Marketing communications that go the distance
Marketing communications that go the distance
- January 1, 2021
- Written by Karen Quinn
- 3 years ago
- No Comments
It’s that time of year for resolutions, detoxing and forming new habits. Have you thought about including your marketing communications in your freshen up? We’ve created a New Year fitness program for your marketing communications.
Content is the lynchpin of your marketing communications – making sure it can go the distance is crucial. Content can and should be more efficient. But why is there so much focus on content these days – it’s all just marketing right?
Well, yes and no. Consistent, credible, and useful content is so much more than just words. And so much more powerful than traditional advertising. Strong content can:
- Build trust and confidence in your brand and its values. By delivering consistently useful content that is heavy on information and light on the hard sell.
- Generate potential leads to your business. By offering solutions to problems your potential customers are facing.
- Cultivate stronger connections with your customers. By understanding their pain points and demonstrating where you can help and add value.
- Establish you as the subject matter expert. By providing useful and well-rounded information on a breadth of issues that are all interlinked to your product or service.
The foundation of digital success
Content is also a key pillar for your other digital marketing activities – especially social media and search engine optimisation (SEO). Looking at these three elements up-front will create efficiency, consistency, and ultimately much better results. You can of course backfill, but it won’t be anywhere near as smooth – trust me!
Getting wider buy-in
I know that those subjective measures of success don’t help you secure your marketing budget – especially if you want to invest in developing your marketing communications through stronger content. Here’s some other little gems that will help placate the CFO when securing budget for content marketing:
> 78% of buyers prefer articles to ads
> 6 x higher conversion rate than other digital advertising methods
> Content costs 62% less than traditional marketing tactics – it’s also great for your search engine optimisation
> Video content is growing in importance. 85% of businesses use video marketing and of those 92% say it’s valuable
How to make sure your content can go the distance
Now you’re on board with the why, let’s look at the how. How do you make sure your marketing communications are fit for 2021 and beyond.
Truth be told you probably already have quite a lot of content, either as part of your marketing tool kit or floating around in proposals, presentations or on your website. Follow our marketing communications fitness program – Marcomms Fit – for support with covering all the bases…
STEP 1 - DETOX
Know where you are now – set a baseline to work from. Take stock of what content you have already and then you’ll be able to see where you have lots of good material and where your gaps are.
STEP 2 - KICK-START
Set your goals and focus – you can’t get to work on your content without knowing what success looks like. Is it more leads, more social media engagement, more direct sales from the website, or a consistent customer journey?
STEP 3 - STRENGTH
The heavy lifting of your content will be in your campaigns. How many will you have this year? Schedule them and focus on creating targeted and purposeful content for them – utilising your channels in the most effective way.
STEP 4 - STAMINA
Evergreen content will continue throughout the year, giving you a continued presence. Repurposing, reusing, and recycling content will help you get maximum efficiency from your content.
We’ll be sharing tips and tricks throughout January to help you get your marketing communications ready to go the distance. Keep an eye out for the Marcomms Fit program!