Although every organization has differences, when it comes to the content creation process it is important to focus on consistency and community participation. This is just like all of the other Core Profit Centers, to be great, you will need a company narrative that drives a corporate culture that supports inclusion and consistent participation. We all operate in different environments, but we all have the same goals—to sell our products and services at a profit. Everyone’s content strategy will be a little different depending on your business, but in order to understand what corporate content strategies work and which don’t, we must look to the core components of content strategies at successful organizations.
Defining Your Target Audience is Always the First Step
Like any great SEO or marketing campaign the most important first step is to clearly defining your customers and their motives, goals and path to get what they want. Knowing what keywords your target audience will search for when looking for your products and services, and how they will look for what you are selling is the foundation of everything you’ll do when it comes to content creation and publication. Never lose sight of our primary focus of conversion, or getting potential customers to do what you want them to do when they get to your site or view your marketing efforts.
Defining Creative Content Goals and Moving Together
Getting your team on board is not always easy, but from experience we know having a well thought out plan with clear expectations and goals can grease the wheels and persuade them to consistently create new interesting content.
Strong preliminary research, along with regular performance measurement and reporting, will create a realistic forecast of results, and set your employees up for success. If your squad doesn’t know what success is they can never achieve it! Always define your goals clearly. A company without a Core Narrative, which includes a fantastic corporate pitch, is missing a fundamental ingredient that will keep the entire team moving in the same direction, and create consistency in relation to your customers.
You can define many goals like brick and mortar sales, power leads, e-Commerce sales, phone calls, or growing your social network connections. Goals can be tied to anything that converts a prospect to a profitable sale. Again, this is accomplished by really understanding your prime customers and their motives, goals and path to get what they want. The foundation of any fabulous content strategy is to research your target audience and understand them well enough to be in their face, place and space when they are looking to purchase what you sell. And creating content sooooo impactful that it creates new customers that might have shopped elsewhere in the past.
Alert: You always need to ensure that everyone in your organization maintains a healthy respect for online reputation management. Whenever you put anything on the internet it’s there forever. If it’s content that stands for your brand. You can’t un-tweet something. And if you publish something in error, odds are good that some server somewhere has already captured and stored whatever it was that you didn’t want up there.
Content Creation Polices
Businesses today need a well-crafted and thought out policy for writing and publishing content on behalf of the company. You can imagine why. It’s imperative to invest the time to define exactly what people can and can’t post, and the editorial procedure they need to follow. Always keep in mind that anyone on the web can find and save your content as soon as it goes live. Ultimately, your online reputation is critical to whether customers will buy from you or your competitor.
All successful organizations regularly monitor their content strategies and trends. Research is not just something we need to do at the beginning of each campaign, but is a consistent practice that allows for evaluation, change, and re-evaluation all the time. If your online marketing company or advertising agency isn’t giving you extensive third party research about your results, it’s time to change marketing firms.
Creative SEO can Help!
You might also consider outsourcing some of this work, and finding people that are passionate and excited to create content for your company and spread the word. Creative SEO and Internet Marketing in Las Vegas might be the right choice for your company.
