It’s that time of year again. Newspapers are speculating about the worst winter for decades, my mother has bought enough festive food to feed an entire army and people everywhere are starting to think about their New Year’s resolutions.
But New Year’s resolutions aren’t just about eating healthier, saving money and disconnecting from technology more often. We content marketers should be making some New Year’s resolutions too, aiming to make our 2014 content strategy bigger, better and more successful than ever.
So what kind of promises should we be making to ourselves in order to make our content work harder in 2014?
1. I will place more focus on relationship building
Content marketing success doesn’t just rely on what you know, but also who you know. Solid relationships with other industry professionals and influencers are integral to widening the reach of your content. Think about it, if one of your contacts has 7,000 Twitter followers and at least one of these followers has 5,000 Twitter followers themselves, the content your contact shares will reach 12,000 more Twitter users than if you’d pushed it out solely on your own account.
So how do you build these relationships in the first place? In my experience, the best place to start is Twitter. Users are sharing other people’s content all of the time on this social network, so join in!
Once you have identified an individual who you’d like to forge a relationship with, set about sharing their content, retweeting any updates that resonate with you and striking up conversations with them. Once you’re on their radar and conversation is flowing easily, you’ll often find that not only will they naturally share any of your content that they find interesting, but they won’t have a problem with you actually asking them to share a piece of content that you want more eyes on. Provided it’s good quality of course.
2. I will focus less on the link and more on the reader
While writing for the reader and not for the search engines isn’t a particularly new notion, the changes that peppered the SEO landscape throughout 2013 mean that it’s going to be even more important during the coming year.
Updates to Panda and Penguin and the launch of Hummingbird mean that black hat content focused solely on links is being hunted down and penalised more effectively, and value to the reader is well and truly the focus at contents fore.
It makes sense then to support any points you make within your content with personal experience, facts or statistics, and to make sure that you’re giving actionable value back to your target reader, teaching them something new, entertaining them, answering the queries they’re typing into Google and optimising your content for Hummingbird.
This new algorithm was launched in response to users searching with increasingly more semantic and contextual queries, so don’t forget to edit your target keywords to include relevant phrases in this vein.
3. I will develop content KPIs
KPI (key performance indicator) is a pretty scary abbreviation, creating a lingering fear that if you don’t achieve it then you have failed drastically. That isn’t the case, and where content is concerned it can actually create a drive that you may not have experienced if you didn’t have any goals in place.
KPI’s create a sense of order and force you to think of ways in which you can make your content perform better. For example, say your KPIs for a new blog post were 100 social shares and 500 page visits. Would you have thought to carry out every one of the following actions if you didn’t have those goals to hit?
- Slot supporting facts, figures, statistics and personal anecdotes into your post to add trust and support to your points.
- Make sure your post is keyword optimised for your target reader.
- End your post with a call to action that encourages readers to socially share the piece.
- Place your social sharing buttons in a position that encourages more clicks.
- Push out the post on your own social networks and your companies social networks, and schedule more staggered updates to ensure content promotion continues over the next couple of months.
- Utilise the relationships I mentioned above, asking your connections to share your blog post and tagging any influencers you’ve mentioned in your post into your promotional tweet.
- Take out targeted social media adverts promoting the post (given it’s valuable enough and of good enough quality to warrant it).
4. I will measure content performance
Content production is a learning experience. No matter how much you yourself might like something you have produced, if it doesn’t resonate with your target audience then you need to concentrate on creating more of the stuff they do like to ensure your content strategy does the job it’s meant to – increases brand awareness, generates leads and then nurtures them.
The only way you’ll be able to work out what it is they do like is by measuring the performance of every piece of your content. Keep an eye out for comments, and track the number of views on each piece, social shares and backlinks. Once you know what’s working write another piece of content about a different area of the same subject, re-purpose a popular piece or write more posts that are structured in the same way.
5. I will re-purpose older content
If you spent 2013 struggling to think of ideas for your content, re-purposing older pieces of content should be one of your main resolutions for 2014.
Did you recently speak at an event? Turn your PowerPoint presentation into a SlideShare presentation. Have you written a series of related blog posts? Turn them all into an ebook or, if there are enough statistics contained within the post, an infographic.
When inspiration for something completely new isn’t forthcoming or you need to get a piece of content out relatively quickly, re-purposing older pieces is a quick win that won’t cause you to rush under pressure and compromise on quality.
6. I will curate community generated content
Curating community generated content is great for two main reasons: 1) It can help build the relationships I spoke about earlier and 2) It requires minimal effort on your part.
Use your Twitter account, Google+ communities, LinkedIn groups and your email newsletter as a vehicle for data gathering. Ask a question – for example, “How much time would you say you spend on social networking sites each day?” – then collate the answers into a piece of content. It could be a blog post, an infographic, even an ebook that features the resulting data as a supporting piece of evidence for a point you have made.
Not only will you have a completely unique set of facts and figures at your fingertips, but people love getting involved in stuff like this and will look up to you for caring about their opinions. When the piece of content is published, schedule a set of staggered updates in a social media management tool like Hootsuite, tagging in the people who contributed their thoughts.
7. I will save some budget for social media adverts
With the recent announcement that the reach of Facebook posts is only going to continue decreasing, there’s no escaping the fact that 2014 is going to be the year of the social ad.
While Facebook’s move is by no means fair (in my opinion anyway), there is something to be said for social media advertisements. As well as running a lot cheaper than things like PPC ads, they’re very customisable and can be targeted towards people in specific industries and locations, with specific interests and can be linked to whichever page you want them to be.
So save a little of your New Year budget and push more people towards that new ebook, whitepaper, killer blog post – whatever it is you want to promote.
8. I won’t forget to have fun
Throughout 2013 there has been more pressure than ever to create brilliant content that reaps results, and it has left many of us in a bit of a panic. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve experienced my fair share of stress induced headaches and unnecessary moments of panic because I feel that something I’ve written just isn’t going to make the grade.
In this coming year though, I want you all to remember that content creation can be incredibly fun. When you write with passion about a subject you know well it pours infectiously off the page, and that more than anything is the biggest hook you can place in your content. It’s one of the main factors in encouraging shares and leaving a lasting impression with your readers.
Have you made any of your own content marketing resolutions for 2014? Tell me all about them below!
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