Alright, so if you’ve been tracking this blog you should have at least a basic understanding of what Content Marketing is as well as where it fits in the customer buying cycle – but how do you get started?
Well, almost like I planned it (*wink*) – here’s my Top 5 Tips to Get Started Creating Marketing Content!
- Know your audience
Before you even think about picking up a camera or writing a social post – learn as much as you can about your audience!
What is important to your audience? What are their interests? How do they like to be spoken to? What do they value? What do they need? Who are they? Once you understand that, it will help you develop content ideas and you can evaluate which of those ideas are likely to be successful, rather than just posting and hoping.
- Live within your means
The ads you are used to seeing from the biggest brands in the world can often reach in the millions in costs, and even some of the best social ads and content can be expensive.
If you can’t afford to spend your budget on high quality photography or video production, don’t! It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make content.
In fact, social media platforms make it easier than ever for you to create content within the platform, and there’s so many great resources out there that you can use for free to make great social content.
- Utilise (FREE) tech available to you
Which leads me to tip 3 – use the tools that are available to you, especially the ones that are free or low cost. First of all, most of us have smartphones that can record HD video that is of a good enough quality for social media content. While it’s ideal to have a great quality DSLR camera like the Canon EOS 5D or the Nikon D850, or a camcorder such as the Sony ___, but those cameras cost thousands of pounds – and that’s often without any additional equipment such as microphones and lighting that really help you make the most out of that tech.
There’s also a number of apps that you can use for editing photos and video on desktop or mobile, that make it quick and easy to post content to your socials.
- Get your Nike’s on…
…and JUST DO IT!
See what I did there? 😉
Cheesy? Yes. Relevant? Absolutely!
I have personally spent days, weeks and sometimes months in the past working on content or debating strategies with clients, only to post it and receive a lukewarm reaction.
I’ve also created content within literal seconds and have it perform well about benchmark. The point is that making good content is important, but you have to balance that with how long it is taking you to produce and fine tune your content – remember, all the time spent tweaking content is time that content could be reaching your audience.
- Reflect often, but be patient
My last, but certainly not least, tip is to take time to evaluate your content and it’s performance, but to be patient.
Growing an engaged social media following takes time so it’s important to remain patient and set yourself a timeline for evaluating success.
If you want or need to, work with a marketing consult or agency on how long you should be staying the course on a strategy. You should also look into some of the engagement benchmarks from your chosen platform.
TL;DR
To conclude, remember that these are only some tips to get you started, but the reality is that there is no one-size-fits-all method to creating a successful content marketing strategy. Often the best marketers and the best agencies will fail when on their first attempt at content creation, it’s about trial and error.
But the only way to guarantee ROI on content marketing is to do it in the first place.
Produce content for your audience that educates, inspires and entertains, sprinkle in a little patience and dash of analytical thinking and you’ll be serving up great content in no time at all!
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