Brands mainly use two content marketing approaches, each of which has unique advantages and disadvantages that may make the approach more applicable to your business model and customer base.
When it comes to content marketing, brands' strategies are heavily dictated by the industry they serve and the expectations of their customers. While there is no "one size fits all" approach, we often see brands take two different tacks.
Approach One: Create or leverage content marketing efforts alongside big events
Approach Two: Create a continuous voice that is constantly accessible
Both have unique advantages and disadvantages that may make the approach more applicable to your business model and customer base.
Connecting Content Marketing Efforts To Big Events
This approach allows brands to immediately connect with a large audience. Events such as conferences, awareness days or months, concerts and sporting events allow brands to tap into an already very active community. By taking advantage of this, the message you are attempting to deliver is accessible by an audience that may not have been exposed to your brand before. You are also able to attach your brand to a cause, person or sports team that potential customers have a connection with.
Not only does this mean your brand and your content will be seen by those following the event but, if done correctly, it means more retweets, more likes, more visits to your website, and more social signals being sent to search engines.
While there are many positives to this strategy, there are also negatives. With an event-focused strategy, brands often turn off their efforts when there is not an event to tie them to. As a result, individuals you had previously reached out to may not engage with your brand because there is nothing specific to engage with. If your events do (Read more...) occur frequently, this could leave individuals who have expectations from your brand unsatisfied.
Create A Continuous Voice
Creating a content stream that is easily accessible and provides users with constant, quality updates can turn your brand into a trusted resource and help move your product further along the purchase cycle. Depending on your sales cycle and product, the amount of content and frequency with which it needs to be shared may differ.
With this strategy, your customer base and audience knows they can get the answers they need about your products and services from places like your website and social profiles. If you create "evergreen" content related to questions your audience may have, it could lead to additional customers who access your content through search engines or recommendations from peers.
While this strategy is most commonly used, if you never create content that ranks extremely well on search engines or if it does not create a ridiculous amount of social buzz, your content may never reach your audience. Without growth of your audience, the ROI for your content marketing efforts may not stack up.
Which Approach Is The Right Approach?
As mentioned above, there is "no one size fits all," and sticking to one of these strategies may leave you with lackluster results. When getting started, you should always leverage social listening to understand what content needs to created, where you should be sharing it, and how frequently it needs to be produced and shared.
Sticking to just event-related content promotion will leave your audience with gaping holes of time between the events you decide to create content around. At the same time, just updating your blog and not putting any promotion behind may leave you standing at the top of the hill, shouting to no one.
A custom strategy is needed for each brand, but a combination of promotion around events can introduce you to a new audience, while constantly providing them with quality content can keep them coming back for more.
Homepage image via Shutterstock.
This article was originally published on Search Engine Watch.
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