Many brands have distinct divisions in content marketing and media design, both of which help their products and services reach customers quickly. However, for a business to truly engage its target audience, these factions need to work together to build on each other’s efforts.
A consistent message is owned, and acquired media indicates that the target audience is not identified and content strategy and media plan are not aligned with the brand goals. When consumers are confused by seeing conflicting messages on different channels, the brand is not even aware of what it is doing, leading to less effective marketing and a decline in advertising and sales.
Below, we have discussed the most effective ways to keep your content marketing strategy on the same page as media planning and ensure that you reach the right audience with a consistent brand and consistent message.
1. Define Your Goals
The first step in content or social media marketing is to define and coordinate goals.
Social
What are your goals with social media marketing? Do you want to increase your brand awareness by gaining more shares, likes, and comments? Want to drive traffic back to your site and use SMM to help sell a product? Do you want to use SMM to communicate with current customers?
Content
Like developing a social media marketing strategy, a content marketing strategy should start with a single question: what is its purpose? Some potential goals are to increase the brand’s reputation, make it more visible, provide value to the community or industry, improve the search ranking of your site, or gain more customers for your product or service.
2. Define Your Audience
Who are you hoping to reach? Who really benefits from your content, product, or service? Identify your customer base and any other potential audiences that can benefit from the content you create and distribute to the world. Define your audience and meet them where they are.
Social
Over 77% of Americans have a social media profile, and no matter how much you try and post any number of times, you will never reach them all. Which social channels do booth viewers use? What kind of material do they deal with?
Content
What kind of content does your potential audience already consume and share? Where does this viewer deal with online content? Do publications often publish content in industry or niche? Where does your audience get the most potential recommendations for your product or service?
3. Research
A content or SMM strategy that is not inferior to research is not good. Identify your competitors, customize the work that you do, discard what you don’t, and make sure you offer a unique value proposition to your audience. What sets this apart? Highlight this for your audience.
Social
Identify your competitors, analyze their social presence, and based on what you have learned, you want to take your social media strategy forward. SproutSocial has in-depth guidance on creating social media competitor analytics and template HREs.
Content
With keyword planning, you can understand your audience better and communicate with them better, and answer those questions. If you don’t know where to start, GOOGLE KEYWORD DESIGNER is a great tool to get you started.
4. Create a Content Calendar
Social
A social media profile alone is not enough – you often need to create, curate, and share posts and updates with your audience. You need to identify some of the topics you are focusing on and then produce, refine and follow your social media calendar. You can start with a mix of visual and text-only content on Twitter and healthy GIF content, while the video is paramount on Facebook. Define a clear plan using the content calendar.
Content
Your content strategy should set for a publishing schedule in the editorial calendar and identify four main categories:
- Format: Is it a blog post, a white paper, an e-book, a research campaign, a video, infographics, or an interactive tool? Will it be held on-site or off-site?
- Keywords: Specify the keywords for which you want to categorize the content. Also, identify related keywords or long-tail keywords for this content.
- Title and subject: Enter the title and description of the main topic. A great tool to ensure your title and description is optimized for SEO in YOAST SEO.
- Goal: Specify which part of the buyer’s path and the associated target want to access this content.
5. Use first-party information for personalization
Personalized use of first-party data is a useful tool for creating relevant content combined with media design. Not all browsers are the same. By analyzing your first-party data and understanding your customers’ path and potential customers, the content they engage with, and the channels they respond to best, you can deliver them your message more effectively.
6. Take advantage of your search information
Take advantage of search data – ask questions specifically. Do not think about its content in the silo you presented. Instead, listen to what consumers are saying about the information. Don’t just listen to these questions. Some words may be lower in volume but require a higher clickthrough rate, which confirms that the content is worth creating and promoting.
7. Understanding The Audience At The Domestic Level
The key to getting the right message to the right person through the right medium is understanding the target audience domestically. Advanced data aggregation provides tremendous insight into industry trend modeling and individuals, including brand clients themselves, thereby cutting down content creation and media planning suggestions.
8. Find Your Customer’s Drinking Water.’
Assess the conversation going on there. What are the trends? Where are the drawbacks? Assess your sales representatives. What questions do they get? Survey customers. What is most important to them? Where the client needs and editorial gaps end, it indicates where the creation of compelling content begins that can help identify the best media activities.
9. Provides valuable and educational content
The combination of strategy and promotion is critical to the success of a content marketing campaign. Create content that is valuable to your audience, answers their questions, and educates them. Promote this content through paid social, paid search, email marketing, and website promotion to get the most out of your content marketing efforts.
10. Put paid expenses behind best performing content
Put paid expenses behind the best performing content. If you have created a blog post that is already converting 10% of people who systematically include it into new leads, it is the factor that makes up the excellent content portion of your media buying campaign.
11. Strengthen The Content Created By The Influencer
While the content created by the influencer can be a highly effective way to reach the audience through the audience’s own promotional power, it can significantly enhance this result with paid media. If we work with influencers to provide compelling, brand-owned content, we can use that content in various ways, including digital and even traditional advertising.
12. Talk About The Goals And Challenges of Ideal Customers
In the professional services space, we recommend clients create content elements that meet the ideal business’s goals, opportunities, and challenges. The media promotes that content. As a result, better possibilities for content appear, and a severe dialogue is formed. It is the best combination of content and media I’ve seen. – Randy Shattuck, Shattuck Group
13. Invent a Story
Create a story and statement from above. Ask your content team to work directly with the media design team to ensure that the brand’s story is told, the content reliably supports this story, and your team has a checklist.
By following these steps, you can ensure that they remain faithful to the brand. Story tapes and content should support your business and your customers.
14. Ensure That Topics Cross Channels
Note that Themes and topics cross the channels for consistency in marketing communication. By setting a theme for a month that is inspired by an initiative, event, event, or release of a product or service, you create meaningful content that you can use in a compelling way across all channels. You want your content to be driven by the expertise that the media needs anyway.
15. Focus on The Channels That Mean The Most To Your Audience
You can combine your channel planning on the basis where your target audience is most active and where you can reach them most effectively. Above all, do not plan content for six community channels if only two are most effective. Focus on content design for the channels that are most relevant to your audience.