Content marketing is not about reaching people; it’s about reaching the right people. This does not happen by chance – it needs a strategy based on experience.
Research also shows that it needs to employ the same content in a range of formats in a range of situations (including use in several different social networks).
Traffic, clicks, likes, shares, and retweets from content marketing are primarily vanity metrics – although they can be used to find actionable insights. Actionable metrics include comments/referrals, opt-ins and cost per conversion (e.g. enquiries).
“What you do after you create your content is what truly counts.” ~Gary Vaynerchuk
Five Key Factors to guide your Content Production
1 Know your target personas
Write to address their wants, needs, pain points and values. Find a way of promoting your content specifically to them – e.g. by demographic
2 Links to your content from other websites
Your content is working when the sites that link to it are rate highly with your target market? If they are, this will help both referral visits to your content and the search ranking of your content.
3 Sharing
Great content gets shared – the more influential the sharer is (with your target personas) the better. “It’s not the best content that wins. It’s the best promoted content that wins.” ~Andy Crestodina
4 Leads
If your content is being effective, many of your leads will identify that it was influential in them contacting you. Finding this out from them is crucial.
5 What leads want
If you are being asked for products / services that you don’t supply, you aren’t creating the right content.
“In your content efforts, stick to only those topics and sub-topics that are directly related to your product or service. Write only about those subjects. Talk, share, comment, and engage only in those areas” Neil Patel (New York Times Bestselling author. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web)
———————————————————————————————-
This 340 word article is a precis of what I consider to be the key points in a recent 3,000 word Kiss Metrics article – I recommend that you find the time to read the latter