Business

Content Marketing Strategy Tweaks: Boost Your Game in 2019

While content marketing feels a bit old hat, there’s still plenty of room to get a lot more out of it. An array of recommended strategy tweaks highlight the importance of not resting on your laurels.

As association messaging strategies go, content marketing has gone from buzzy trend to old standby.

But even though it’s become more common and less novel, there’s still plenty of room for content marketing strategy tweaks in 2019. A few suggestions to get going:

Spend more time on your content. In the past, content strategy has been driven by the quick hit—write something that can be turned around relatively quickly without a need for much editing. But this strategy might be costing you potential opportunities, argues Jeremy Moser, senior content specialist at Codeless. He recommends taking the time to do more in-depth research. “If you want average results, spend the average 1-4 hours on your content,” Moser writes on Search Engine Journal. “But bloggers spending 6+ hours per post are 56 percent more likely to report stronger results.” Another suggestion from Moser that’s in the same wheelhouse: Have an editor work on the piece before it goes online.

Don’t worry about the hard sale. The latest edition of the Content Marketing Institute’s B2B benchmarking report [PDF] makes the case that the most successful content marketers in the business-to-business space generally put the informational power of the content over the hard pitch. CMI’s report finds that 90 percent of the most successful content marketers downplay the hard pitch in favor of stronger information. In this spirit, recent research from Pressboard finds that when there is less name-dropping in a piece of sponsored content, that content is more effective.

If you don’t have an actual content strategy, maybe you should get one. While more organizations are increasing spending on content marketing these days—the CMI study says that there’s been a 56 percent increase in spending on content creation in the past year—just 61 percent of all respondents have a documented content strategy. This might be a place to stand out, Forbes contributor Lilach Bullock writes. “While that’s bad news for them, it can be great news for you if you start developing a content marketing strategy that aligns with your business goals,” she says. Such a strategy should include outlined goals, key performance indicators, audience segment strategies, and approaches to content curation and repurposing. Speaking of repurposing …

Turn a single piece of content into lots of little pieces. Rather than just posting a video once and letting it die on the vine, find ways to keep that video fresh—put it lots of different places, including on your blog, but also post on your Instagram account. In a recent interview with Thrive Global, Frank Kerner of Pelican State Credit Union explained how the organization’s marketing strategy keeps building on itself. “We currently use videos on YouTube, Facebook and IGTV. We turn them into blog posts and announce those blog posts as stories on Instagram,” he says. But he’s far from done: “We also have plans to turn all of that content into bite-sized videos and posts for Instagram and Instagram Stories in the future. Your audience is diverse, and they each prefer specific types of content, so diversify to reach everyone!”

With a higher level of competition for eyeballs, added sophistication is the name of the game for formulating content marketing strategy tweaks in 2019.

(AlekZotoff/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

Ernie Smith

By Ernie Smith

Ernie Smith is a former senior editor for Associations Now. MORE

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