Companies should use the opportunity to keep up with the future of marketing. Innovation is no longer an option but a necessity. It is time for companies and marketers to reflect on what the true state of content marketing is. Simply creating tens or hundreds of 500-word posts won’t help your business.
If you think that having done a content strategy once, you can live happily ever after for at least one year, you are wrong. This generally applies to any digital strategy, but today we are analyzing content.
It is time to stop asking questions like: ‘What design should I make for the post?’, ‘Where can I get the free brochure templates?’ or ‘Is the animation maker free?’ and think about an evolutionary content strategy. Content marketing is the future. People understand this and begin to allocate a large number of their resources to it. Crello Unlimited giving access to a unique template design, or filters, or other popular solutions for different types of content.
Approaches to Strategy Development
There are two approaches, the first one is classic. It is used by big companies that invest large resources in content marketing. Classic way means the following activity – the marketing specialists of the company get together and they are developing a strategy in which they describe in detail each step they take throughout the year. It can take 2-3 months. Further on, employees begin to engage in its implementation.
Nowadays trends in the market are changing very sharply and it is very difficult to make a more or less accurate forecast for the whole year. And what if one small arrow in your tactics does not work? Because of this detail, the entire strategy can fail. An evolutionary approach comes to the rescue, because it has recently gained more and more popularity.
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Evolutionary Approach
How is it different from a classic? The fact that you do not need to have any data and experience to develop a strategy. It can be changed every time we see a need for it, and it is also convenient because after each step we can conduct analytics, remove weak points and understand in which direction we should move on.
The evolutionary strategy is not built like a house, but grows completely from scratch and has no time limits. If you don’t have top managers in your team and big budgets, then this approach is perfect. This evolutionary strategy is an endless process that does not have a “freeze” stage. We proceed to implementation, analyze the results and start thinking about the next step. The main thing here is to eliminate the weakest points every month.
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Vision of Approach
Despite the fact that the evolutionary approach offers a variation, in any case you can not forget about your destination point and original strategy. Your vision has to be simple, so we recommend not to put complex goals. First of all, you need to answer your questions: what value should your content bring to the user and for whom you are writing.
Further on, you start to think what you want to get from the content. How to check your vision for authenticity? You just need to start.
Where to Begin
Already at this stage you have to understand about who your target audience is and what they expect from you. On this basis, you create a content plan, incorporating into it the material that you think should go to your audience. After writing the content, you begin to implement it, and a week before the end, you need to analyze and draw up a plan for the next month.
Didn’t work in the first month? Time to change something.
Analytics
The foundation of your content plan better be divided into the “Categories”. This includes articles, portfolios, case studies, mockups, templates, engaging posts, and more. It is very important to understand what headings go perfectly, and which are affected. Track absolutely all information that can be analyzed. Thanks to analysis, you can track not only on what day and at what time the heading comes better, but also which column benefits most.
It helps to keep track of not only the best rubrics but also the ones with the worst results. What is it for and how you can use it. At the end of each month, select the 2 worst headings and try to modify them somehow. Mostly work on their design and presentation.
If in the second month it rises in your rating and shows good performance, then leave it unchanged, and if it turns out to be one of the worst for two months in a row, take it down and come up with something else. Thanks to this analysis, you will be able to remove our weakest points.
Cons of Evolutionary Strategy
If you can make an accurate forecast for the coming year, then the path to point B of your classic strategy will be faster and more optimal. You do not need to look for other roads, turn off your only path. When choosing an evolutionary strategy, you will have a lot of painstaking work, a bunch of analysis tables and constant brainstorming. Are you ready for this?
Tips on Сontent and Strategy in General
The reality today is that the increased content amount on the web is indeed inevitable, but content marketers have all the means to cope with it without losing customers and loyal audience. The key to asking yourself these four questions while reviewing your content strategy:
- Will this content be relevant to readers in the future? (Make sure your content is time independent).
- Is this actually correct content? (When content isn’t validated, it quickly loses credibility.)
- Is your content appealing? (The look of the content is just as important as the content.)
- Finally, is your content complete enough? (After reading the reader should have more knowledge than before).
Create quality content that solves problems of your audience and have the value. Focus on content, not quantity, and don’t forget data-driven and UGC – all of these factors will make your strategy work and bring real value to your product.
