Content is a big part of what we do here at HdE GROUP. And without tooting our horn too much, we’re pretty darn good at it. We work with a variety of clients within the technology space, building powerful content strategies that have generated some pretty impressive results.
With that in mind, we wanted to gather some of our best content marketing advice and package it into an easy-to-read blog for your viewing pleasure. So, whether you’re a seasoned-pro blogger or an enthusiastic newbie, read on to find plenty of actionable advice to level-up your content marketing strategy in 2021.
1. Remember both your audiences’ and your business’ Goals
It’s all too easy to get carried away with all the bells and whistles of content marketing, often losing sight of the most important thing of all, the reason you’re creating content in the first place: the goals of both your business and your audience.
When planning your strategy, you need to really think about the core objectives you wish to achieve through your content. Perhaps it’s to generate leads and drive sales, or maybe it’s simply to grow brand awareness within the ever-competitive industry.
You must also consider your audience and various buyer personas, which, as explained by Hubspot, involves research into your target audiences’ goals and motivations. When creating content, remember to always have these things in mind.
2. Educate Your Buyers
Sometimes the tough pill to swallow is that our potential customers don’t necessarily care about our products or services; they care about themselves. If we buy into this notion, then we must also consider that the majority of the content we produce for marketing purposes cannot be about ourselves. Content should primarily be centred around fulfilling our customers’ needs and interests through engaging and, even better, educational content.
Consider the problems that your product or service aims to solve for your customers, and then turn this into insightful content that’s going to help your audience in some way; from how-to guides to downloadable templates.
3. Diversify Your Content
When it comes to content marketing, it’s best not to put all your eggs in one basket. Unless you’re an extreme risk-taker, you wouldn’t invest all your money in one stock. If something was to go wrong, you could lose all of your money in an instance. That’s why it’s much more recommended to diversify your funds in order to mitigate risk.
The same can be said for content marketing. It’s not wise to concentrate all your efforts on one marketing channel, such as Vlogging or blog writing. In today’s digital age, trends are always changing and so are consumers preferences on consuming content. Because of this, it is vital to diversify your marketing channels in order to ensure maximum success in identifying leads.
Content marketing channels you will want to consider include:
- Podcasts
- Social Media
- Your website blog
- Guest blogging
- Social media
- Email marketing
- YouTube
4. Work With Thought Leaders (or be the Thought Leader)
Content marketing is all about creating pieces that will help you win the battle for your audience’s attention, consideration, and, above all, loyalty. A format that is particularly good at doing this is thought leadership content.
Thought leadership pieces help your audience to look at your business as a source of relevant and high-quality insights about developments happening in your industry.
Be the Thought Leader:
If there’s one thing that we humans love, it’s a good story. This means that telling a story about you as a business leader or professional in the industry including what you’ve learned, how you ended up where you are today, your reflections on your experiences so far, can be an amazing way to do thought leadership.
Working with Thought Leaders:
Another super successful strategy is to leverage the wealth of knowledge available outside of your business and within your network. Don’t be afraid to reach out to leaders and the movers and shakers in the industry that you admire. Have a conversation with them about how you can collaborate to create insightful content that your audience will love and learn from. This is a technique that we at HdE GROUP, find goes down particularly well with our audience. Our “STARTUP Stories” series takes our audience on a journey in which we meet the founders who are taking a stand and doing things differently in the tech space.
5. Publish Off-Domain Content
Done properly, guest blogging and publishing content on websites and platforms other than your own can do wonders for your marketing objectives. The main benefits of publishing on established platforms such as Medium or other industry news websites is that it comes with a built-in audience.
Medium alone has around three million subscribers, and so when you publish on Medium, you have a great chance that many of these eyes will be on your article. When you’re posting to an industry news website, you’re posting to a platform where people are actively seeking out your type of content.
When creating this type of off-domain content, the key is to have a narrow focus and stay in your lane. For example, if you’re a digital marketer that focuses on brand marketing, make sure you’re writing about content and providing the audience with insightful information that may lead them to want to find out more about your business and services.
6. Evaluate the Success of Your Content with Data
It’s important to track, analyse and report on the performance of your content in order to evaluate its success in achieving your goals. There are many different metrics you can use to measure success and it all really boils down to your goals.
For example, if your goal for a particular strand of content is to grow brand awareness, then the metrics you may want to measure would be social media engagement. You’ll want to look at things such as reach and impressions to see how well your audience is engaging with your content. If the numbers are looking good, then you’ll of course, want to carry on with your strategy. If the numbers aren’t looking too great compared to the amount of effort you’ve put into that particular strategy, you may want to reconsider your approach and try something new.
Content marketing can really be a game of trial and error. But by using data for insights, you can adjust your content marketing plan when necessary, ensuring you have confidence that you’re delivering on your audiences’ interests and expectations
7. Repurpose Your Content
When carrying out the above step, you’ll get a really good idea of what content and topics are resonating best with your audience. When discovering particularly successful results, you’ll want to consider repurposing content.
Repurposing content is an approach that takes existing, published content, and refreshes it and puts an entirely new spin on it to create something totally new and wonderfully different.
Let’s use a hypothetical example of a blog post “7 ways to optimise your SaaS landing page” which proved to go down brilliantly with a businesses audience, receiving great viewing figures and shares. From this piece of content, which probably took a lot of time and effort to create, why not create smaller pieces of content from it to promote to your other channels?
For example, you can repurpose a blog into:
- A webinar to review your findings and discuss with other thought leaders in the industry
- An infographic for social summarising the main findings of the blog
- Downloadable guides based on the blog content
- Social media Stories focusing on different discussion points, inviting your audience to engage via polls and other interactive features.
At HdE GROUP, we’re experts in content marketing for those in the technology space. We work hard for both ourselves and our amazing clients to build solid content marketing strategies that not only engages, but converts too
In 2021, having a solid content marketing strategy should no longer just be an option, it’s vital to stand tall amongst the sea of fierce competition. Get in touch today to find out how we can help your business achieve mindblowing results.