Content can be used to reach out to a new audience or to engage with an existing market base. Take Microsoft’s blog aptly titled “Stories” which invited audiences to go behind the scenes for a look into life at Microsoft. This new take on blogging or vlogging gives Microsoft a more human touch which helps them connect with their audience.

Content Marketing Campaign

In this article, we take a look at 5 ways for you to create a content marketing campaign that actually works.

Specify Your Goals

An effective content marketing campaign starts when you begin setting your goals. Having a clear set of objectives ensures that you’re able to stay on track throughout the course of your campaign.

From producing content targeted at nobody to missing the target audience entirely, too many businesses have become derailed by aimless marketing campaigns. Before getting started, have a meeting with your team to determine what are the objectives of this campaign.

Are you looking to engage with your existing audience? Or maybe you’re looking to tap into a new market?

These questions lay the groundwork for the objectives of your campaign. Having determined what your goals are, you’re now ready to move on to the next phase.

Set Key-Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Key-performance indicators or KPIs provide you with a means to measure your performance. With a set of KPIs in place, you’ll be able to determine how bad or good your campaign is doing. Ideally, you’ll want to use several metrics when determining your KPIs.

Items such as sales figures, traffic and revenue are some of the items that can be used. For example, an increase in revenues and traffic could be an indicator that your content marketing campaign is able to successfully generate interest in your business.

On the other hand, falling traffic could be an indicator that your campaign is ineffective or not reaching the right audience.

Know Your Audience

As one of the greatest admen of all time, David Ogilvy said; “The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife”. In order to engage with your customers, it’s crucial that you understand them and what their needs are.

Take as example the Major League of Baseball who uses Social CRM techniques to engage their fans. With these tools, they produce a back and forth interaction with fans, making sure the fans and MLB expert picks are feeling like they are in the dugout, even if they are not even in the stadium.

Over the years, some of the best marketing campaigns have come about because their creators understood and respected their customers. Take the example also of HubSpot with their innovative approach to marketing. Recognizing the fact that their target market consists of marketers and salespeople, HubSpot produces top-quality content aimed at helping their audience improve themselves.

From detailed and authoritative guides on marketing to free e-books and webinars, HubSpot have been able to position themselves as a top resource for everything related to sales and marketing. Being in the business of selling sales and marketing software, this strategy has no doubt been proven to be an effective one.

Engage Visually with Your Audience

Visual content is one of the most effective methods of engaging with your audience. As can be seen, GoPro clearly understands this. The image of one of their cameras covered in dirt and water highlights what a rugged piece of equipment they’re selling.

Besides that, it offers a promise. A promise of a wild and fun experience that appeals to the adventurer inside all of us. These striking visuals allows GoPro to relate with their audience on a truly personal level.

Besides staying within the consciousness of your audience, visual content is also more easily shared with your audience. From a study, it was determined that 39% of consumers were more likely to share visual content on social media as compared to more traditional articles.

With visual content being one of the fastest growing trends on social media, it would be folly to ignore this trend.

Using Automation

In today’s competitive economy, it’s ever more important for businesses to remain relevant. With the power of social media, a well-planned content marketing campaign can go a long way towards helping you win new customers.

From understanding sales funnel anatomy to mastering your content, you too can create automated sales funnels that convert. Just because your funnels are automated doesn’t mean they can’t be personal, authentic, and ideal for your client. Don’t believe this stigma around automation.

In reality, automation is more than just a time saver. It lets you strike while the lead’s hot to make more of every email. Are you ready to automate? What’s holding you back? It’s time to join the new era of sales funnel marketing to take your business to new heights.

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B2B Content Marketing Agency London

Marketing Fundamentals Ltd is a B2B Content Marketing Agency in London that creates Content and manages Social Media for Professional Services firms. We hope you find this information useful.

If you would like our help creating and executing a Content Marketing Plan for your business or organisation give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247. You can also email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com

On our YouTube channel you will find marketing advice, business advice & inspiration. Subscribe if you work in Marketing for Professional Services or are a business owner or solo-preneur trying to grow your business. New uploads on Wednesdays.

Best regards,

Author Benjamin Lee for Marketing Fundamentals Team

This is blog post number 520.

Image credit: Pixabay

The post Developing a Content Marketing Campaign that Actually Works appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.

Hello everyone. In the online environment everyone wants instant results. If you are a regular reader of this blog you will know that Content Marketing will not deliver instant results. However, you will see a good return on the time that you have invested in it when you consistently produce content that is of value to your audience. This good return will come in the form of leads and sales. To read more on this subject please read How Long Does Content Marketing Take to Work?  . For the purposes of this blog post I have highlighted three ways to improve your content marketing effectiveness. These methods will  increase the reach and impact of the content marketing that you are creating for your company. I have assumed that you are regularly creating content and that you have evaluated your customer and prospect data and know who you are talking to.

Content Marketing Effectiveness

LinkedIn Commenting

Commenting on LinkedIn articles in your newsfeed is still a proven way of increasing the reach and impact of your own content marketing activities. Let me qualify this by saying that you need to make an insightful comment so you should have read the article and be comfortable with its subject matter. Simply writing ‘Well done’ , or ‘Thanks for sharing’ etc will not have desired effect. If you genuinely add to the discussion around the article without spamming you are likely to receive more profile views and more traffic to your Company page. This still works so your action point is to do more of this in the next 7 days.

Twitter Engagement

Time and time again I meet with companies that have delegated their use of Twitter to the closest millennial they could find. The person in question is often fairly proficient at using one of the many tweet scheduling tools available and can therefore tweet regularly for the company. Tweeting regularly and increasing engagement to the point where new business leads are generated are not the same thing. A person’s age does not determine whether they are adept at relationship building. Your action point is to spend time creating hidden prospect lists on Twitter (you could separate by sector)  and then consciously engaging with them to build rapport and relationships. Warning – this is time consuming but it is effective. For more on how to use Twitter click here.

YouTube

There is no getting away from the fact that building an audience on YouTube is not easy. Most B2B businesses that we have met with shy away from YouTube. This is usually because they do not have the technical skills or video SEO capabilities to make YouTube a viable channel for them. This is precisely why creating original content for your YouTube channel that can be distributed across Social Media is still a winning strategy. Your action point for the next 7 days is to plan video content for your company’s YouTube channel and then to record at least a couple of videos. Talking heads based videos may be the easiest place to start. Production values are important but your audience will evaluate the content of your video. Get that right and they will come back for more. If you need help with the technical side of video production let us know . We will be happy to work with you.

B2B Content Marketing Agency London

Marketing Fundamentals Ltd is a B2B Content Marketing Agency in London that creates Content and manages Social Media for Professional Services firms.

If you would like us to create and  execute a successful  Content Marketing Plan for your business, feel free to give us a call on +44 (0) 845 2264 247. You can also email us via mail@marketingfundamentals.com

On our YouTube channel you will find marketing advice, business advice & inspiration. Subscribe if you work in Marketing for Professional Services or are a business owner or solo-preneur trying to grow your business. New uploads on Wednesdays.

We hope you find this information useful.

Best wishes,

Mike Pitt

Founder & CEO

Marketing Fundamentals Ltd

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This is blog post number 353.

The post How to Improve Your Content Marketing Effectiveness – 3 Steps appeared first on Marketing Fundamentals.