Making content magic happen. Great content is the product of careful strategy and planning. This type of content planning forces us to look beyond WHAT content people are consuming, and consider the WHY. Integrating seasonal data in to your content planning process will further ensure relevancy. Own your territory One of the most challenging (and exciting) parts of defining a brand’s content marketing strategy is determining where that brand has the right to play. If you haven’t already, it’s time to create production standards to measure your content quality against. This sounds simple enough – but test and learn is something that brands and agencies tend to preach rather than action. Only 55% of Australian marketers say that their organisation is clear on what successful content marketing looks like (CMI 2016). From audience understanding, through to strategy, ideation, production and amplification, we need to continue to challenge the process, and remain accountable for making it better. Whether your brand’s content strategy is just beginning to find form, or you’re looking to strengthen an existing process, constant refinement will be crucial to your success.
Content sits across every digital touch point – your brand’s online perception is hinged on it. So why do we spend so little time establishing an effective content marketing framework, from understanding our audience, to how we measure success?
With only 28% of Australian marketers vowing that their content marketing strategy is actually effective (CMI 2016), it is no longer viable to just add to the noise. It’s time for brands to hold their teams accountable in driving measurable change and return on investment.
There is no single framework for success. Great content is the product of careful strategy and planning. Nonetheless, there are some simple methods you can apply to make your content work harder for your brand. Whether you’re looking to challenge your existing strategy, or simply benchmark your approach, read on to discover the fundamentals that will drive your content play further.
Understand your people
As marketers, it is our goal to create meaningful connections between people, ideas and brands. In order to do this, we must be tenacious in understanding our audience and the small idiosyncrasies that make them unique.
In the new media landscape, it’s easy to be blindsided by new format and channel trends, but we should always start with (and revisit) our audience to command our overarching approach.
How does your audience think, act and feel? More importantly, what is keeping them awake at night? We can no longer define people by the top-level demographics that bind them. At Columbus, we look beyond these to understand our audience’s triggers, barriers and pain points. We consider their device and channel preferences, what types of content they are creating, consuming and sharing. We analyse their sentiment across social and study their behaviour across search.
People can’t be reduced to numbers or trends, so we strive to understand who they are, rather than how they can be loosely defined.
Leverage intent
Every minute spent online, our most valuable prospect is leaving rich intent markers for us to tap in to, to power up our content marketing efforts. We just need to listen.
Searches, social actions, website interactions, and time spent engaging – they’re all telling actions that we can leverage to ideate and serve meaningful content experiences. In fact, marketing personalisation on a broader scale depends on the ability to…
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