Make Your Content Rock

I love curating and creating fresh, exciting content for my clients and I know you are wondering how I do it so well and so consistently. Here are a few tips on what I’ve learned that makes content creation fun and simple.

Journalism versus Marketing

Traditional marketing is like a television commercial, you position your product in front of the right customer at the right time for the right number of instances and eventually they buy your product. Content creation is part of a marketing strategy that has nothing to do with traditional marketing. You are creating interesting, engaging, consumable media that brings your customers into a dialogue about what they do and care about. Whether it’s your product, or most likely not; you’re a journalist creating a consistent story that engages your customers in an ongoing conversation about who your business is and how it fits into their lives. In this process, being responsive to your loyal fans and followers is critical to winning this game.

Go the Distance

Consistency and responsiveness over a long period of time, a minimum of one year, is where your business will see the real benefit of any social media marketing campaign. Content creation shouldn’t happen in one shot, don’t blow the budget on one long fancy video. Create a theme, a consistent message, and post regularly on all relevant sites. Content for each period of time only needs to be created once:  write a blog about some new industry trend, publish it, and post and link to it on multiple social media outlets as outreach marketing. If it’s relevant to some of your favorite sites, post a link back to your blog and make comments with tidbits that fit the conversation on independent sites. Most importantly, do this repeatedly on a consistent basis for at least a year.

Measure your Effectiveness

This is why going the distance is so important. It is difficult to measure a single data point, but a collection of data over a period of time will tell a story about what is working, what is not, and what to try next. Virality, engagement, click-through, sales, and email newsletter sign-ups are all great ways to measure ROI for your content. This is a continuous improvement process, not a final measurement of a single campaign. Effectively measuring consumer loyalty based on timing and viewership of content created and shared will point to what to keep doing, what to improve, and what to discard. And over time, this may change, which is why I consider this a continuous process.

Expect Organic Results

In fact, question the results if they don’t appear to be natural. A customer that has found and engaged with your content in a natural way (not responding to paid advertising, a promoted post, or an SEO keyword heavy link) is a true customer; and much more likely to remain loyal as you engage in a conversation online. Don’t expect to be an overnight success with a thousand views of any of your first ten posts or that anything will go viral for at least four months, if ever. We all want to see big numbers and a steep curve on a graph, but the truth is this is more questionable versus effective most of the time. Effective content creation includes many points of contact for fans and customers that together create a whole story of your Company’s brand.

Pay Attention

Ask yourself why followers and fans would care about the content being created, are you playing to the audience? If you would click on it, maybe they will click on it. A great way to get started in the right direction is to visit your favorite social media business pages and look at what they are doing! What do people love to talk about? What is everyone clicking on? What is trending on Twitter? Go from there.

This article was written by Eliece Hammond – Online Marketing Strategist at Dream Local Digital. Eliece is from the Pacific Northwest and has recently relocated to Silicon Valley with her new husband, Jim. Maine has a special draw for her and she is excited to work with the team and support local commerce. Eliece attended college at an early age in Illinois, earning a high school diploma and AA degree in Graphic Design in June of 1999. She later went on to complete a 4-year Business Administration degree from the University of Washington with concentrations in Marketing and Finance. Her focus has always been on entrepreneurship, with 14 years of experience developing business models and marketing plans. You can reach Eliece at [email protected] or connect with her online at: https://about.me/eliece