Content marketing is one of the best ways to generate leads, increase sales and build engagement with your customers. By creating relevant, valuable content, you have the opportunity to attract and retain customers.

In today’s world, the demand for content marketing is higher than ever, but of course, quality content requires significant research, time, and effort.

If you are looking to step up your content marketing game, this 11-point checklist created by the Bold x Collective team is for you!

1. Understand Your Target Audience Thoroughly

What exactly is a target audience? A group of individuals or say customers in this case, who would specifically be interested in what you are selling or promoting. Factors that could assist you in understanding who your audience is can be things like geographical location, gender, age, personality, language and so forth. Whatever you may be selling, know that it is vital to have an audience to target your products to, to create success and generate a revenue in the process.

Without having a targeted audience, you could miss out on opportunities that would cater your services to the needs of your client base. The more streamlined you are to your target audience, the better chances you’ll have with scoring more clients. Being aligned will also, most definitely help you build stronger customer relations opposed to being a wide-spread service. People choose services or products based on what they can relate to, so it is essentially your job to nail your service to the degree of someone catching an online glimpse and saying:

Hey this product really grabs me, I am propelled to go that direction.

2. Content Marketing

Content marketing is the way to go as it engages your current customers whilst attracting new customers. Typically, a business would create free content that follows along the lines of podcasts, engaging articles with tips and tricks, email newsletters, photos and more. It’s about being consistent and not just creating any content but something that carries weight to it. Your content should be focused on adding value to the lives of your current clients and potential clients, or you’re missing a part of the bridge that crosses over.

Being good at creating strong content is also going to drive sales and bring further engagement to your business. Once you can identify the needs of your customers, you can focus on creating excellent content delivering just that.

3. Flexible Workflow Plan

A marketing workflow plan is a very important tactic to have as it coordinates the way your team works. Having a strong workflow plan, it highlights the ability to be efficient and carry out work tasks in a quality manner ensuring that you are producing merit. The motivating force here is to be able to clearly execute methods that improve the way that you and your team work. For instance, such activities that are produced in a step process can help you up to your game.

For your business, this could mean creating a workflow for your social media, email marketing, blogging, content marketing, and SEO. The goal is to find the right tools that will help create the right workflow for you and your team. For many companies, flexibility is a necessity. It’s really all in the details and these intricacies can require adjustments throughout the process especially if you are working in a design-related industry.

Be sure to really do your research on what tools your company is going to need to create a seamless workflow so that you have optimal outputs and gains. This plan will ensure that you and your team are on the same page, focusing on creating quality work, being more effective, meeting deadlines, and project management. With a concise outline, it’s important to know who is responsible for what task in the team which can also help create realistic timelines with the given duties required to complete the project.

Having a review process is essential because this allows for any alterations to take place. There’s always beauty in reviewing things once they have come together before you give them a go, as new ideas or insights are bound to come up. If you’re new to this, focus on defining your strategy to develop the right workflow. Having a strong workflow is also going to give you the chance to measure your team’s performance. When you bring an approach that is both highly efficient and organized, your strategy will succeed. Keep it flexible by switching things up where necessary because the companies that can do it the most flawlessly are the ones people will turn to.

4. Use Visually Appealing Images

In our fast-paced world, a quick glance is enough to catch someone’s eye but how do you do that? It’s great if you have a clear message that your company promotes but having eye-catching, visually striking images is on a whole different level. Quality visuals that have a substantial appeal are going to elevate your brand. It’s typically the imagery right off the bat, that gravitates a customer to try a new product and our entire world runs on visuals especially with the output of information all around.

Think about the largest social media channels like Instagram – it’s all about the visual pull that gets people to click on an ad, leading to the respective brand. It’s important to opt for engaging visuals that can be fun because at the end of the day, people will follow what they can relate to and as a brand, it’s your job to ensure that you choose the right visual appeal that targets that. Visuals can fall along the lines of gifs, short videos, well-photographed imagery which stock is great for, or even something custom-made. Striking color palettes are aesthetically pleasing and seen across the spectrum of brands that are highly successful.

5. Generate Viral Content Ideas

What is viral content? The word viral left to itself, tells us that it is the circulation of such an event or idea that moves information across many platforms or people for that matter. Viral content is successful because it carries a well-built message and that is done by focusing your attention on putting together the fine details of your content to make sure you have set forth an excellent strategy.

Your content needs to be going to be worthwhile of one’s time and interest to share and if done correctly, this will lead to it going viral which can be favorable on several social media platforms. Impact takes the driver’s seat here. Emotion is a propellant because people can connect – our feelings are what compel us to act. So, if your content deeply connects to someone within and with the more emotions evoked, the higher your chances are for that individual to share it amongst their social circle or social media channels.

It’s also about valuable content. Can you deliver something that is going to help someone? How can you enhance one’s life with your product? Connect the gap here so that you can light up some emotions in one’s mind. It could be a short story, a useful tip, an emotion-provoking visual – basically anything worthwhile sharing. It’s important not to put your focus on chasing the metrics but instead having a defined purpose of why you want your content to go viral. This way, you can search for the right resources that will help build that content to have an x type of turnout. Defining is the way to go. Things do take time, and this requires patience on your part, but with the right content and consistency, you are heading in the right direction.

6. Grab Attention with Good Copywriting Skills

Have you ever heard of catchy tag lines? This can be in association to perhaps a fast-food restaurant or even one of your favourite products. These tag lines succeed in grabbing your attention and how is this done you may ask. Copywriting entails written content for advertising or promotional purposes.

Through well-crafted copywriting skills, you are bringing out a valuable message that is going to help connect potential customers to the perfect solution that you hold on the other side meaning what your business offers. If you could solve problems for people, why would they not turn to you? Having an exceptional product is one thing but if you don’t know how to grab their attention, you’re in for a loss instead of a gain. Well-written content is going to persuade your customers towards looking into your product or service, essentially a pulling force. You can construe your copywriting skills by really knowing who your audience is because in this way, you know how to get them to notice you.

7. Three Words – Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization – if done correctly, will lead to formidable results. Optimizing for SEO is one of the critical skills a business would need to thrive. If you aren’t ranking high enough on search engines like Google, well then you can’t exactly expect many customers to purchase from you. While there are several factors that go into client attraction, optimized ranking in search engines is an important aspect.

Further explained, SEO is essentially optimizing a webpage to be discovered at ease without having to scroll through multiple pages in a search engine. Using a proper technique will ensure that you rank higher and that more traffic is being generated to your website. Implementing and utilizing the following can help you score higher and gain more visibility – quality and unique content really do matter, optimal and relevant keywords that are streamlined with your product or service can make a major difference and, optimizing the webpage itself with title tags, meta descriptions, and body content.

While putting these variables into play, it’s good to investigate and understand what your competitors are doing as well. Harnessing the power of social media really does help too because if your content is relevant, people could potentially share those links or even blog about them.

View this from a customer’s standpoint because you need to understand what they are interested in and what is relevant to them. The bottom line is that you need to be consistent in SEO because that’s what will produce results and being innovative in your approach can help you gain new insights that’ll even further benefit your business.

8. You Absolutely Need a Social Media Strategy

Without a proper strategy, you may just be engaging on social media for the sake of posting but there will be little results. So how do we reverse that? Plan and know what you would like to post instead of impulsively choosing content on the spot. Having a schedule will allow for consistency which is what customers like to see because that creates a sense of reliability.

Do you know what your social media goals are? Having a defined social media strategy in place will help you create output towards achieving those goals. Direction is so important. Being effective at targeting your social media audience is a necessary skill because you are essentially pinpointing to get a better sense of what they need and in turn, helps you provide finer value to them. When you first start out, you may not have a fixed strategy, but this is where research plays an important part.

Build a strong social media strategy and then get out there! Don’t be afraid to play around and experiment because by doing this is how you will know what is helping leverage your business opposed to what isn’t. With the right content, visuals, branding, quality and worth that your company carries, you are bound to attract the right customers. Advertising also goes far with really getting yourself out there. Find what makes people tick and use that to your advantage.

9. Blog!!!!

Blogging is an effective way to connect with your customers and attract new ones along the way. While we live in a fast-paced world and most people prefer quick visuals, there are also a significant amount of people who turn to well-written blogs. You see, blogging can provide a deeper insight with useful and valuable information while still being able to pique the interest of people by using striking visuals that would lure them into looking deeper into your blog. In a significant context, blog marketing is the ability of creating engagement and a further reach into your target audience. There are several pros to running a blog such as gaining trust from your customers as you provide them with worthy information, it engages your market, builds traffic to your website and it’s simple to setup.

Define what you are trying to get across to people, it is important to know what type of solution you are looking to provide. If someone is going to read it, then the requirement is that you provide them with something valuable. Blogging does require enough time however, if you can dedicate some time every week or two, it will build up engagement. If you have the luxury of hiring someone to assist you with this, that could also work out in your favour.

Once you get into blog marketing, like anything it is important to keep up the momentum because one blog post often leads to the next and you may just have a customer viewing several posts of yours. Getting people to sign up via email upon reading your blog is another way to get them to revisit your website. Let’s say when you have the next blog post out – they’d get an update hence creating more traffic to you.

10 Measure Your Results – Use Analytical Tools

With the myriad of several other marketing techniques, analytical tools are heavily emphasized upon from a business standpoint. What are they and why do you need them? Analytical tools are a means to measure your online performance and overall understand what type of data is helping you with your marketing campaigns. The underlying extraction from using analytical tools is purely data. This data is what drives marketing to work in your favor. With such software platforms, they enable you to extract information such as customer purchase data, email marketing data, the performance of any paid campaigns being run by you, overall website data, and much more.

You can then collect this data to further assist you with how to improve your efforts. There are several tools out there and it’s important to understand what they can do for you. Using specific analytics like some of these can enhance your online presence – digital marketing, optimization, predictability, competitive analysis, tracking several channels and campaign ROI.

Take into consideration that an abundance of data is being poured in through several analytical tools – an excellent way to micromanage would be to implement cross-channel analytics. These would give you the insights and data that you could string into a more defined analysis to help you with your marketing strategy. The objective of an analytical tool is to merely help achieve great outcomes by flipping over the data excreted into operative steps.

11. You Need a Content Marketing Campaign

With the overload of information being widespread every single day, heck every single second – it is vital that not only should you have superb content marketing but to have a strong marketing campaign. Being skillful in content marketing is going to be the foundation that helps you build a marketing campaign. When you know what your goal is in clarity, that will allow you to take aligned action to execute a proper marketing campaign be it running over the course of several hours or months.

What are you trying to achieve with your marketing campaign? Build yourself a blueprint and tie that in with your business perspective(s). Going back to content marketing and having known your business objectives can help you carry out the right information in your marketing campaign. Here are some ideas to get your thinking going – Are you trying to optimize your marketing program? What about having better operations? Could you perhaps take your customer service output up a notch? How about innovating your products and services?

The more specific you are with the objective of your marketing campaign, the higher your chances of success are. The next steps entail having a clear focus on the bull’s-eye which is the target you are trying to reach, and it is equally as important to give yourself a timeframe to ensure that you are meeting your goals. Other key factors that are really going to help you with this process are to know your target audience, how you will be measuring your results, what the bottom takeaway is from the content and promoting it. Be sure to invest the time into it because it will pay dividends.

Conclusion

Content marketing is a crucial part of your marketing strategy in today’s world. If you do not have content marketing as part of your plan, it’s time to implement it.

You must stand out amongst your competitors and the best way to do so is by being unique and smart with your content marketing.

If you are looking to step up your content marketing game, the Bold x Collective team digital team is here to help you take your content to the next level.

 

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How to Boost Engagement with This Content Marketing Checklist