By Jodi Murphy, Marketing Director, EUXmedia
A new year means a new chance to get your digital content house in shape.
It’s important to strike while the iron is hot because, as any marketer can tell you, once January slips into February and Q1 turns to Q2 then the internal drive to create great content starts to fade. Sad, but true and soon enough the marketing team will have lost the ears of other departments. So, it’s important to at least get the ball rolling now and fine tune as you go!
Here are three ways you can kick-start your digital content marketing strategy for 2015:
1. Identify your best performing content from 2014
If you did any kind of content marketing in 2014 you NEED to look back and see how well that content did. You don’t necessarily have to prove ROI (it’s definitely worth tracking in 2015!), but you at least need to see what worked. Some of us love to analyze the data and well, some dread it, but every great marketer knows it has to be done! Which blog posts received the most social love and which platform did it come from? Which posts earned the most natural links? Which posts did really well organically? Which white papers or demo videos does your sales team rely on? If you look back at past emails you sent, what content did your customers open and download? Now take a look at those pieces of content and see what common threads there are (if any). What topics/points of view/style, etc. seem to resonate the best with your audience? If that’s what they love, then give it to them. There is no better way to get started with your digital content creation than to give the people what they want!
2. Start with what you know you can do
Almost 90% of New Year’s Resolutions fail, and it’s often because we set unobtainable goals for ourselves. Sure, we all want to go to the gym five days a week but the very first time we don’t hit that number we feel like a failure and lose hope and faith in ourselves. The same holds true for our digital marketing efforts. Yes, we would all love to write one new blog post every day, publish a in-depth white-paper every month, update all our old presentations and so forth, but in reality the best way to kick-start your digital content marketing strategy is to start small and do what you know you can do. So, make a dream list of all the content you’d LIKE to create this year and break it into sections. Baby steps…what can you do every day, every week, every month? What can only happen on a quarterly basis? What will have to be tabled until the second half of the year? You can’t get anywhere with your digital content marketing efforts if you don’t have content (no brainer right?), so KNOW what you can routinely create and build on that.
3. Leverage internal knowledge
As much as we may not want to admit it, sometimes we marketers aren’t the most-knowledgeable ones on the team when it comes to our own products. Our degrees are in marketing, communications and journalism…not education or medicine. And even though the longer we spend at a company the more comfortable and familiar we get with a product, sometimes it takes the experts to really answer the detailed questions. Your content MUST appeal to your audience, so if you are trying to appeal to educators or nurses you need to pass your content through key resources sooner or later. Who can you count on, outside of the marketing team, to review your content for accuracy and authenticity? ASK FOR HELP! The worst thing you could do is try to use incorrect information to sell your products or build your brand! You’ll only end up harming your company in the process.
If you are full steam ahead with your 2015 digital content marketing campaign then congratulations, you are on top of things! Don’t let that momentum wan over the coming weeks and at least give these three tactics the chance to keep the process alive and well.
Do you have any tips to keep the momentum going you’d like to share? Let us know!