Everyone is talking about content. You know you need it. You may already have it. But let me tell you, getting it is a far cry from getting it to work for you, if you know what I mean. At 97th Floor we see it all, from “I have literally no content to I have so much content and no traffic to said content” which is painful! So we polled some of our content and digital marketing experts and uncovered 5 things we often see missing from content strategies and what you can do about it!
#1: One and Done
Content is only as strong as the campaign or overarching blueprint it supports. Even a well executed blog post or infographic may be published and get results something like this (below) because it is hard to keep a piece relevant and the one-for-one promotional efforts are not scalable.
So, consider the campaign first, which means, consider your content efforts from a larger campaign and turn your content into a collective series under that umbrella campaign. An example of this is the O.C. Tanner Coolest Companies to Work For campaign. Each new piece serves as the latest installment and latest “commercial” for not just the most recent piece of content being published but every historical piece of content within the campaign.
We’ve done this for clients and pieces we’ve published two years ago still receive hundreds of views per day, per piece, as in, per installment within the series of installments. These results are a far cry from standard one and done and the compounding and residual wins are immense.
So go back, reconsider how your content is better served within a strategic campaign.
#2: Goal Specific: What’s My Conversion?
Why are you creating content in the first place? Do you know? Or are you creating content to fulfill against a content calendar. It would be better to match your content to your conversions. Whether it be high volume brand awareness or a hard sell, most of us are working every aspect of the sales funnel. Enterprise Digital Marketer Tyler Kussee says,
The number one mistake I see is thinking any content is good content. If you don’t know where you’re going it doesn’t matter what road you take. Find where in the funnel you want to go and make content around that specific goal.
#3: Ideation: Let’s Schedule a Brainstorm!
Enterprise Campaign Manager PJ Howland says,
A big mistake I see often is how people ideate content. They gather and shoot ideas around then retroactively try to fit them to meet some kind of goal. Instead they should start with numbers, specifically numbers found in quality keyword research (i.e., search volume, benefit score).
It all comes down to data. Do you have it? Do you have enough? Do you know where to get it? If your answer is no to any of these questions, no worries! We literally talk about this stuff all day every day at 97th Floor so here’s a resource for you: We did a webinar on Advanced Keyword Research where our Director of Marketing Operations Paxton Gray takes you through each step in not only gathering the data but provides the template and formulas to mine the heck out of that data. Check it out - it's crazy valuable!
#4: Who Cares?
Have you ever created a piece you were sure would do well and then didn’t? If yes, you probably forgot to ask not only the right question but the right audience. Campaign Manager Barrett Dastrup says,
Creating content without first asking “who is going to share this or care about this?” or “who is this going to help?” is an eventual roadblock.
He goes on to say that sometimes people come up with an idea based off of intuition or their “gut” and think “Man, this piece is gonna be great.” The problem then becomes that they can’t see flaws in the piece because they think it’s so awesome. They don’t check it against questions being asked in forums that have to do with their product or service, or against past attempts at similar types of pieces that they could improve upon. Really it boils down to an inability to kill off an idea that made you really excited initially but in the end just isn’t that great.
Here are two resources to go to, to ask questions with the intent to vet a topic is:
#5: Promotion
If you publish it, they will come. Sounds ideal but even if you create a quality piece based on our Advanced Keyword Research methods and double down in all your on-page efforts (i.e., keyword optimization, meta descriptions, H1 and H2 tags) you need to work promotion into your strategic plan from the start. You can do this through content partnerships, social media sprints, or if you’d like to see an immediate spike and have some budget and a feel for pay per click, do paid traffic. What you want is to create momentum throughout the content creation process vs. hitting publish and seeing a trickle of traffic, or worse-case, no traffic at all.
If you’d like us to share ways to build partnerships and promotion into your content marketing strategy, give the video a thumbs up or leave a comment below.
That’s it, 5 things missing from your content strategy.
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