Whether it’s the lead generation, audience engagement, brand defining capabilities, high ROI or the sheer joy of helping consumers out with valuable advice, most businesses agree that content marketing is a great thing.
And it isn’t just that people say content marketing is great, but fail to follow through on the doing part. According to data from Curata, 42.5% of companies increased their content marketing staff in 2016.
But getting set up and making it work for you can be time-consuming and challenging. It takes time and talent to create the content, testing and research to optimise it and a lot of admin work to routinely tick all the boxes.
Content marketing is inherently difficult – nothing worth having comes easy. However, with a few simple tips, you can quickly make significant steps to getting set up.
Organisation
It may go without saying, but content marketing needs to be an organised process. You can’t just throw resources at it when it needs them and push it aside the rest of the time. Everything must be planned and ideally systemised to ensure maximum efficiency.
But don’t worry. Even though content creation is inherently a creative process, it can be systemised and smoothly run.
There are many tools the beginning content marketer can utilise for this particular task. For example, the Content Marketing Institute has loads of tools and advice like this guide on setting up an editorial calendar.
Curation
Content curation is defined as “the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme.” Essentially, it means finding, sharing and drawing from other people’s content that your audience would appreciate.
Studies show that 95% of marketers share other people’s content in some way. It’s a very common practice, and a great way to provide value to your audience without actually having to write everything yourself.
(Although, if you want a unique brand voice, you’ll still need to produce the majority of your own content. Use curation to fill the gaps in between your content, not the other way around.)
Creating the content
For many, this can be the most tiresome part of content marketing. If you’re not writing everything yourself, you’ll need talented writers who understand your audience. What do they want? What’s going to bring them the most value? How can your content help your audience know, trust and like you?
It depends on a range of factors, but there’s no harm in outsourcing a portion of your writing. Studies show that 64% of B2B marketers outsource their writing to freelancers.
If you outsource your writing, the most important task on your hands will be to clearly define what you want from them. What, tonally, are you going for? What does your audience want? The more descriptive you are, the better the work will be.
Putting it all together – automation
Now that you’ve got all the basics covered, all that’s left to do is set up your posting automation so that everything runs automatically in the background.
There are many tools, such as Zapier and Hootsuite, that can help you with that. Do a bit of digging and find the platform best suited to you, and then go to town!
As time goes on and you start to test things and experiment, you’ll find out what works for your brand. But rest assured, content marketing is here to stay, and you won’t regret putting it to work for you.
