4 Tips to maximize content marketing performance 2017

1. Define the strategy and KPIs

You know you need to engage the target audience throughout the purchase journey, and any strategy needs to outline how to achieve this. For instance, what are the informational content requirements at each stage of journey? What authority/link requirements allow a brand to compete for top ranking positions?

To measure success, a clear framework is required that separates channel and business KPIs. For instance:

• Owned KPIs: Volume of linking domains, domain authority and engagement metrics such as time on page and bounce rate
• Social KPIs: Share, likes and tweets
• Business KPIs: Leads, brochure downloads and conversions

2. Understand the audience and the purpose of the content

To create content that resonates and builds a connection with your target audience, you need to:

• understand your audience through personas, ideally augmented with emotional intelligence.
• define whether the purpose of the content is to engage with a retained audience or attract a new audience.

You can then apply the learnings from the Meaningful Brands research, which show that in addition to content that educates, informs, inspires, helps and rewards, 84 percent of people expect brands to provide content that:

• entertains.
• tells stories.
• provides solutions.
• creates experiences and events.

With strategy and KPIs defined, you must build a deep understanding of target audiences and a clear idea of the type of content they want to engage with. Once you have this, the ideation process can begin. The shape of the ideas will inform whether existing content and campaigns can be repurposed or expanded (a worthy consideration if we keep in mind that 60 percent of content that brands produce is seen as clutter), or whether new content is required.

Regardless of whether new content is created or existing content is repurposed, the content should be remarkable and add value to the target audience. Achieving this will hit the sweet spot of delivering against both business and SEO KPIs.

3. Connect across channels

To be truly useful to your target audience, it is vital to leverage an owned, earned, shared and paid (OESP) approach where we specifically identify who and where our audiences are, when you should talk to them, and with what messaging. In doing so, you have the opportunity to repurpose your content across the OESP spectrum to drive the maximum possible engagement.

With this in mind, a collaborative approach is required, where content no longer operates in silos and teams collaborate around a single content plan. Hero, Hub and Hygiene is a widely accepted framework that facilitates this:

• Hero: Larger campaign-based content that captures your audience’s imagination through entertainment, storytelling and experiential events
• Hub: Content designed to increase trust and authority by drawing in influencers and their audiences
• Hygiene: Informational content designed to educate, inform, provide solutions and be helpful

This ensures that campaigns are fully connected across channels, with the common primary objective of adding value for the target audience, with channel KPIs forming secondary objectives.

While it may seem basic, a shared content calendar is the initial step in driving this approach, as it:

• diarizes all content, PR, events and social plans and sparks collaboration across teams.
• maps consumers’ topical interests, allowing content to be deployed at the right time.
• highlights cultural events.

4. Adopt the mentality of ‘less is more’

As explained earlier, consumers believe that 60 percent of the content that brands create is clutter. To elevate organic search and business performance to the next level, you need to adopt a consumer-centric approach and create far less content, but ensure that the content you do create is more impactful and lives across channels.

Ultimately, you need to ensure everything you do is focused on delivering against the types of content that your target audience wants to engage with, whether they are looking to be entertained or educated. This will drive overall business performance. If your content delivers this and is also seen as remarkable, the content should sell itself as part of the outreach process, ensuring that you hit your SEO KPIs without needing to create content in a silo just for SEO.