
- Link back: Continuously link back to old videos and blogs
- Follow-up: Write a follow-up post about how things have changed since the original blog
- Socialise: Post social updates linking to older posts, thereby directing people to valuable content they might not find otherwise
- Expand your lists: Take your “listicles” and turn them into individual posts
The Bottom Line
Content marketing doesn’t have to be difficult; mostly it comes down to good planning and a good deal of trial and error. To truly tap into the power of content, you need to stick with it and continually build and share quality content that truly engages people. Only then can you expect to build stronger relationships with your audience and stand out in this content-driven world.
