5 Ways to Improve Your Content Strategy

A new report from BrightEdge reveals that although marketers at B2C and B2B Fortune 500 brands recognize the AI, voice and hyper-local revolution is here, most are not yet planning to adapt their marketing strategies to these new ideas.

The wheels do tend to grind slowly in large corporations. Like biting the tail of a dinosaur – it takes a while for the message to reach the brain.

This lack of forward thinking puts brands at risk of failing to meet the rising expectations of their consumers. “It’s a winner-takes-all in the post mobile world and marketing departments are adapting to changing consumer behavior.” Jim Yu, CEO of BrightEdge,

There is a positive side to the findings of this report – in house marketers and agencies are moving towards strategies that integrate SEO, SEM, social media and content marketing. It gets better results and improves customer experience.

This seems like a no-brainer to me, yet 70 percent of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy. (Altimeter)

IMPROVE YOUR CONTENT STRATEGY

Almost half (47%) of B2B buyers consume three to five pieces of content prior to engaging with a salesperson. (DemandGen Report – 2016 Content Preferences Survey)

Your customers are reading this information online. They use search engines and social media to find it. Search has been the number one activity, along with email, for many years now.

It shouldn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that every piece of content should be:

1. Based on researched data of customer’s needs and intent


2. Created to address these needs


3. Developed to provide different information at the specific stages of the customer journey


4. Optimized for search engine algorithms


5. Distributed intelligently via social media

CONTENT STRATEGY AS A COMPETENCY

CMOs at the largest technology companies report that building out content marketing as an organizational competency is the second most important initiative, only behind measuring ROI. (IDC)

A content strategist needs to know many things – what the customer journey is for that brand or product, what information they look for along the journey, what they need to find at each stage of the journey, how to create and craft content that will get found in search and shared on social media and how to track results.

A search on Indeed.com and LinkedIn reveals that there are about 4x more jobs requiring content skills than PR. And many of the PR jobs ask for content creation and content strategy skills. Since the predictions are that content will only gain ground over the next five years, it would be a very smart career move to learn how to devise and implement an integrated content strategy that includes SEO and social media.

If you want to get ahead of the pack, learn how to use AI , machine learning and predictive analytics to drive your content strategy.

Source: B2C