All the earmarks of spring are starting to pop up – we’ve sprung our clocks ahead an hour, we’re enjoying more daylight hours, the weather is starting to warm up and spring cleaning initiatives are in full swing.
Now is also a great time to clean up your content marketing strategy. New trends and approaches are emerging all the time, and it’s always good to revisit your current strategy to make sure you’re keeping up with the times.
Let’s take a look at some of this week’s content marketing news, and get some inspo for a content marketing strategy clean sweep:
Does Your Content Marketing Mix Address Your Business Challenges?
This piece from Skyword’s Content Standard blog delves specifically into the strategy behind each piece of content, reminding readers that the approach of creating content just for content creation’s sake died out long ago.
Now, each piece must be supported with a clear objective and overarching goal, and the mix of different content pieces that your brand uses should directly help you achieve your goals. As brands strive for success here, Skyword contributor Carrie Dagenhard advises:
- Not to overlook informational content. Educating your audience should remain a key pillar of your strategy.
- Not to get too caught up in the trends. Taking a new marketing approach can be great for shaking things up a bit, but it’s important not to get lost in the pursuit of keeping up with the Joneses.
- Diversify and try new content types. Avoid that stale feeling among your audience, and consider trying out elements like video, infographics or ebooks.
How White Papers Can Help Your Content Marketing Strategy
Speaking of diversifying your content types, this piece from Forbes Agency Council’s Karan Sharma provides a valuable suggestion: white papers.
As someone who’s written her fair share of white papers, I agree with Sharma’s take that these longer-form, informational pieces of content can be considerably advantageous to your marketing strategy. This is especially true for B2B brands who need something more in-depth to properly educate potential customers and offer a higher level of detail.
Sharma also outlines a few key tips for creating white paper content, advising readers to avoid straight-out promotion within white papers, and take a more informational focus. That being said, it’s also imperative to use robust research from reputable sources, and support talking points with thoughtful design layout.
Read the article here for more tips on white paper content.
Last Week’s Facebook Outage Proves Why Email Marketing Is Still So Valuable
If you haven’t heard about the Facebook outage, you must be, well …
The social media giant’s historic outage gave rise to all different types of media fodder, including for Entrepreneur’s Nick Wolny, who sparked a discussion about the importance of email marketing.
As Wolny pointed out, an outage like Facebook’s – a platform on which users spend an average of about 40 minutes a day – demonstrates the issues companies can run into when they put all of their marketing eggs in a single basket. As opposed to mainly (or solely) relying on social channels, adding email marketing to the mix can enable brands to continue reaching out and forming connections with their audience, even when social sites experience performance issues.
Wolny goes on to provide some key tips for brands’ email marketing, pointing out the importance of situating the company as an authoritative voice in its space, making sure elements are optimized for mobile and using GIFs. Interestingly, an emerging best practice is to re-send campaign emails to recipients who didn’t open them the first time – one company boosted its open rates by 30 percent using this approach.
Check out the article here for more.
3 Ways to Break Through the Marketing Clutter
Spring cleaning is all about decluttering. Taking a cue from Marie Kondo, if it doesn’t spark joy, it’s time to get rid of it.
Well, this attitude isn’t just used when it comes to crap around the house – your audience is inundated with so much marketing and messaging today that if you don’t do something to stand out, it all begins to look like word clutter.
Enter these tips from Chief Marketer contributor Chardia Christophe-Gargia. Citing some insights shared by participants of Bizzabo’s Empower executive summit on International Women’s Day, Christophe-Gargia noted that audiences stick with brands that stand for a particular cause. Insurance provider Lemonade, for example, works to target millennials with its services, and has openly limited gun insurance options. Since this cause aligns with many millennials’ views, it’s resulted in positive feedback from customers and helps separate the insurance provider from others in its space.
Read the article here to see the other strategies you can use to cut through the clutter.
And check back next week for our usual marketing news wrap up.
Happy spring cleaning!
