The 10 Content Commandments
There’s no doubt about it, content is king. Google has changed and their goal is to provide users with a great experience and help them to find relevant and engaging content with ease. The days of SEO footers and dirty black hat tactics have well and truly gone.
These changes have caused digital marketers across the world to create reams of content in order to sell products, services and attract new audiences, but are they doing it the right way? Spamming people with irrelevant, poorly created content can often cause more damage than good and end up turning people against your brand.
Here at Parallax, we love content. From beautiful interactive infographics, to engaging articles and superb social campaigns, creating the best content we can is ingrained into the DNA of our digital agency.
Check out our 10 content commandments to stick to when planning your content marketing campaigns.
I. Understand your objectives
Ask yourself ‘why?’. What are you trying to achieve?
Are you trying to increase sales? Or generally increase your search engine ranking? Perhaps all you want is more traffic? Clearly plan what you need to achieve from the start and set yourself some decent S.M.A.R.T objectives.
Specific – target specific areas that you want to improve upon.
Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
Assignable – specify who will complete tasks.
Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved.
Time-related – specify when these results can be achieved.
II. Know your audience
You need to focus your entire campaign around the customers that you’re targeting. You’re looking to build a relationship and start conversations with these prospects so anything that’s irrelevant to them will more than likely get dismissed.
III. Don’t use the “sell, sell, sell” approach
People don’t want to be sold to. They want to consume engaging content that plays on emotions and that is memorable. The mindset of telling people how amazing your products are and that they need to buy them ASAP is a thing of the past.
Think about creating content that can be promoted across your various channels that sparks interest, encourages conversations, helps or advises, and provides an opportunity for you to demonstrate your knowledge and experience.
IV. Clearly define your strategy
We’ve covered this a few times on our blog before as it’s one of the most important factors within a content marketing campaign. You need to effectively plan your content, stick to key dates in the future, and piggyback off company milestones or events. By noting when and where content will be distributed, it’ll help you achieve your goals much more easily.
V. Focus your content around your objectives
As we mentioned before, understanding your audience is key. Some of the greatest brands in the world have a clear understanding of their audience and the content that they like to consume.
Look at Nike for example. Their Instagram feed is not about promoting product ranges, it’s about inspiring their followers to reach new heights. By posting incredible images of athletes alongside powerful motivational phrases, they’ve created an engaging channel that doesn’t feel like you’re being sold to.
VI. Structure your content effectively
In a world where the internet can be accessed almost anywhere, people are inundated with so much content that it can often disappear into the abyss. People aren’t interested in reading vast walls of text so ensuring that your content is well structured is a necessity.
When creating articles, try and keep your content accessible so that it can be skim read if necessary. Keep paragraphs bite-sized, use subtitles, and bullet points to make content that’s easy to consume.
VII. Make sharing simple
Prominent social sharing buttons are a must. If you’re creating something that your audience will enjoy, you need to make it easy for them to share it online with friends and family. Don’t overlook this point.
Mashable.com is a great example of a site that has fantastic sharing buttons. Placed at the top of every article, as well as inside a sticky navigation bar that follows you down the page as you read, it’s incredibly easy for the user to share.
VIII. Create a varied range of content
A varied range of content is key. The internet has become a very visual place so there is an incredible opportunity for creating videos, powerful imagery, interactive infographics, ebooks and much more.
Check out the ‘Battle of the Sexes’ infographic that Parallax made for our client CitiPark. As well as creating social and blog content, we also made an interactive infographic in an attempt to answer the age old question of who are the better drivers; men or women. With over 10,000 views it’s proved to be a resounding success for the client, driving additional traffic to the website, gathering valuable backlinks and increasing domain authority.
IX. Don’t forget about SEO
Before you think it, SEO most definitely isn’t dead. You can create some of the most fantastic content in the world, but if nobody can find it, it’s worthless. For example, if you’re creating off-site content such as an interactive infographic, the page titles need to be optimised to help the search engines. Don’t forget about your keywords – use them throughout all of the content that you’re creating.
X. Measurement is essential
If you’ve set yourself some clear objectives at the beginning of your campaign, you need to make sure that you’re keeping track of them whether you’re meeting them or not. Google Analytics is always a great tool for this – process such as user journeys, click-through rates, time spent on the site, unique visitors and bounce rates can be tracked here.
Using specific social media management tools such as Hootsuite and Sprout Social will help you too. By linking up social profiles, you can see engagement, impressions, interactions, link clicks, mentions and much more.
With an ever increasing amount of companies using content marketing as their online marketing strategy, it’s more important than ever to effectively plan and manage your content. The Parallax content commandments are there to help to you out whether you’re a multinational organisation, or a digital agency in Leeds like us.
What do you think is the most important thing about running a content marketing campaign? Let us know, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a tweet or email us.