7 Awesome Tips For Rookie Content Marketers

1. Use Social Media For the Right Reasons

Social media is an absolute must for good marketing. However, all social channels are not the same and they all have different strengths. Get to know these strengths and leverage them. Once you know what they are you can then flex your content marketing muscle and be more effective in reaching your audience with the right content on the right social media channel.

2. Expand Your Digital Footprint

One of the best ways to accomplish this expansion is to use social media. If you are currently using one social media channel, say Facebook, try expanding your brand to Twitter, LinkedIn or others. You will have a different age range and type of person on each of them, so take advantage of that. Here are some statistics from the Pew Research Internet Project that will help you understand each social media channel better. You may also want to start a company blog, or even create a digital hub where all your company digital resources can be found on your website. This will make it easier for your customer to connect and engage.

3. Think About Who Your Customer Is

Start creating content based on the audience you want to reach and the topic you think will be most effective in reaching that recipient. Content-to-customer relevance is king. Here’s a social media example. A LinkedIn post will be written differently than a tweet, or a Facebook post. This happens because the people who frequent those channels can be different in age and also their expectations are different because each of those social channels delivers different types of information. Knowing your customer is also knowing what vehicle to use to reach them most effectively.

4. Content Posts Should Be Relevant And Engaging

The recipient of your post will most likely “like” it and maybe even “share” it with their sphere of influence. That is one way to take advantage of social’s strengths. You can also use social media to create a dialogue with the customer, drive them to a landing page on your website, connect with the brand or share your content. Customers can also be a brand ambassador for your company by sharing their own stories. You just might be surprised how frequently your content gets shared. Typically, engaging content that gets shared is highly relevant to the customer and also has an image attached. Facebook content posts with photos are shared 87% of the time – wow!

5. Don’t Forget About The Customer Path

It’s critical to understand where your customer is so you can modify your content based on where they are in the sales funnel. They might be just entering the sales funnel and need to be educated, (this is the top of the funnel), or be deep in the funnel ready to make a purchase (almost at the bottom of the funnel). This matters, and your content should be produced knowing where the customer is in the sales funnel.

6. Don’t Forget About Hashtags

Social posts need hashtags to be recognized far beyond the friend or follower receiving it.Use a hashtag if you want to tell the world about your topic and expose it to others who are also using that hashtag. The # is the way to get your content post more targeted visibility. For instance, if you wrote a post about your product video, you may write this (video and carpet are the keys here).

See our #video explaining 5 ways to clean your #carpet (then add your URL here)

7. Create It Once And Share It Many Times

This is a phrase you need to keep on your mind 24×7. One of the most important things you can do with all of your content marketing is to create it once and share it as much as possible (without going overboard). You don’t want your content to be out there by itself – share it with others. If your content is alone and not shared on many other channels, then you need to get that started immediately. Repurposing content is critical to increasing exposure many times over.

These are just a few tactical ways to propel your marketing to new levels. It’s not instant. However, if you can follow these basic guidelines, your marketing will be on the road to capturing more qualified leads and converting those leads into sales sooner than you think.

Yourbrandexposed.com is designed to look at digital with an eye into the future with a creative, innovative marketing angle. A digital-business perspective for today’s content marketers.

Sources:

Different Strengths

http://blog.tailwindapp.com/importance-of-social-media-differences/

Content Marketing

http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2011/11/content-marketing-inbound-marketing/

Pew Research Internet Project.

http://www.pewinternet.org/2013/12/30/demographics-of-key-social-networking-platforms/

Content-to-customer relevance is king

https://econsultancy.com/blog/63638-content-is-critical-but-relevance-is-king#i.aglf6n1a5xd27q

your content gets shared

http://socialmediatoday.com/varuntulsyan/1834911/what-most-popular-content-shared-social-media

87% of the time