Content Marketing – The High Octane Fuel For Your Marketing

Content is the fuel of social media, it drives engagement, produces shares and invites your audience to participate with comments and contributions. It is though one of the hardest things to get right and often involves a degree of experimentation.

You can though rapidly improve your content. If you think of content generation as working in 3 parts:

1. The Idea stage – this is where you are coming up with great ideas for your blog
2. The Production stage – this is where you craft the words and pull together the structure of your blog, article, copy….
3.  and Finishing touches - rounding off the look and feel of your content and double checking it looks good

What businesses are now looking for hasn’t changed – just as in the early days of advertising brand awareness remains a key goal. The challenge is adopting to the new democracy of social media where attention is earned through trust, relevance and providing content that engages the audience. Here are some fantastic and simple ways to deliver high octane content to your audience:

	Ideas
1.	Focus- as a marketer you want to make sure your content fits to your audience, delivers a clear message and is seen as being interesting and useful.But how can you ensure your content marketing effectively meets the needs of your audience? A common mistake is to try to achieve too many objectives with your content. Try to stay focused – keep it simple and easy to understand what key message you want people to take away from your content. Start with the end in mind and set 1 clear objective and stick to it.
2.	Understand Your Audience – many marketers, business owners make decisions based on who they think is their audience and what they like rather than conducting some research. Research can vary from the simple – listening online to social media through to more sophisticated research methods such as focus groups. Either way good homework pays dividends.
3.	Answer a problem - your customers probably face challenges in their business. Let’s face it running a business is complex, time consuming and demanding. Think about how you can help solve a problem for a customer – save them time, come up with a new idea that saves time, provide solid advice or point out trends in their market that are useful
	Production
4.	Make It Appealing- there are many different ways you can present content, some types of content though are more appealing to readers than others. If you just serve up endless amounts of text then don’t be surprised if people don’t come back for more.Some easy formats that you can use are – how to’s (top tips, guides, step by step); case studies (how top brands use, 3 examples of, best use of); interpret a report (key takeaways from ABC’s report, top findings, from ABC’s survey, stats and figures to support your), stories (trending news, this weeks roundup), lists – this often saves people time and helps provide a selection of information that they may need (top 20 blogs on…, top 20 experts in ___).
5.	Style Your Content - the next stage is to put together the style of the content. This will vary depending upon the format you have chosen. Some points here to consider are how you are going to build upon your main objective – some decisions you need to make are: What style you are going to use, what links to other sites, what tone of voice, whether you are building on a previous theme, what visuals you are going to add-in, how your layout will look, what blend of media you are going to use e.g. videos, photos, podcasts…
6.	Make it Visually Appealing - think about how a gallery is laid out, or food is presented in a restaurant, or photographers present their work and magazines are put together…all of these require some thought to how it will appeal to people. Your content needs to drive home the point, but if people don’t find it appealing visually they may go off track. Some ways to break up the content are to put it relevant and interesting pictures, vary your text colours and font size for headers and key points.
7.	Make It Easy to Share and Newsworthy - This starts with the headline, make it interesting, snappy and be creative. Add-in social sharing buttons at the top and bottom of your blog so it is easy to share. Link to other notable bloggers in your subject and let them know you have mentioned them (if you are lucky they may share your blog with their followers) and build a relationship with them.
	Finishing Touches
8.	Check Back - Finishing touches are the accessories to your look. If you have got ready to go to a special occasion and are on show you want to look your best. The finishing touches, the hat, broach, belt and the final pieces that come together to make your outfit look great. So revisit your objective and review what you can add-in to finish off your content. Check over the visual cues – pictures, links, highlight key points, are headings clear and straightforward. What other content can you add to finish your content. But be careful don’t over burden the look. Importantly check to see if it meets your objective.
9.	Make Sure it Maximises Your SEO – Proofread your content and check it for spelling and grammer mistakes (even better get another pair of eyes to review it). Look back at your objective and check to see if you have hit it. Develop a simple checklist to score yourself and to help you be consistent in your approach. As part of this take time to ensure you have a consistent use of your keywords throughout your content to boost your SEO.
10.	Comments and Feedback – If you are trying to build a loyal following you will want to develop interaction and get some comments from your readers. Think about the questions that your readers might ask and that arise from the subject you are writing about, what can they contribute to this? Try to pose some questions throughout your content and invite people to comment at the end.

The Content Marketing Institute produced an interesting set of slides on Content Marketng and predictions for 2012. Take a look and see what you think are the most important trends shaping content marketing.

There are many predictions that have been touted for 2012 and the evolution of content marketing and aggregators will be interesting to watch and a topic of another blog.

So have I missed anything out – let me know.