03 Feb How to Design a Content Marketing Strategy
Content Marketing isn’t a one-shot concept. It takes a dedicated strategy to reach your content delivery goals – getting your message out to your customers. Here’s how.
Good morning, good afternoon, perhaps I should even say good evening. Whatever time it is, wherever you are in the world, welcome. Thank you so much for stopping by, my name is Paul Barrs.
Welcome to 2015. What a fantastic year. I hope it has kicked off for you in a strong, positive way.
Here’s what I’ll be looking at in order to help you throughout the coming year. Each week I’m going to sit down here with my YouTube channel, with the video, with the computer perhaps, sometimes, and give you an insight into the types of things that I’m sharing with my clients. As they come to me asking
“Hey Paul, how do we build our online business? What can we do to grow our internet side of our income?”
Throughout the weeks I find that I have to give, often, the same advice to different people. Yet in a slightly different way. So I’ll be looking to share and to pass on as much of that information as I can to you. Simply as a thank you for you stopping by here.
At the same time, also sharing insights into how I grow and manage my own business. I hope for you, as a small business operator, that will be something of tremendous value.
So let’s start with this past week and this coming week. What things have I been trying to communicate with my own customers but also planning in my own business? Really just one thing. One primary thing, and that is for people to start planning their content-marketing schedule and strategy for the next six months. Now we don’t have to take it across the whole year. Six months is good enough.
What are going to take about this year – sorry, this month. What are we going to talk about next month? What are we going to talk about the month after? What kind of things do our customers want to know? Really that is the key. It is impossible for us to be able to create a successful content marketing strategy unless we know, unless we listen to our own customers, our own audience. We have to know what it is that they want to know.
So here’s what I’d like you to do this coming week, if you haven’t done it already, in the last month or three. Start communicating with your customers. Start communicating with your existing database. Perhaps put a survey up onto your own website, and ask people, “Why did you come here? What is it you wanted to know?”
Then with that information, it gives you the opportunity to start customizing the content that you’ll be putting forward to them. Now of course, you do this wherever you have a good following. Maybe that is with your email or marketing list. Maybe that is with your website, if you’re getting enough traffic. Perhaps it is through social media.
Look, this is so important it’s even worthwhile paying to get the traffic, to get those answers. It’s incredibly important. You set yourself up for success when you know what people want. You set yourself up for failure when you’re just guessing, not quite sure.
So as I’ve been talking to people in this past weekend, even in my own business. I’ve been saying to myself and saying to them,
- How can we improve our content marketing throughout the coming three, four, five, six months?
- What topics are we going to be talking about?In what way are we going to be delivering that content? Just the written word?
- Or will it be the written word and audio?
- Or the written word, transcripts of the audio, of the video?
- Can we package some of those things up into infographics?
- Can we take some of this pieces of information and make slides out of them?
What are the different ways that we can present that content? To not just put it on our website. Not just have people share it, ourselves included, with social media – but out also onto document-sharing websites perhaps with PDFs. Out into places like SlideShare with slide presentations or infographics getting shared also on other websites.
What are you going to do in these coming months? Now here’s the thing. In terms of two things, the content type, this month, next month, the month after, something different but relevant each time. In terms of the delivery, it’s the same every time.
So I’d like you to sit down, work out what are you going to talk about and then how. That’s my thought for this week.
I’ll talk to you again soon. You have a fantastic week. Bye-bye.
