Get Your Content in the Game

By: Chris Reid, Account Manager One of the biggest sporting days – Super Bowl Sunday – is nearly upon us. What does this have to do with content marketing? Well, there are actually a lot of similarities to the big game. Just like football, there are forward moving plays, tactics that can set you back and individual team members that can contribute to your ultimate success. Here are some plays to keep in mind so you can take home the content marketing trophy. Create a Playbook It would be ludicrous to walk onto the field without a game plan. With content marketing, you have to be prepared with a defined strategy. Creating a style guide is one of the simplest ways to keep everyone on your team in line with your brand’s tone, style and language. With content assets including your website, blog, social media channels, emails, press releases, white papers and more, you need a consistent voice. Some things to include in your style guide: A writer’s checklist, including your tone, topics to avoid and target personas. A list of stylistic do’s and don’ts. Unique language, including words, phrases and spellings your company uses. A punctuation guide, including when to use colons, semicolons, hyphens, or dashes etc. Prepare and Research The best teams come to each game with a strategy for success. According to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs 2015 report, only around 32 percent of companies have a documented content marketing strategy, with research showing these companies are more effective in nearly all areas of content marketing. At the very least, research your target audience and pinpoint your ideal customer so you have an idea of the kind of content will appeal to your target market. Then start creating a content calendar for your blog and other marketing channels. Study the Competition To keep you opponents off balance, identify their weak points so you can exploit gaps in their content game. If you want to rank higher for certain content topics, you need to produce content that is much better than anything else you (or your customers) can find on the Internet. To find gaps in the market, you need to research unanswered questions. Search Google using a phrase relevant to your industry to bring up the top ranking results and then ask the following questions: What questions are being answered by these search results and which are not? How detailed is the information you find and how good is the quality of writing? Is there any visual content that supports the information? What is missing in terms of research and statistics? After researching the standard of content in your industry, you can start to see your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Outperform the competition and you’ll have a great chance of winning in search engine and social rankings. Look at the Stats Football coaches rely on statistics to create future game plans and you can do the same. If lead generation is your priority, track the lead sources for each of your content channels to optimize future content delivery. If brand awareness is your goal, track social shares, comments and links back to your website. Find out where your strengths lie and focus on promoting your best content. You can then develop your weaker areas to bring everything up to standard. Getting to know your analytics is key to understanding what’s working. You can then play to your strengths and maximize future wins. Performing a content audit will also help you improve your game. Ask yourself the following: Can you improve the format of past content, or make it more relevant to your audience? Which pages are getting the most traffic and more engagement? Which search terms do visitors use to get to your site? Can you revise old and outdated content? Is your editorial calendar up to date? Multiple Offense: Repurposing Content Like the most successful football teams, you need to try different forms of attack. If content isn’t delivering the required results, change it until it does. Perhaps a blog post would be more shareable if it was developed into a long-form article. A white paper might get more attention if it was split into four blog posts. Remember, it may not be the content idea that isn’t working; the problem could be in the delivery. Find new ways to plan your attack, like publishing your content to more relevant channels. Time Out Under-performing content campaigns are all part of the game; the trick is to use each content fumble as an opportunity to progress and turn the game around. Ultimately, the teams that plan ahead, play to their strengths, know their opponents’ strengths and weaknesses and learn from past experiences are the ones that succeed. That’s enough football analogies. We hope these suggestions will help to get your content marketing game on point. Enjoy the game!