Content marketing isn’t difficult or elusive. It only looks so if you try to play football with your content marketing, without any idea of where the goal post is 🙂
Consistency & Persistence Make a Content Marketing Strategy Successful
A content marketing strategy is like your game plan. It is what you are going to do, the situations you are going to create, and the results you are going to measure against certain metrics. Think of it this way – it is like deciding your healthy eating diet. So, if someone strolls along your way and suddenly asks you to eat ice-cream instead of vegan cheesecake, you will politely say no, and eat your vegan cheesecake because you have a bigger plan, and you know that a vegan cheesecake will fit into it. If you don’t do that, and you get a heart attack three weeks later, you will not know if it was because of the ice-cream or the steak or the Mac & Cheese which someone asked you to eat on some outing.
Content marketing requires consistency and persistence. If you have say 100 units of resources (eg, time, money), and you squander it in 20 places, 5 units each, the ROI of each of those 5 units is difficult to measure. Even if you do have ROI, the ROI you get from 5 units cannot be approximated to what you would get from 50 units because it is not a linear calculation. So, if you work without a documented content marketing strategy, you are not proportioning your resources as per what ROI you could possible get from them. You would be squandering your resources without any direction and it’s like throwing darts in the dark. It may bull’s-eye, it may not. What are the odds?
A Complete Recipe
When you have a documented content marketing strategy which is shared across your whole team, it is much easier to trace back what went wrong and what went right and what steps should be taken to rework it all. Moreover, when you plan a strategy beforehand, each individual component adds up & multiplies the effect of the other components. It all adds up collectively. For eg, you write a blog post, then you make an ebook on the same topic, and you run an ad to sell a product in the same category. They all connect in a chain which leads to a sale with a certain conversion rate. On the other hand, if you write a one-off blog post, suddenly make an ebook one day and keep running ads on some other product, they are just independent occurrences which don’t contribute or magnify your outreach in any way. Each item is clamouring for visibility on its own, rather than multiplying the visibility of the other items.
Stay Distraction Free
Anyone who is anything in digital marketing is always ODing on content, social media and coffee. But if you have a content marketing strategy which tells you, like a prescription, how many infographics in the morning, how many blog posts in the evening, how many posts on social media across the day, you can cut out the distraction and execute your strategy without getting derailed.
If not, well, good luck.
Every other piece of content or post will trigger your creative juices and ideas, and you might just end up overwhelming your own self with what you need to do. End-result is you have 10 things to do, instead of 2, and you do zero by the time you hit the pillow and the next day you have 4 things to do, and you pile on another 15, and do zero again. Worse still, you cannot hold your team accountable because you have no idea where they are spending their time and why as per them, they are “working hard” but you are not getting any results. They are distracted too, perhaps far more than you, and more willingly so, and there is no idea of what your outreach is going to be in the next 2 weeks.
A content marketing strategy helps you stay focused on the tasks that need to be completed, how the dots are connected, and what is the expected outcome. Even if you do fail, you know where you failed, rather than trying to find the flaws on a smoke screen. And you don’t need to swim through it like a fish out of water – struggling to stay afloat. You can sail through every terrain smoothly like a crab 🙂
