How to Master the Art of Content Marketing – 5 Keys to Success

As our inbox gets flooded with more and more emails daily, it’s becoming increasingly important as marketers that we develop relevant content that our email subscribers will want to open and read. As technology, business, and consumer behaviors change, email marketing must also evolve to meet new challenges and take advantage of new opportunities. Content marketing has been on the rise for several years, but as the trend encounters more web-savvy consumers and new techniques, it is rapidly becoming a critical part of every marketing plan. There are numerous ways to increase and optimize your content marketing strategy for best results; here are 5 simple, key tactics to ensure you are on the right track:

1. Understand the Content Pipeline

Create a development strategy based on the type of content you need to produce. Is it long-form or short? Low-frequency or high? Based on the end results, decide what skill sets are necessary, how to allocate budget, and what production timelines are realistic.

2. Get Passionate People on Your Team

Passionate people produce results. Find people with the right skill sets for your content needs, and then nurture that talent. Understand your audience and put together a team that is interested and engaged in the content you need to produce.

3. Create a Development Workflow

Clearly communicate responsibilities and set realistic timelines. Decide and articulate who is responsible for which tasks in content development, how those tasks will be accomplished, and what the final result of each task should look like.

4. Integrate with Other Marketing Systems

Stay in touch regularly with teams heading up other sales and marketing initiatives for your business. Although people may operate in different departments, it’s to everyone’s advantage to share ideas and resources and repurpose content whenever possible. If there is no communication between teams, the message you deliver to your audiences will be muddled.

5. Target Content Appropriately

Targeting is important for any kind of communications outreach, and even more so for content marketing. As is often the case, targeting is part art and part science. Sorting content by demographics, specific topics or audiences is a helpful way to ensure the right users get access to the right material.

It’s not only content itself you need to refine and improve, it’s also your content distribution methods. Get creative and utilize other channels in addition to email to reach your customers. And don’t forget to measure and refine: make sure you utilize analytics and metrics to provide the type of data that can help you make effective decisions about future content. Don’t wait, get started by learning more about your customers and integrating content marketing in your marketing plan today.

Thanks to Limelight Marketing for their inspiration for this post. Download their full white paper on Content Marketing here.