Good leads and sales begin with great content. Even though you might have heard this a thousand times before, content is still king online because this is the universal currency to generate awareness and to drive action for all your marketing efforts.
While many understand that good, unique, and shareable content is needed for digital marketing success, not everyone is sure how to start creating a content marketing plan and strategy that will yield results and help them achieve their business goals.
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Magnetic content marketing plan
Creating a solid content marketing strategy takes time, but to get started is easy. Everything in your digital marketing strategy should be agile and measured so that you can make changes where necessary in a blink of an eye. The same rules apply to content. It’s easy to start, but how are you going to know if your plan and magnetic content is working? Always measure the results of your campaign and change where necessary.
Here’s a simple content marketing plan to get started and can be the foundation of your strategy to generate leads from your efforts.
- Create a list of topics that are relevant to your business, services or products. When creating these topics, take note of the keywords and phrases people are using on Google and other search channels including social search when searching for relevant topics. Look at the questions people are asking and see how you can answer them.
- Identify industry leaders that are seen as thought leaders and industry experts around the topics you have chosen. Once you have found them, engage and network with them and check how you can contribute to what they are doing. Sometimes it’s as easy as engaging with them and sharing their own content.
- Create a programme to get these industry leaders involved by either contributing or creating content with their name stamp on it that you can use or simply ask them to help you spread and share the content with their own social circles.
- Rinse, repeat and share the content.
- Measure the results
There is, of course, a lot more to this baseline plan than just a few bullet points, but it’s a start. One key thing to remember when creating magnetic content is that it should always be shareable and have the ability to travel. This rule applies to any type of content that you create (social media update, white paper, infographic, short video, etc). That is why it’s called “magnetic content” and not just content. It’s content that has the ability to draw people in and that want to share the content with their own social circles.
Generating leads with magnetic content
Once you start getting attention with your magnetic content it doesn’t mean you are successful. At the end of the day digital marketing isn’t about just creating magnetic content that gets shared. It should generate leads, sales and help you reach your business goals. That is ultimately what it should do.
Do you have a proper process and system setup to generate leads from your magnetic content marketing efforts? If you don’t have a process in place to collect, qualify and nurture your leads, you may as well do nothing with your content marketing plan.
Do you have proper calls to action in your magnetic content that are clear and to the point? Where are you directing people to to complete an action? If you are promoting a service or product with a white paper, make sure you link to the service or product where people can either submit their details to learn more or contact you directly. This does sound obvious, but you will be amazed by how many people are overlooking this.
Once you receive a lead, how is it qualified and funneled? How are you collecting information and what information are you collecting? Be sure to keep track of how and where they have been generated. If you don’t have a CRM system in place, now might be a good time to get one where you can manage all of the leads you are generating.
Magnetic content is huge, but it’s so much more than just churning out content pieces all the time. Have a plan and strategy in place so that you strategy can work for you and your business.
