The business of content Social Media Marketing Tips and Strategies is fundamentally based on the premise of “content being king” and rightly so, but with multiple social media platforms to market on, you will need to keep publishing content on a regular basis. This could be blog posts, podcasts, e-books, videos or more to ensure that you generate enough eyeballs. But more content may not be better or necessarily effective if a full-fledged content marketing strategy is not in place. The volume of content is just one of the many things you need to consider when thinking of
Nick Westergaard shares with us how he shapes his content strategy by referring and relating to Rudyard Kipling’s 1902 poem “The Elephant’s Child”.
I keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.
Questions-What, Why, When, How, Where and Who
We can also use these six men to come up with our content marketing strategies. The five W’s (and the one H) can do much, especially in simplifying your content creation process. It is important to focus on WHY, WHO and WHAT to set the foundation for content that is both business centric and appeals to your target base.
WHY – “Start with Why” is Simon Sinek’s now famous Mantra that makes so much sense in today’s Why is your business objective – Why do it?
Content Marketing can help you achieve specific business objectives and your WHY should be answered by one of them in each of your real world scenarios.
Branding: Are you looking at establishing familiarity of your brand or creating/re-creating your brand image within your industry or market segment?
Community Building: Is your goal to build a community around your product or service that allows for a free flow of information and feedback?
Public Relations: Do you seek to tailor your content for promotions and PR events?
Market Research: Are you looking to gauge market feedback on any particular topic, analyze the data and use to your advantage?
Customer Service: Do you wish to offer service related content to engage and connect with your existing customer base?
Lead Generation: Do you want to create inquiry based traffic and generate leads for newer sales?
Which then brings us to Who (m) or WHO, that refers to the audience that you are targeting or already serving. Your content has to offer some kind of a solution – it has to serve a need in the lives of your customers. This would mean that you’ve got to figure out your customers’ preferences and find out what is actually important to them. This can be achieved by reviewing quantitative demographics and qualitative psychographics.
Finally based on your business objective (the why) and figuring out your target audience (who), you are in a better situation to decide WHAT form of content do you need in that scenario. It’s all about creating content that fits a simple strategy – what’s best for your brand?
Kipling’s first three serving men, the Why, Who, and What provides a simplified foundation for a strategic framework you can use to arrive at the right content serving the needs of both your audience and your business. We can now delve into the details with the rest of the serving men – WHEN (period and frequency) – WHERE (internally or externally, which platform) and finally HOW (plan of action, how will you measure the success)
It would help to have an innovative mindset in place to ensure that your content not only grabs attention but also holds it. It’s not just about piquing curiosity, but also about engaging your customer towards an action or a reaction that you would like. Of course, you will have a variety of metrics to evaluate your publications – page views, video views, length of view time, social media shares etc. but do remember to optimize for your mission rather than for the metrics.