Does your five-year plan include content marketing?
If you’ve attempted to establish a consistent workout routine, you’re familiar with its u-shaped process. You start out feeling excited about your workouts, but as that initial excitement wears off, it becomes harder to stay motivated. Until you successfully make this routine a habit, you may even question why you started working out in the first place.
The same process can play out when you start a content marketing strategy. What is initially fueled by your team’s excitement quickly turns into a routine that’s hard to maintain.
Just like exercise, though, sticking with a content marketing strategy pays off in the long run. Let’s flex our marketing muscles and see how a content strategy improves your business’s overall health.
The short-term challenges and long-term benefits of content marketing
Starting a content marketing strategy can be challenging. Marketers who try content marketing may quickly face issues they didn’t expect, such as:
An extended timeline. It takes time for content marketing solutions to prove their worth. The lag between starting your project and seeing results can make you wonder if your strategy is working.
Overwork and burnout. Continually researching and creating content is taxing and can lead to creative burnout. Additionally, many businesses don’t have the internal resources to produce content consistently, which can hinder results.
Difficulty analyzing performance. Tracking content performance can be challenging, especially if it’s not aligned with your overall marketing strategy. For example, companies using an ABM strategy are less likely to care about SEO metrics and more likely to care about how individual customers engage with content.
Thankfully, getting through these initial trials opens up a world of benefits. Just as exercise improves your long-term physical health, a content strategy builds your marketing muscle. It does this by providing employees with the tools they need and giving customers the resources to answer relevant questions. Additionally, content marketing empowers your team in three key ways:
Content marketing gives your team the tools to nurture leads. The sales funnel is typically divided into four stages: awareness, interest, decision, and action. Potential customers need specific content throughout each of these stages to keep them engaged and progressing through the funnel.
Content marketing increases your brand’s recognition and authority. For instance, teaching readers about a specific topic, like AI in medicine, highlights your industry knowledge. Additionally, businesses with blogs have 55% more visitors compared to those without blogs.
A content strategy creates better leads for your sales team. One study found that 60% of people decide to seek out a product after reading about it. Educating your audience on your services will make them more inclined to choose your business over the competition.
When you start an exercise routine, it’s vital to have strong reasons that motivate you when you get discouraged. Similarly, focusing on the long-term benefits can drive you and your team to follow through on your content marketing strategy. But, you don’t have to push through on willpower alone. There are steps to make content marketing more enjoyable and effective for everyone involved.
How you can flex your content marketing muscles
Just like following an exercise plan helps you meet fitness goals, creating a content marketing plan enables you to achieve specific marketing goals. These steps can help you plan your content strategy:
Get to know your audience. Understanding who your target audience is and what topics appeal to them gives your strategy an optimal starting point.
Determine the purpose of your content. Determining what each asset needs to accomplish will help you personalize your content for better engagement.
Create content guidelines. Having clear guidelines for content creates a consistent brand voice and makes it easier for others to keep messaging on brand.
Set deadlines. Setting realistic deadlines makes your content a priority without overwhelming you.
Dedicate resources. Working as a team makes it more likely that you’ll follow through on your plan. Additionally, you don’t have to do it alone. Working with a content partner could give you the resources you need on a fixed budget.
Be patient. It takes a while to build an audience around your website. Patience will help you avoid giving up before you reap the reward of your investment.
These steps will help your content strategy attract and build a devoted audience. It’s true that, like an exercise routine, a content marketing plan can be hard to maintain. Thankfully, both can yield amazing results if you stick with them long term.
At the Content Reactor, we partner with businesses that need help fulfilling their content strategy. From developing content calendars to writing informative articles for your blog, our services can ramp up your content marketing strategy. Contact us today for a free consultation.
