We’re just halfway through the first month of 2018 and already we’ve had lots of discussions around content marketing with both current and prospective clients. Through these meetings, we gathered a lot of research and discussed some pretty interesting topics around setting a content strategy for 2018. We thought we’d share some interesting insights and tips with you!
1. Want More Shares on Your Content? Start Producing Video!
Video will continue to be a dominant content format as we head into 2018. With over 4 times as many users preferring to watch a video about a product, rather than read about it, it's clear that if you’re selling a product or service, video is a format that you need to prioritize in your content strategy.
But one thing really stood out as we were looking at the data - people share posts with videos more frequently than posts with links.
So if you’d like to get more organic reach via shares on your content, push more video content out there!
2. Going to Dive Into Video? Considering Adding Paid Distribution to Your Strategy
So maybe you’re convinced that you should start producing more videos. But one more thing to keep in mind is that the amount of video content that is being put out there is increasing rapidly.
Using Facebook as an example, the rise in published video content is inevitable as video becomes easier to produce and content marketers start to reap additional benefits of using video as a preferred format. Additionally, with Facebook's increasing preference for publishers to create video content for their platform Watch, unless you’re developing longer-form, series-driven content, it’s going to be more difficult to obtain organic reach on the news feed.
That’s why it's important to consider allocating some of your digital ad budget to give your video content an additional push. It's inevitable that there’s going to be a lot more videos on platforms like Facebook, so to stand out from the crowd, you’re going to have to pay to play.
3. Integrated Marketing Technology will be critical to tracking ROI on your Content Marketing efforts
Utilizing “full stack” marketing systems like Hubspot Marketing is going to enable content marketers to track which initiatives are driving revenue. The key is that you’re going to need to make sure all the different components of your marketing stack: Blogging, Social Media, Email Marketing, SEO, etc. all find a way to talk to each other via your marketing technology so that you can attribute where that revenue came from.
Full disclosure: Tobe Agency is a HubSpot Agency Partner (which is why we like their marketing tools and tech so much) :)
The goal is to track a customer’s path, from start to finish. The pipeline may look like this: Because of the email drip campaign, he/she clicked on these 3 blog posts, downloaded a lead magnet, and ended up scheduling a consultation with us. Being able to track ROI has always been a murky thing in the marketing world, but having the technology to enable marketing methodology is a key step in tracking ROI from your initiatives. Remember, marketing should be a revenue driver for your company, not a cost center (and you should have the data to show it)!
4. Email Automation will Continue to be Key to Nurturing Leads
The best content marketers in the world find ways to nurture you with great email content after they find a way into the sacred inbox.
Building great email drip campaigns will continue to be absolutely key to nurturing those valuable leads that you’ve captured. Although it depends on how you captured your lead and how far that lead is along their journey to purchasing your product/service, in general, most people aren’t ready to be sold to. This is why you need to automate useful, non-sales email content for your newly acquired lead.
Sephora is an example of a company that delivers great, nurturing email content to leads once they enter their email funnel.
You don’t always have to automate useful, non-salesly content to your leads though. Cart abandonment emails are a great way to be a little bit more direct with someone who might have considered a purchase of your product/service and added it to their cart, but didn’t take the final step of making that purchase.
Check out this example from popular direct-to-consumer mattress company Casper:
Casper also included a nice touch by including a link to customer testimonials, which might give the user just enough of a push to take the final step in the sales process.
5. Diversity in Content Formats will be Key to Your Content Marketing Strategy
While Content Marketing has always been around in some form, blogging has become a key format over the last decade. But within the last 5 years, we’ve had a lot of changes in technology that have allowed content marketers to diversify the ways they present their content.
We’ve talked about video a lot throughout this post, but what about the rise of formats like podcasts, pillar pages, and webinars? These are all interesting content formats that you need to consider incorporating into your overall content strategy.
Like it or not, people have a lot of options when it comes to consuming content. The smartphone has become a playback device for podcasts, videos, and written content. With that in mind, developing formats that diversify the way people interact and consume content for your brand is going to be critical to getting maximum reach and engagement. So if you’re planning your 2018 content strategy, consider making a commitment to one of these other content formats.
Are you currently planning your content marketing for 2018? What interesting insights do you have to share in terms of strategy, distribution or formats? Leave us a comment below, we’d love to hear from you!.png)
