Shifting a business’s culture towards a publisher mindset is key to making your content marketing fly.
Making that shift means getting people throughout the organisation aware of audience and content. This will drive not only content ideas and production, but also make clear what tactics will best connect you with your current and future customers, prospects and influencers.
Follow these 6 steps towards creating and delivering great content that grows your business.
1. Ask Who Makes Up Your Audience?
This is the most important and first question you should ask. Your audience isn’t only your customers. It’s everyone you need to understand your story – your prospects, partners, stakeholders, the media and anyone who will influence others to do business with you. Know who these people are, the language they use and what they believe. Then determine what content they will appreciate most.
2. Develop a Quality Standard for Content and Stick to it
Plan in advance, apply the best resources and focus on quality content. Producing sub-standard content that delivers little or no value implies you also consider your audience to be of little or no value. Respect your audience and gain their loyalty by doing a good (or preferably an exceptional) job on your content.
3. Make Regular and Punctual Delivery a Priority
Put content marketing on the back burner or deprioritise it in favour of other things and you will lose out to competitors. Implement an editorial calender so you conceive and plan your content well in advance – to ensure you continue to build loyalty through regular contact with your audience.
4. Make Sure Everyone is Content-Minded
Content marketers rely heavily on knowledge that exists within the organisation. Your internal expertise is what makes you a thought leader in your field. That means that from the CEO down, everyone should feed knowledge and experience into a constantly evolving content repository. Without this collective awareness content creation quickly becomes an uphill struggle.
5. Build a Content Team
You will need both internal and external human and physical resources to create and deliver effective content marketing. Find out where all the experts are in your business and how they can contribute quality content. Ask yourself where outside the business you can access appropriate expertise and turn it into great content. Identify and brief your writers, designers, production professionals and all those you need on board. Decide who will be responsible for overall content creation and delivery and make sure they can access the appropriate resources.
6. Last but not least: Respect Your Audience and the Rest Will Follow
As long as you keep thinking of what your audience wants and new ways in which to give it to them, your content marketing will maintain momentum. Make sure everyone adopts the publisher mindset … a mindset that respects audiences and the regular quality content that will make them value your brand and offerings. Then you’ll be forming deep and rich relationships with those who will grow your business, without the hard sell.
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