Most companies post content on social media just for visibility. They don’t have a clear objective and lack clarity with their content marketing. With undefined business end goals, it will be a challenge to bring an effective content marketing strategy and post relevant content on social media. They just want brand awareness, which may not serve your actual purpose of reaching the right target audience.
Content marketing without a purpose doesn’t create any value for the users. The ultimate goal of purpose-driven marketing is to convert the list to loyal fans. Posting for the sake of visibility doesn’t achieve this objective.
Posting haphazardly with no clear objective results in wastage of time, money & resources and the content marketing process will be fundamentally flawed by default. This would ultimately harm your business and reduce your customer base.
Won’t you think, this needs your serious attention? Now, what’s the best and right action you can do?
Let’s see here how you can effectively build a winning content calendar that converts contacts into contracts:
Step 1: Define your purpose
Before building a content calendar, you need to primarily define the purpose of your content marketing strategy. The message of your brand should be the core essence of your content which is shared across your target audience.
If you are able to fulfil the aspirations of your target audience through useful and informative content about your brand, you’re well on your way to dominate the market!
Step 2: List down the problems that your product or service is capable of solving
Content is the most efficient business communication channel. It bridges the gap between what you have to offer and what exactly customers are searching for. When your content can convince your prospective customers that your brand is the apt solution for what they are looking for in a product or service, you’ve hit the bulls eye.
Your content should include the solution that your product or service is offering to your target customers. This is when their aspirations meet your offerings through a streamlined content marketing strategy.
Step 3: Identify the audience who have the problems that your business is capable of solving
A standout amongst the most well-known mistakes in the enterprise is making a solution before identifying a problem.
You may think you have the ‘next big idea’, yet have you truly done the research to check whether it could be effective? Is there a need in the marketplace or solve the problems of your target customers?
If you truly need to acquire success in content marketing, the principal thing you have to do is identify the issue to understand. The issue fills in as the pillar for your organization. Thus, you can do a wide research and market survey in your niche market to identify who have the problems that your business can solve through products or services.
Step 4: Segment the audience based on common fears, Frustrations or their Wants and Aspirations
Once you have identified people who have problems that your business can solve, the next big thing is to segment your target customers based on each customer behavioural pattern. It can be based on their common attributes, fears, wants or preferences.
This will help you in positioning your product right in the market, which ultimately translates into increased ROI and sales.
When you prepare the marketing mix (4ps of marketing: Product, Price, Place & Promotion) as a part of the social media marketing strategy, you need to segment the target audience according to their attributes and needs. Only a proper market segmentation based on customer behavior would help to know which type of content message can be communicated to specific target customers through various social media platforms.
Step 5: Competitor analysis to identify what’s working for your high level competitors.
Drawing inspiration from your high level competitors is a great idea. When they already have established content marketing and distribution strategies, you can hack their content marketing strategies with your own innovative and unique content marketing approaches.
On analyzing the kind of content format working for your similar competitors, you can get a fair idea on how to frame your own content marketing strategy and content distribution strategy to reach your customers in an effortless way using the various digital platforms.
Step 6: Define your Social Media content deliverables
As you know, the evergreen prominence of social media content brings an inevitable need for the right and effective social media content deliverables.
You need to plan and strategize how often and where your content needs to be distributed to increase the chances of reaching the right target audience. You have to plan and define the quantity and time intervals of the below content types to be posted in the respective and suitable social media platforms:
- Blogs per Month
- Image posts per month (Theme Based Image Posts)
- Videos Per Month
- Live Videos and Live Image Updates
- Polls per Month
- Listicles per Month
Step 7: Define Content Theme
An unorganized and aimless content will only confuse your prospective customers. Is that what you actually aimed for? Well, when you have numerous problem-solving brands to be offered to the same target customers, they shouldn’t be bombarded with a generic and cliched message.
Hence, you have to define and design your content theme well before the preparation of the content calendar. Select only one problem of your target customers that you want to solve through the content.
When each content piece is presented in this way as a solution to one problem, it will be more comprehensive and effective, which creates trust and attention among your target customers.
Step 8: Create a Content Calendar
Once all the content marketing strategic planning has been done; it is now time to actualize the creation of a content calendar.
As indicated by the Content Marketing Institute, 92 percent of content marketers utilize social media to broadcast their content.
A social media content calendar will enable you to post reliably over all stages by guaranteeing that content is planned and scheduled in advance. A content calendar isn’t only a planning tool; it’s a record of all that you’ve at any point published.
Step 9: Start creating Socially Snackable content pieces as per the Platform
When you are creating a social media content targeting a niche market to solve their problems, you need to also pay heed to the type & quality of the content. The content message and style must be appropriate to the respective social media audiences.
The style and purpose of content can vary on each social media platforms like facebook, twitter, etc. You may need to modify the content message, the content length, content language, a solution offered, the timing of posting contents and several such factors before posting it based on each social media platform. Moreover, make it simple and understandable to effectively arouse interest in your target customers minds.
Step 10: Distribute it across Various Social Media Platforms and send email Broadcasts to your existing database
Once the content is ready in any form which is designed according to your content calendar plan, you have to distribute it across Various Social Media Platforms and send email Broadcasts to your existing database.
Thereby, your brand’s message is rightly communicated across various social media channels to attract a larger customer base and improved revenue for your business.
Step 11: Paid Promotion of the content to reach the audience who have visited any of your web assets
Apart from creating snackable and problem-solving content, the most significant step is to do content advertising. This can increase the chances of reaching more customers. Content advertising can be done through paid distribution channels like PPC campaigns, Social Media Ads(Facebook, LinkedIn, etc..) and so on.
In STEP 10 and Step 11, some Percentage of the audience are converted to Loyal fans and these loyal fans will eventually become either our customers or brand advocates.
In our training programs we teach you how to identify the purpose behind your content marketing campaigns & how to align them with the wants & aspirations of your target audience. We teach you the proven practical process of creating a solid content calendar from scratch.
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