Clear and defined goals
As with any business venture, it’s essential you set yourself up with some clear goals for where your project will go. This will not only help you and your team, but it will also help when it comes to selling your content marketing product to your clients. Typical goals to think about for a content marketing campaign include; raising brand awareness, loyalty and authority, and providing your customers with information that is genuinely of use to them.
A clear way of measuring your success
You will need a way to determine whether you are reaching your goals or not so that you can identify the success rate of your campaign as it progresses. Your goals will likely have differing Key Performance Indicators, but there will be some online tools such as Moz Analytics that will help you to measure the most common ones, such as traffic on your website, conversion rate and social shares.
Fluid Navigability
The bottom line for user experience is great content and simple navigability. It’s all about find exactly what you want in the less possible time. If you are positively surprised along the way with some add-ons (i.e promos, related products/articles) even better.
Make sure to find a perfect blend of content and web design. Some essential details to take care of include: easy-to-read fonts, compelling colours and multimedia galleries, proper categorisation and layout, related posts/products tabs, page breadcrumbs, just to name but a few.
Check websites like Web Eden to find inspiration on how to craft the proper marketing fabric. Make sure you have a flexible CMS in order to adjust content strategy as it evolves.
You won’t be able to generate amazing content for your audience unless you know who they are, what they want and what they need.
To do this, you’ll need to conduct surveys on your customers, check out your customer profiles and build personas on these to help determine a better understanding of who you are writing for.
Interesting and unique ideas
Think about the content you’ve seen lately. You may have even shared some content online with your friends, family or co-workers. It’s a good idea to start thinking about why these pieces of content are sharable – why was it so interesting that you wanted to show it to someone else? This is a key question to ask when it comes to generating ideas. You’ll need to attack normal topics with a unique perspective to get your voice heard and recognised, too.
A content calendar
It’s no good just producing one or two really solid pieces of content. You’ll need to regularly give your readers something new and original to read. Download a content marketing editorial calendar such as Coschedule to help you get organised and so you can physically see when your content will go live.