Pushing your content marketing strategy forward can sometimes be overwhelming when you look at the amount of work involved. There are so many times you feel like the hamster on a wheel, and all you want to do is get off. But it doesn’t have to be this way. With a little planning, creativity, and an understanding of how your audience wants to be reached, it’s possible for anyone—regardless of how big or small their business—to produce quality content without breaking the bank.
The hardest part is the content creators dilemma around creating high-quality content while also ensuring the time constraint doesn’t push out or speed up the quality. There’s a thin line between appealing to your audience and churning out stuff that is half-baked.
Here are three ways to deal with this dilemma and get great results.
1) Become an Inspiration Magnet
Your Inspiration list should be a compilation of resources or content you regularly use to learn more about what inspires you on set days. This is important because it helps you come up with ideas. As you develop your content calendar, you can look at your inspiration list for ideas to create great content.
For example, when I needed to write my Halloween blog last year, I looked at my inspiration list and the photo of Mr. Hyde from the TV show Fringe . In addition to the image, I included a brief description and something that made Hyde scary (he’s an evil version of Dr. Jekyll).
2) Search for Alternative Methods
Looking for alternative methods to generate ideas will help make your content more exciting, especially if you’re running out of time.
For example, when you need to create an infographic, but all your stock photo searches are coming up empty, there are various online tools that can help you find free images. For example, Public Domain Archive has a large collection of stock images that can be used on the site without any restrictions or licenses.
3) Avoid Over-Promising
Making an “ideal” content calendar makes it hard to see if your time constraints are going to affect the quality of your content. In order to avoid over-promising, create a minimum viable product. This guarantees that the quality of your content will not be compromised in any way, yet still gives you a platform that can be built upon in due time.
For example, I create products like this on my personal blog. A recent example is my blogging productivity guide . Although it’s not exactly 100% complete, I can make edits and add more resources to grow the guide into a complete product. In fact, I’m already working on a follow up guide that focuses completely on blogging for businesses.
Some content creators include their “minimum viable products” on their blog right off the bat so that their readers can see what kind of quality they are producing and they can gauge if it’s worth checking out more in the future.
4) Measure Your Results
If you’re using a new method or you’ve changed something about your content, it’s important to see if your changes are making an impact.
There are a few ways to do this. For example, you can utilize Google Analytics to measure how many people read your blog posts, view your infographics, or watch your videos. From there, you can start looking at the content that’s performing better than others and go from there.
Some points to consider:
• Make sure your marketing plan includes everything you need it to. The goal should not be to do less, but rather a better job. If you are planning on doing all of the work yourself, ask a friend, family member, or employee to help with one aspect.
• Don’t discount any source. Each type of content has its own audience and it’s important that you reach them all in order to get the most bang for your buck.
• Try to avoid overlapping the content you are producing. For example, do not write a blog post about a product you’re creating at the same time as you’re creating the product. The only exception to this is when an event is occurring simultaneously with your product launch.
• Make sure your content isn’t just about you, but also about your audience. Utilize other people’s tweets and blog posts to show how your product benefits their lives.
5) Know Your Audience
Whatever type of content you produce, know that your audience wants to see realistic results. If your goal is to get more subscribers or better search rankings, know that your audience wants to see these results in a reasonable amount of time.
If you can’t give them that, they’ll lose interest. That’s why it’s important to follow steps 1-4 above and make sure everything aligns with what your audience wants, so they’ll stick around for the long-haul.
Conclusion
Creating high quality content can take time. So using the steps above such as starting with an inspiration list or creating a content calendar can help you begin to build the content that your audience wants and needs. If you’re going to start from scratch, make sure to check out this blog post for some strategies and tips on what to focus on first.
To recap, here’s how to move forward with your content marketing strategy:
1) Create an inspiration list of ideas you’ve been storing and add to it frequently.
2) Use the ideal content calendar to get an idea of how much content you need to create and put together a schedule to see when you’ll have time for it.
3) Search for alternative methods if you’re limited on time and resources.
4) Measure your results in order to create better content.
5) Know your audience and make sure you’re creating content they want to read.
We have created a detailed content marketing guide that explains the whole process in more details. If you liked this article, please check it out.
Feel free to browse our blog to learn more about other aspects of content marketing!
