Make your content go the extra mile

Whatever your goals – whether it’s to increase brand awareness, generate leads or encourage customer loyalty – your content should be accountable for getting you results. Begin by assessing whether you are creating the right content in the first place. A great place to start is by using your content to answer questions being asked by your target audience: speak to your customer services team, what are the most common enquiries they deal with?

Once you’ve nailed down topics, think about what form your content will take – and how that will impact how useful the content is, for both your business and your target audience. For example, could you create gated content – where visitors need to enter select details to access the content? Once the content is downloaded by the visitor, they could then be targeted with a personalised stream of content that will help drive your goals but also prove useful to the visitor.

Always re-purpose your content too – once you’ve done all the hard work coming up with the ideas, use the content across as many of your marketing channels as possible to really leverage its benefits.

Equally, don’t stop after creating the content. Any good content plan must have clear steps to take to promote the content. If you’re creating content that could be of value to the relevant media, make sure you’ve thought carefully about how you want to pitch the content in to them – should you run the idea by any target journalists, before investing in the content creation, to get their feedback on your ideas and to gauge their interest?

Consider whether you want to put some advertising spend behind your content promotion too. To help it reach a wider audience, could you create a social media advertising schedule to push the content a bit further?

Don’t forget your internal resources either. Share your newly created content with your team. Sales may be able to share the useful articles to engage potential customers, and your customer services team may find the content invaluable when supporting customer queries. And last, but not least, always put in place steps to measure the success of your content. If you can see some content isn’t getting the results you had hoped for, don’t be afraid to make changes, update the content, or try a different approach when promoting it.