Content Marketing Strategy – Finding The Perfect Mix
Content marketing is any form whether email newsletters, case studies, blogs etc are undoubtedly a corner stone for any successful online marketing campaign. That being said, it’s difficult to really determine what is the perfect mix of all these forms and just how much of each would be optimum to create the most buzz around your business and deliver the most traffic or leads through your websites. Every business is different and each has it’s own audience with their unique set of preferences when it comes to the how they prefer to consume the content published within their domain and finding that perfect mix is a continuous process driven by trial and error. Those who understand the long term benefits of getting it right should be prepared to try different approaches and find out what works. For those who don’t, they may not be able to justify spending time on developing their mix and may not be able to justify any spend on publishing online content. The key to finding the best mix for you is don’t be afraid to experiment with various content forms and find out what works for you.
For example, for a travel business which is more B2C focused publishing a vibrant online magazine with posts and articles may attract a good volume of travel enthusiasts and generate subscriptions click throughs and leads. Publishing short video clips of destinations they represent and posting them to YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and other sites may also result in generating the kind of waves a travel business needs to create. Once they know these are working for them, they can chalk out a plan to ensure these are updated regularly and become part of their mix while experimenting with other options like micro blogging and email newsletters perhaps. On the other hand a B2B business which is more niche such as a software company that focuses on the biotechnology space may need a completely different mix of online content to create the buzz they need and drive the right kind of visitors towards their business. They may find publishing free technical white papers, creating webcasts that can be easily accessed, building a resource of case studies and sharing their blog posts and articles within biotech professional online communities help them reach out to their customer base better. The mix is likely to differ for each one of us but it takes experimentation and time to discover what is effective and then most importantly:
Keep publishing what works
The same applies to building an effective blog for your business. It actually helps to experiment (especially in the initial months) with the kind of posts, categories, topics and writing style till you discover which ones are most effective and drawing the kind of response from visitors that you want to see. Once you discover what kind of direction is working, be consistent with that and experiment some more with with what else you can do. The learning process is constant. The quest for the perfect mix is an unending one but as long as you work towards it and keep publishing content that others find useful, you’ll see results.
