Content is important to any marketing strategy. What you talk about matters and businesses need to provide value in order for customers to pay attention to them. Content is king after all.

Janine Popick of Inc. says with great content you:

• Have a wider funnel of leads to cultivate
• Become known as an industry leader
• Can share with the press for great public relations
• Have new information for your sales, marketing, and customer service teams to use

Developing a content marketing strategy needs to support not only social media, but search engine marketing, branding, and positioning. Jason Brewer recently wrote a post for Convince and Convert on creating a likeable content marketing strategy. He says, “In business, a successful content strategy is one that achieves business goals while fulfillment of these five traits of likability in the most natural and organic way possible.”

Be Informative

Bring new insight to your customers by providing valuable and/or educational information. Baer says if your content isn’t informative, or if it is trite, redundant, or can be found elsewhere, your results and viewership will suffer.

Be Entertaining

As humans we tend to like, share, and talk about content that makes us laugh and cry because we form an emotional connection with it. Baer says a successful content strategy should seek to produce and distribute content consistently shared by your audience and be shared easily by them.

Be Relevant

Know your audience and understand what is appropriate, popular, and timely. The time of day, the season, and upcoming holidays can play into your strategy. You also want to look at all channels for distributing your content and format it to the specific channel. For instance, Baer provides the example of a video. He says, although a video you produce may be relevant to your target audience overall, think about how to modify content based on whether you’re distributing through your website, an on-demand video platform, or at a trade show.

Be Consistent

Baer says, “If you change too much or too often, user engagement will suffer from this sporadic inconsistency.”

This includes your tone and voice. Baer suggests laying out a repeatable system to govern content creation and publishing.

Be Honest

Let your audience know what you think, your opinion, and show them who you are. Baer says don’t be afraid to open up and put a name, face, backstory, and context to your content.

Putting the right words in the appropriate context that makes reading them meaningful takes time and experience. You need to conceive, plan, and execute even when it’s part of a good strategy.

Do you have a content marketing strategy in place?

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