This Halloween, DON’T scare your customers!
On the spookiest night of the year, we’re going to talk about something that can either trick or treat your business: content marketing.
But is it that important? Let’s just put it this way: without an effective content strategy, your trick-or-treaters, aka your audience, will stop paying attention to you and knock on your competitor’s doors.
This year we have something better than chocolates and candy for you (unless you’re a chocoholic…) We’ve packed a handful of useful tips to ensure an effective content strategy and all the “tricks” you must run away from.
Treats for your business
1- Goals & Audience
The first step to nailing a good content strategy is to define your goals, what do you want to achieve with your content? For example: Improve brand awareness, boost revenue, improve brand loyalty, and customer engagement.
Next, you have to think about how can you measure them and establish your key performance indicators (KPIs), for example, social media followers, daily sales, site traffic, among others.
It’s important to know your audience, in order to give them what they are looking for. There are some key questions you should make clear before you create valuable content: Who are your customers? What do they want? What are they researching and where?
Your content must respond to your customer’s needs, if you give them the right treats, they will be happy.
2- Types of Content
What kind of treats/content are you going to share? This depends on your target, the current trends, and what your competitors are doing. Some questions that you should answer:
- Why do they need your service or product?
- How can you help them?
- What makes you unique?
Next, you need to think about the formats that will grab your customer’s attention: Infographics, videos, blog posts, social media posts are just a few examples.
3- Choose your channels
As soon as you know what type of content you’ll market with, you need to decide where it will live and be shared from. This will depend not only on your content format but also on where your customers are. These are some of the main channels:
4 – Start Creating!
Now is time to start creating and distributing your content. To ensure you’re consistently producing content and sharing it set up a content calendar. It will track every content that you share with your audience, helping you to stay on top of what is being created and to plan a well-balanced and diverse content plan.
It takes time and effort to come up with a solid and effective content marketing plan for your brand, talk to us and we’ll help you reach your brand’s goals.
The “tricky” part of the content
Content can make your business…but also break it. There are many things we can do wrong when producing content. Content can be tricky, so here are 3 common mistakes that will definitely scare your customers away:
Click-bait headlines? Not the best idea
When you are growing a brand you need brand loyalty, when your audience sees your content they need to enjoy it and respect it in order to buy what you have to offer, give positive feedback and come back.
Clickbait headlines are based on over the top promises, that make the user click in order to find out the answer and, at the end, feeling disappointed with the result.
This will create a feeling of mistrust and a lack of credibility towards your brand.
Not thinking about your audience
The main goal of a solid content marketing strategy is to reach and attract customers. To create and distribute valuable content, your main focus has to be on the consumer.
What do they need? What do they want? What are their interests? These are the questions you must have in mind when producing your content.
Your CTA’s are no way to be found…
CTA’s (call-to-action) are a very important part of any content strategy, it’s a piece of content that prompts users to perform a specific action.
CTAs will help you guide your visitors through the buying journey, to have an effective CTA you’ll need an action-focused copy, great design, and a clear and truthful action. If your CTA is “Click to know more” you are promising to your customer’s valuable information about a certain topic, you better deliver it or they will bounce back or worse, knock on your competitor’s door.
Now you just have to get ready for your trick or treaters! Not sure how? We can help
