Anyone who has looked at a marketing trade article in the past five years has seen the phrase “Content is King.”
While this catchy phrase has merit, it is also a bit misleading. Sure, quality content can be an integral component of brand growth. But how important can it be if no one sees it? It’s no longer enough to simply invest in high-quality brand content and hope that it reaches customers.
Today, brands must devise ways to efficiently distribute and maximize content ROI. In addition to growth hacking and constant A/B testing here are a few strategies for making the most out of the content you have.
Determine Your Content Goals
With so many brands pushing out content across mediums and at unprecedented paces, it can be tough not to feel the pressure to follow suit. But creating content for the sake of creating content won’t do your brand many favors.
The first step to maximizing your existing content is to go back to square one and determine your overarching content goals. Are you creating blog posts, videos, Instagram stories, and case studies to sell more products? Or are you after brand awareness or community growth? When you know you’re larger goals, it’s easier to define the best channels and types of content to help you meet your goals.
Make Channel Specific Content
Not all content is created equally. Unfortunately, some brands still take a one-size-fits-all approach to content development. Every social platform has different strengths and weaknesses.
When it comes to visual storytelling Instagram can’t be beat, whereas Snapchat is becoming increasingly important for enacting behind-the-scenes, 1:1 content. When it comes to content creation and distribution, brands have to take a step back and look at their social landscapes in their entirety.
Trust Your Data
Data is your best friend when it comes to creating channel-specific content. Taking the time to look at each channel’s content performance, as well as costs and resources, can help you decide when and where to focus your efforts. Neil Patel of QuickSprout recommends pinpointing 1-2 channels and designing content around their unique features.
For example, let’s say you’re experiencing the highest engagement on Instagram and would like to focus your efforts on continually building up your Instagram community; you can look at the specific performance metrics of each of your posts to determine what your followers want to see.
Did a product-focused photo come up short in comparison to a behind-the-scenes video or community spotlight boomerang? If your users are consistently not engaging with a channel, medium, or content series, it’s not a fluke - they’re trying to tell you something.
Audiences are bombarded with think pieces and social videos all day long, most of which don’t add much value to their lives. The brands that create content with meaning have the ability to cut through all of the content excesses.
Your data doesn’t lie to you, so trust and use it in your content planning stages.
In addition to offering insights about the types of content that perform best among your target audience, post-specific data can also reveal your audiences’ platform habits. For example, you might notice a time of day they are most active on networks.
Promote
Navigating the fine lines between promotion, over promotion, and under promotion is tricky.
Some brands fear that pushing a piece of content too much will result in “unfollows” and “unsubscribes,” whereas other brands don’t have any conception of promotion boundaries. Based on the structure of social media, you have to promote your content often to gain any real traction.
Let’s say your team spends weeks developing seasonal trends whitepaper, and after sharing the link via email, Facebook, and Twitter, you’ve received only a few download requests. The poor results are (likely) not from audiences’ disinterest; instead, they likely stem from audience’s not knowing about the paper’s existence.
Organic reach across networks, especially Facebook, is on the decline; so unless your users are already engaging with your content on a regular basis they may not see your latest efforts. It’s ok to reshare the same links and collateral with your audiences several times, so long as there is enough time in between each share.
You can also promote your posts to target your audiences - and although this will require you to dip into your marketing budget - it also means that your social audiences have a greater chance of seeing content that could add value to their lives.
Incorporate Calls to Action
With every piece of content you produce, you have the opportunity to create new audience touchpoints. For example, an Instagram story can evolve into a website visit, or blog traffic can become a case study download. When you create channel-specific content - don’t give away the farm on just one channel.
If it makes sense to do so, meaning that your call to action does not feel forced, you can promote a portion of your content on one channel and bait your consumers into reading the rest after they take a call to action.
For example, in Instagram’s new Stories features, brands can instruct their followers to swipe up to learn more; this action takes their followers off the platform and onto their mobile site, thus increasing the number of engagement opportunities.
Most brands creating content on a regular basis are already employing baseline distribution strategies, like sharing across social media platforms and sending out monthly newsletters. While these actions are important components of an organization’s content strategy, they’re no longer to command audience’s attention spans or generate potential leads and sales.
Today’s content landscape is nearing oversaturation at an alarming rate.
Organizations can’t just simply amp up their content production and expect to see results. It’s more valuable to tweak existing distribution strategies to maximize the potential reach and value of your content.