Vastly Improving Your Content Marketing

content marketing
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In many situations in life, the less you say, the more effective your words will be. That especially applies to your content marketing technique. It is very important to choose your content words wisely so that people don’t grow impatient and move on.

The right approach

When it comes to your  marketing content, it is important to take a good, hard, long look at your content before you make any changes or create anything new at all. Another extremely important issue is choosing your target audience before you do anything with your content. If you happen to be a the beginning of the process of choosing your target audience, a good approach may be for you to initially choose who you think is appropriate to target and then keep refining your list until you have the “perfect” group to target. As you are in the process of refining, it is important to recognize the improvements that need to be made in order to make your list as effective as possible. An important part of perfecting your content marketing is making it as lean and as efficient as it can possibly be.

The definition of lean content marketing

It is a good idea for you to think of lean content marketing as an approach of continual refinement. You will be refining the length of your content, the topics that you choose, and many other parts of your content marketing that will ultimately affect the results of your marketing content campaign. In order to successfully stay as lean as possible, you will need to create new content on a regular basis, maintain analytics on that content, and use the data to build new content. It is a continual cycle that is easy to follow and you will be surprised at how successful you will be using that approach.

As you go through subsequent cycles of the same process, you will start to identify topics that you may have originally believed were valuable but that no longer hold such significant value. Those topics will be replaced with topics that will ultimately result in more conversions and, ultimately, more revenue for your business. Establishing lean content marketing is an approach that really works and, therefore, is well worth your investment of time and effort.

The many uses of lean content

It is important for you to understand that lean content is not just for you when you are first starting your business. In fact, most businesses can benefit from a lean marketing content campaign. In the majority of cases, there is always unnecessary content that can be edited out. There are several different ways to approach your campaign to creating leaner content:

Identify your difficult points: On an extremely basic level, as a business owner, you must subscribe to the “WIIFM” (“What’s In It For Me?”) marketing concept. In other words, the other person has a problem and he or she has turned to you to solve the problem. It doesn’t matter how wonderful you and your business are. All that matters is having the ability to solve the other person’s problem(s). It is also important for you to allow the other person to tell you what he or she needs and wants. Make sure that you do a really good job of listening. In your quest to become leaner, you should speak directly with your clients rather than relying on second- or third-hand information.

Think simple in the beginning: Now that you have formulated what you need to do, you must make sure that the content that you create is as impactful as possible and you need to do that with as few words as possible. That will serve many positive purposes, including the concept that your audience will be interested in your content because it is short, meaningful, and to the point. People love that! Your content can pack a punch but be still be concise and clear. It is also important that you don’t discount the value of content curation in this situation. You can take valuable content and test it out with your audience without too much effort at all. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have to come up with original content as well. You can share a combination of the two.

Pay attention to how engaged your audience really is: You can gather the analytics of how involved your audience is with your content and your branding. This will be easy to do by measuring “likes,” how many retweets you are getting, bounce rates, etc. It will be quite easy to get your hands on that information.

Conclusion

As has been discussed here, there are many different ways to make your marketing content leaner and more effective. It is definitely worth making the effort to refine your content in an effort to make it leaner and more efficient and effective. As is always the case anyway, constantly improving upon what you have is critical to your continued professional success. It is also important to remember that you only have a few seconds to capture your target audience’s attention when it comes to your content and leaner content lends itself well to that. Additionally, there are many ways to “sell” your offerings. A long-winded approach is not always the most effective way.

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Author

  • Carolyn Cohn

    Carolyn Cohn is the Co-Founder & Chief Creative Services of CompuKol Communications. Carolyn manages CompuKol’s creative and editorial department, which consists of writers and editors. Her weekly blogs are syndicated globally. She has decades of editorial experience in online editing, and editing books, journal articles, abstracts, and promotional and educational materials. Carolyn earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo.

5 Responses

  1. Viktoriya Semyrodenko says:

    Thank you for sharing, Carolyn.
    Would you say that in order to successfully promote your content you need to be equally active on each social network or pick one main channel and direct your efforts towards sharing your content via that social network? Thank you!

    Viktoriya

  2. Scott Tate says:

    Via LinkedIn Groups
    Group: Marketing & Communication Network
    Discussion: What is Your Content Marketing Strategy?

    1. Get agreement from the leadership on what they provide, for whom, for what business benefit, in what way that’s unique and superior to alternative solutions or paradigms. 2. Validate through competitor web site reviews and custom surveys to customers and non-customer targets. 3. Codify the results in a “Messaging Manifesto” to which the marketing team can refer when creating derivative messaging, the the other departments can use to make sure their respective efforts are in alignment with corporate goals.
    By Scott Tate

  3. Jean L. Serio says:

    Via LinkedIn Groups
    Group: Marketing & Communication Network
    Discussion: What is Your Content Marketing Strategy?

    While it’s essential to know your product, and it’s benefits, it essential to know your audience, their needs and wants before determining how your products can fit their needs. And safe to say to include, in your content strategy, reaching out to your audience via social sites; which ones are best is the question and unique to each business. It’s a fact. In todays changed world, buying habits have dramatically changed. People purchasing more what they need, not what they want. Something a biz must consider when deciding content to provide and developing a sustainable content marketing strategy.
    By Jean L. Serio, CPC

  4. Misty B says:

    Via LinkedIn Groups
    Group: Marketing & Communication Network
    Discussion: What is Your Content Marketing Strategy?

    I create content marketing strategies with the primary factor being the target audience which I determine in our initial meeting by asking a series of questions that build our business relationship, while also giving me key information that is beneficial in determining the best course of action to take, to get my clients the results that they are looking for.
    By Misty B

  5. Daniel Page says:

    Hey Caroline-
    Loved your article! We featured it in our Monthly Resource Roundup – http://www.aseohosting.com/blog/2013/11/seo-content-marketing-social-media-best-october-2013/

    Cheers!