Achieving success with content marketing is not as simple as writing articles, designing infographics, and recording videos and then doing little else but hope for the best. Creating fantastic content is undoubtedly important, but one must also consider content strategy, content planning, audience building, content distribution, content performance monitoring and continuous improvement. Covering just 50% or 75% of these tasks is not sufficient.
As a content marketing agency, it is embarrassing to admit this, but in our early days, we made the mistake of ignoring some essential parts of content marketing. We started our business confident in our ability to create 5-star quality content and thanks to dedicated study, we also had an excellent understanding of the principles of content strategy. However, we failed to pay sufficient attention to audience building and content distribution. We hoped something would magically happen and people would start paying attention to our content. Of course, this something never happened. Don’t get me wrong, we had some audience members in the early days, and we built a decent social media following too. But we didn’t’ focus hard enough on converting those readers to subscribers – people we could freely contact via email or some other channel about our new content.
If you don’t take the time to build an audience, your reach will be stunted, and you won’t get the feedback you need to improve your content marketing efforts. We’ve now rectified this error, in addition to our Facebook and Twitter followers (both of which currently stand in the thousands), we’ve built a respectable sized email list, and we’re starting to grow our own Facebook group. Focusing on these types of ‘high impact audiences’ such as our email list has been extremely beneficial to us. We know each new article we write will land in the inbox of hundreds (soon to be thousands) of people who have clearly expressed an interest in hearing from us. We’re able to monitor data such as open email rates, click-through rates and social media engagement which we can use to improve our content marketing performance. For us, a shift to focus on audience building has been a revelation.
Our story brings me to the four quadrants of content marketing success. See the below diagram. We have identified four critical elements of content marketing success.
- Content Strategy & Planning
- Creating 5-Star Quality Content
- Audience Building & Distribution
- Measuring Performance & Continuous Improvement
You must understand that every person and business is different. Our initial mistake was to focus too much on quadrants one and two, while failing to give sufficient attention to quadrants three and four. This severely impacted our growth and the effectiveness of our content. We created high-quality material, which was relevant to our audience, but too few of them were reading it!
However, ignoring any of the quadrants leads to problems, had we focused too much on two and three while ignoring one and four, we would have also faced issues. For example, we would have created great content, but without a content strategy supporting it, it might be irrelevant to our ideal audience members. Then since we wouldn’t be measuring performance, we would be unable to figure out why our plans were not working. Perhaps we would have built a big audience, but it may have been full of the wrong type of audience member, the audience might be uninterested in our content and completely unengaged by it.
You may excel at some quadrants more than others, but you must pay sufficient attention to all four. It is acceptable to leave quadrant four to last because you require the first three quadrants to be in place before you’re able to tackle it successfully. By this I mean you need a content strategy, high-quality content and an audience to distribute your content to before you start gathering the data you need to monitor the performance of your content marketing and ultimately improve it.
Strategy & Planning
This quadrant is about defining exactly who your audience is. It’s about mapping your ideal audience member persona. You do this to know what challenges they face and how you can educate, entertain and inspire them through your content. It’s also the stage where you plan topics that will get the best results. Based on your ideal audience member persona, you will plan content topics that your audience cares about and decide which distribution channels to use.
Creating 5-Star Quality Content
We initially put the most emphasis on this quadrant because we saw it as where the magic happens. In reality, it’s just as important as the other quadrants. The best content in the world is worthless if nobody consumes it. Creating 5-star quality content is about writing high-quality articles, designing beautiful graphics, editing professional videos, recording insightful podcasts etc. It’s about unique value. There is little value in recycling the same ideas as everyone else. Yes, having a polished finished product is part of it, but the most important ingredient is having your own unique voice.
Audience Building & Content Distribution
This quadrant sounds like some sort of dark art to most people! “How on earth do I get people to read my content?!” The truth is that there are many different ways to drive people into your audience. The most effective way depends on the nature of your business. An important part is ensuring that you’re actively sending web traffic to your content and actively collecting new subscribers.
One of the tactics we use it to run paid adverts to a landing page. However, we also have a more cost-effective strategy of funnelling our social media followers to our landing page or Facebook group. When someone applies to join our Facebook group, we ask them to provide their email address in exchange for our lead magnet.
Paid advertising is the quickest and most effective option to drive targeted traffic to your content and thus grow your audience but doing this costs money. A free option is to convince other people with large online followings to promote your lead magnet or online community. However, this takes time as you must build the relationship with the other person first.
One hack most people forget is that on many social media platforms, you can DM your followers for free (although this is a manual process of sending messages one by one). Be active on your social media channels to attract plenty of new followers, then craft a polite invitation message to join your email list. Make sure to explain what the person will get for signing up. Whenever a new person follows your social media account, e.g. Twitter or Instagram, send them the invitation. Just remember not to overdo it – if they ignore the message don’t start private messaging them non-stop. You can try again if you have something new to offer, but it better be a legitimately different offer.
Measure Performance & Continuous Improvement
The final quadrant relies on having sufficient data to make informed decisions about what content is doing well and what content is not. If you don’t have data, it’s best to leave this quadrant to last.
Observe click-through rates on emails, likes, shares, retweets etc. Check Google analytics on your blog posts. How long do people spend reading your articles? Some video channels like Facebook and Wista have great analytics that show how much of a video people have watched. Look out for high performing content and make more of it.
One great hack is to post a snippet of a content idea on your social media, if the piece does well e.g. it generates likes, shares and starts conversations, you know you can invest the time on a more extensive piece of content covering the same topic. However, if the snippet performs poorly, you can start looking for a new idea.
It’s essential to pay attention to the data, just because you like a piece of content doesn’t mean your audience will. The old saying is true; the numbers never lie.
What Does This Mean For You?
It’s time to start being honest with yourself. What quadrants are you ignoring? It should be pretty obvious based on what your biggest challenges are. Once you have identified the quadrant or quadrants which you most need to improve, start researching and formulating a plan. Improving your weakest quadrant will almost always be the most effective strategy for improving your content marketing success.