Christopher Earle: How An Integrated Approach Can Help You Become Content Marketing Royalty in 2016

Wednesday 6 January 2016

How An Integrated Approach Can Help You Become Content Marketing Royalty in 2016

content-marketing-royalty

The stories that we are told as children are largely focused around kings, queens, princes and princesses. These characters are beautiful, intelligent and live a life that others can only dream of.

Today’s royalty take somewhat of a different form. They are marketers that inevitably stand out from the crowd due to their digital marketing creativity, smarts and success. But what is it that makes these marketers royalty?

The key to becoming content royalty in 2016 is by taking an integrated approach to content marketing, or a “content plus” model. This approach shows a level of content marketing maturity and looks beyond content as a singular element, and combines it with other digital marketing services and best practices.

None of these recommendations are either or, but instead they show how each is directly linked to content marketing success. By following the best practices below, you will be well on your way to becoming content marketing royalty in 2016.

Content Plus SEO

Every good king or queen knows that focusing on the needs of the subjects is incredibly important to the success of the kingdom. A community that feels like their needs are being met can become very powerful advocates.

Similarly, search engine optimization (SEO) is an essential part of any successful content marketing strategy. By taking a human focused approach to SEO for your content assets, you can make your content more discoverable for your audience.

Instead of strictly focusing on the keywords that you want to rank for, spend your time researching the trends and topics that your ideal customers are searching for. This will help you ensure that your topic and content are both optimized appropriately.

Content Plus Social Media

Whenever the royal family throws a ball, the invitations promoting the event are one of the first things taken care of. If social promotion of your content assets is an afterthought, you’ve already missed an enormous opportunity. By building an amplification plan for content assets, you set yourself up for the best chance for success.

Social promotion of content is a coordinated effort and the time should be spent in the planning phase to determine exactly how you will execute and measure success.

A coordinated approach will increase your chances for success. But what exactly does that mean? Well, you can coordinate with employees, customers, contributors and influencers to drive meaningful results to your content assets.

One way to do this is to create pre-written social messages for each of these groups to make it as easy as possible for them to amplify the content. This reduces the barrier to entry and makes sharing a snap.

Content Plus Influencers

If you want people to attend your ball, they’ll be interested to know who else is going and what they’re wearing. Adding influencers to your content can be a driving force for getting increasing “attendance” or views, engagement and shareability.

Like the waltz (which every good ball has), adding influencers is like a well choreographed dance that has many steps, all which need to be followed in the proper order.

First, it’s important to identify and collaborate with the RIGHT influencers that can have a significant impact on the success of content assets. There are many tools that you can use to identify and recruit influencers such as Traackr, followerwonk and GroupHigh. Buzzsumo can also serve as a means of finding people that are influential on particular topics.

More often than not, a cold outreach to an influencer asking them to co-create content with you will not work. Many influential experts receive multiple requests a week and have to determine which ones they want to invest their time in pursuing. Before reaching out to an influencer, spend time researching their content, connecting with them on social networks and building the foundation for a relationship.

Make contributing easy by clearly (and creatively) letting them know what exactly what you need from them, and outlining what is in it for them. You can also send them examples of what others have contributed to inspire their response.

Lastly, you can encourage them to amplify your content by creating a series of social messages that they can easily add to your queue.

Content Plus Online Advertising

In today’s digital marketing kingdom, there is a pay-to-play requirement for success. Even if you don’t have an astronomical budget for online advertising campaigns, that doesn’t mean that you can’t compete.

Social media advertising has really come a long way in recent years and can be an excellent (and often low cost) way to promote your content assets. The targeting options available within platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can help ensure that your investment is being spent on getting your content in front of the people that you want to target most.

If you have a larger content asset such as an eBook or white paper, you can invest in Pay Per Click advertising on Google to put your content smack dab in front of your audience. The costs for PPC advertising typically do require more investment, but they are great for bottom of funnel content that is meant to convert.

Make Your Move Towards Becoming Content Marketing Royalty

In 2016, the competition for the eyes of your customers will only get more competitive. It’s time to take your content to the next level and become the content marketing royalty that your fans, followers and customers need.

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