Three Key Considerations For Successful Content Marketing

Increasing in importance, high-quality content is fast becoming the gold dust of aspirational content marketing. But great content creation forms just one digit in the combination code of content marketing success - you wont get far into the vault without the other numbers, such as the best ways to place, promote, source and manage content!

In a churning sea of e-casts, infographics, blog posts, guest articles, status updates, brochures and more, effective content marketers must become great navigators. And with content being so vital for conversion, SEO, and securing potential leads, discovering new tips and ways to steer the fast-paced tides of content marketing strategy should always be high in these navigators' priorities. So jump aboard shipmates!

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5 Great Content Marketing Ideas

1. Outline Clear Goals to Deliver the Best Results & Stay Organised!

Like a well-written article, successful content marketing always works to a clearly outlined structure. Posting content as-and-when you feel like it will not achieve much!
From figuring out budgets to knowing content placement quotas, clearly defining long and short-term goals provides material marketing targets - which you'll need to prove ROI. Stating exactly what you want to achieve (producing e-casts to boost conversion, using content to grow social following, or outreaching articles to benefit SEO for example), this aspirational structure forms your basic content strategy outline. Plain sailing so far, right?
Once you have this strategy and goal in place, the next step is to remain organised and focused - whatever your aim. With a stress-headache-inducing variety of content available, developing good content management habits and systems will help you keep track of created content, content forms and active campaigns, and enable you to plan for short and longer term content goals, deadlines and aspirational achievements, while ensuring you remain on target.

• Define your goals to outline a clear content marketing strategy.

• Remember, you need to be able to prove ROI from the start. Use this structure to determine what granular metrics you need to track continued progress and determine success.

• Don't let your content obscure your end focus. Creating and exploring new content formats (such as mobile apps) is exciting but try not to get lost in your own promotions.

2. Involve Your Social Strategy

If you've taken a great picture or want to promote your personal blog, what do you do? You head to social media right? Well, successful accessible content marketing should do exactly the same!
Though this sounds obvious, many organisations are wary of investing time and money into social strategy as it's difficult to determine precise ROI, and returns tend to be gradual. But as a vehicle designed to share multi-faceted content to a wide-reaching audience, utilising the marketing potential of social media (as well as outreaching content via your own corporate channels) is a no-brainer for content marketing promotions.

• From increasing site traffic to boosting brand awareness and influence, dedicated social strategy exists hand-in-hand with successful content marketing.

• Creating an ongoing cycle, content (e-casts, articles, images etc) should promote brands and grow social presence; and this advancing social presence should then be used to share additional content.
• The larger the social audience, the greater the potential for content sharing, and useable user-generated content.

• Distributing high-quality, original content through the right social channels contributes towards thought leadership assertion. Presenting a brand or an  individual as an industry thought leader, adds value and influence to the content ascribed to them.

3. Find New Ways to Meet Growing Demand

"But there's not enough time! I need to deliver the highest quality content at the highest quantity and speed possible!"

Because of the rising importance of content for SEO, social and other brand benefit, efficiently meeting demand to provide constant, original and interesting content is half the battle, before high-quality outreach opportunities are even considered.
So in order to meet the pace and be successful, you'll need to make the most of all your assets:

• Re-purpose your content. Recycling's not just a green office policy. Adapting and reworking content into new formats cuts research times, allows good ideas to be more widely accessible, and keeps things fresh.

• Think back to that point about organisation. Good organisation makes it easier to source old content, refurbish it, and find new places to publish. You want to get as much milage out of your content as possible! To save time, create folder systems, databases, calendars of editorial deadlines - whatever management system works best for you - and use it to stay ahead of deadlines and quotas.

• In addition to sharing your own content, use social media to source and utilise user-generated content. From images to simple mentions (a good tweet can be retweeted!), encourage social followers to create content you can use and repurpose. Competitions and initiative based campaigns will provoke content creation, boost trust and engagement, and save time and effort.

• Consider outsourcing. If there's no way to improve your content management organisation, you've repurposed out of your ears and your social following's bored with creating, review your budget and consider outsourcing content creation.