We are all the media now. You, me, the brands we work with: We can all create and distribute our own content and build our own audiences. We’ve never been so powerful.
Australian marketers use an average of eight different kinds of content to engage their audiences. Whether it’s social media content (82 per cent), email newsletters (78 per cent), blogs (67 per cent), video (64 per cent), or infographics (47 per cent), Australia’s marketers and the brands they partner with are beginning to understand they can build long-term and trusting relationships with consumers by creating and distributing high-quality content.
Those figures are from the Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 Australian Benchmarks Budgets and Trends report, which also shows that 72 per cent of marketers are focused on producing content that focuses on what the audience wants — be it information or entertainment — rather than what the brand wants to say.
How does a brand know what content to create?
But how does a brand know which kinds of content to create? How do you know whether your audience wants to read a blog post, or watch a video or listen to a podcast? How do you know what messages will engage their interest? How do you know what will work? And how on earth did we land on providing our audience with an average of eight kinds of content? Don’t we know what the hell we’re doing?
It’s not enough to simply be the media — to create and distribute content. If you want to succeed in content marketing, you need a documented strategy.
Investing the time and effort and doing “deep dive” research before creating so much as your first blog post is the best hope any brand has of generating a measurable return on investment from their content marketing activities. You need to know whom your audience is, what they’re searching for, when they’re searching, how to reach them, how to retain them and how to convert them into customers. Without that, you’re just whistling in the wind.
Your content marketing strategy is your bedrock
This research will become the bedrock of everything you do — all the content you create. So it has to be done properly. You can’t scrimp on it. Engage a content marketing agency to do it for you. They can take an outsider’s view of your enterprise and your audience and bring their expertise to the table to help you determine what kinds of content will work best for you.
We know having a documented strategy works because our content strategy team has written dozens of them and they’re delivering results for the brands we work with. What’s the biggest lesson we’ve learned from all that experience? The media has always understood its audience and given them what they want. You can’t be the media unless you can do the same.
If you’d like to work with one of the best content marketing agencies around (it’s not just us saying it, we’re finalists for Agency of the Year at the 2017 Content Marketing Awards), contact Lush Digital Media.
Like what you’ve read? Sign up to the Lush newsletter for fortnightly advice to help you market your business better, tips from our video production gurus, and a podcast or two from our favourite podcasting team, Brand Newsroom. In the meantime, you might enjoy these:
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