Have you ever felt like the dumb kid? Sometimes, it can seem like everyone else “gets” content marketing, but your team is still struggling to get things right. When it comes to content marketing, “smart” doesn’t have to do with intelligence or academic ability. It’s all about figuring out how to use what you have to get the best results. You know what they say: Work smarter, not harder. With that it mind, it can help to borrow a few tactics from some of the smartest content marketers out there. Here’s what smart folks do with content marketing, and ways to copy them.
They Have a Strategy
You can’t get by without a content marketing strategy. Go ahead, try it. We’ll wait.
The truth is, nearly 60 percent of the most successful B2C marketers and 62 percent of the most successful B2B marketers have content marketing strategies. The majority of B2C and B2B marketers attribute their success with content marketing to creating a strategy.
So if you’re still flying blind, trying putting a plan and strategy down on paper. It’ll help you figure out not only where you’re going, but why you’re trying to get there.
They’re Not Afraid to Change Things Up
You can’t be stubborn if you want to practice smart content marketing. You can’t look at something that’s not working and insist that it will work…eventually.
The smartest content marketers know when to cut their losses. They understand that sometimes video isn’t the best pick, sometimes an influencer is a dud, and sometimes it’s totally fine to throw out the baby and the bathwater.
Don’t get stuck in a rut with your content marketing. If something isn’t going the way you wanted it to, head back to the drawing board.
They Work Well With Others
Content marketing isn’t a solo game, and you don’t have to handle every aspect of it on your own. In fact, sometimes, it’s better to get others to do the work for you.
The smartest content marketers know that outsourcing content creation, distribution, and analytics is sometimes the way to go. You might not have the skills or the budget to handle everything on your own. So why not hire someone who can?
They Keep Up With Trends
Social media, SEO, people’s preferences — the content marketing landscape is ever-changing. Only a dummy would continue to rely on the rules of the 2011 SEO playbook, or insist that Friendster is the way to go.
If you want to keep up with what’s going on with content marketing, you’ve got to pay attention. That means reading news articles and opinion pieces from content marketing experts. It also means keeping up with the news of the world. For example, how is the data breach at Facebook going to impact marketers going forward? What does a backlash against Snapchat’s redesign mean for your brand?
You can’t afford to bury your head in the sand and pretend that you’re not affected by what’s going on in the world.
They Fit the Content to the Customer
One last thing smart content marketers do: They make the content suit the needs of the customer. In the smartest cases, that means completely customizing the content experience based on where a person is in the marketing funnel.
The needs of a person who is completely new to your brand are vastly different from the needs of a repeat customer. You can’t expect a repeat customer to be happy if they see the same message or same list of blog posts or videos each time they come to your site. You can’t send your most loyal customers the same email message you’d send to new ones.
Creating buyer personas will help you figure out who your customers are, and the type of content that will meet their needs.
If your content marketing efforts haven’t paid off yet, it’s probably because you’ve been going about things all wrong. Sometimes, looking at the techniques used by the most successful people and copying those techniques is all you need to do to get smart about content marketing.