When it comes to brand awareness, connecting with your target audience and building trust and authority, content marketing has the most important role within the digital marketing mix. It is one of the most instrumental tools to help achieve marketing goals and increase revenue.
According to the latest Content Marketing Institute Survey, 87% of UK marketers are using content marketing and 79% of them say that their strategy includes a plan to operate content marketing as an ongoing process. However, only less than half (40%) of the marketers rate their content marketing as extremely or very effective.
Therefore, businesses and brands often need to take time to reflect on their content strategy to understand what’s working, what isn’t working and what needs to change.
I listed down some questions which might help evaluate your current content marketing and make alignments to it accordingly.
Are we….
- creating content around our company purpose and telling engaging stories?
- crafting relevant marketing messages through personalisation based on unified buyer personas?
- choosing high-quality content over quantity that keeps our audience coming back for more?
- engaging with our sales team and aligning sales & marketing efforts to not just attract potential leads but to actually help them close deals. You might find it inspiring to read how Xerox managed to successfully align sales and marketing operations as part of their digital transformation.
- creating and segmenting the content based on the customer journey and sales funnel? i.e.: awareness, information, inspiration, consideration, education etc. to help push the prospect down the sales funnel or retain the customer.
- identifying and nurturing internal ambassadors to involve in content generation and speak at events (and webinars)?
- repurposing our content to make use of different types of media such as infographics, galleries, slide share, video etc.?
- taking advantage of technology to automate some of the content marketing processes such as content assets auditing, calendar management, content monitoring, discovery and distribution for improved efficiency?
- embracing the content marketing trends that are relevant to our industry, such as live video/streaming, user-generated content or augmented and virtual reality to improve our competitiveness?
- testing different types of content (visuals, infographics, CTAs and titles) to see what works for our audience?
- measuring the tangible objectives in terms of results and sharing this information and insights with other teams to sustain collaboration?
Hope you find some of these points useful for your next content marketing review as part of your digital marketing strategy discussions.