In a riveting 2014 blog post, “Content Shock,” Mark Schaefer asked if content marketing is sustainable. Sustainability might be a common term when speaking of energy sources or economics, describing a desirable situation that continues for an extended period.
However, sustainability also applies to content marketing, though its use is rare. In a LinkedIn and IDG study, more than 50 percent of B2B marketers define their most significant challenge as offering content regularly, with the shortest possible time between posts.
It’s the same with B2C marketers – 49 percent point to a lack of time and other strategic issues as the reason their content could not successfully drive growth. This scenario calls for a viable blog strategy for sustainable content marketing.
A Blog Strategy that Benefits Content Marketing
Posting content at regular intervals over the long haul is better for engagement. Companies blogging 11 or more times every month generate four to five times more leads and web traffic than their peers, according to HubSpot.
Creating a Sustainable Content Marketing Plan
Sustainable content marketing begins with the foundational understanding that content marketing is about telling a story. The story should effectively capture the attention of the relevant audience to provide the opportunity for some desired action. It’s the soul of content marketing.
You’re working hard and churning out a decent amount of useful content, but there’s a problem. There are as many new websites daily as the number of seconds in one day. Hence the need for a compelling strategy so people can hear the good story you’re telling them.
Mass information makes it imperative that the story always wins. If there’s consistency in how you tell your story, you’ll eventually see results. You can achieve such consistency by querying “assignment writing help” or “term paper writing service”.
Here are steps to create a marketing plan that tells your company’s story and ensure that readers follow your lead.
1. Identifying Your Social Mission and Make Sure It’s Compelling
This step is not your usual content marketing regime. It forces you to consider a social, mission-propelled content strategy instead of the traditional content marketing (which everyone does, anyway).
With traditional content strategies, specific buyer personas are the target. Blog posts will feature content that explicitly deals with a problem or a need. If you were a financial institution, you might decide to go after clients in middle age who care about retirement. Typical concerns for this persona would include eliminating debt, paying for their children’s education, and adequately managing investments so they can retire well.
A traditional blog strategy can provide trusted advice on retirement planning by offering useful advice connecting with the product literature. However, this strategy means you’ll keep competing with other financial institutions delivering the same type of content.
Being distinct from the competition for a long time means engaging your community of customers to make vital contributions to the cause. Here are two things to know in this context:
- Traditional content marketing has the mission to be a hub for advice on retirement planning and retiring with poise.
- A content strategy with an intrinsic social mission would mean saving and planning for life after retirement, as a team.
One company that’s done this well is Capital One 360. It wants to save customer’s valuable money and time. Rather than developing a one-sided conversation on saving and investing, the company fostered a thriving Savers Community across multiple social networks.
These virtual micro-communities feature lots of conversations where members bounce ideas for savings off one another. To answer challenging and insightful questions, their “We the Savers” virtual town hall gets people to respond helpfully and engagingly.
To have a good grasp of this, consider what happens in crowdfunding. There are crucial lessons that hold essential insights into how to leverage a social mission. The most successful Kickstarter campaigns serve the purpose of a collective CTA. Barley & Britches (B&B), for example, went beyond its fundraising goal using a socially-driven mission statement.
The statement highlights the company’s goal to do something about a “frustration” that consumers share about paying for garments at several hundred percent their manufacturing cost. Notice that there’s nothing about chinos, but addresses a frustration everyone relates to. More than that, it gives the consumer the opportunity and crucial social tool to fight back.
It’s essential that your blog phraseology is inclusive and leverages social identity. That’s an intrinsic component of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns. A successful project funding will feature a sense of belonging, social cues (for example, retweets on Twitter), social proof, and reciprocity as powerful indicators.
If you position your service or product as a platform to propel a bigger cause forward, you’ll inevitably use a blog strategy to get your community contributing. At the same time, the conversation diverges from your core expertise or product.
2. Nurture Your Contributors Into “Superfans”
It’s important to share your brand reach with your most valuable content contributors or thesis writing service. As content contributors become more prominent, you can deliver more specific content for them. What you’ll achieve is to nurture their interest continuously, and eventually transform the average fan into a loyal ambassador for your brand.
Consumers have plenty of power in the social world. Therefore your brand will have far more reach than any individual community member may possess. Your contributors will want to build up their personal brand, too, and will prefer that you help them expand their influence. You should highlight their content and engage with them as much as is necessary.
Take the example of a hair-care product manufacturer who sells primarily through salons. It could award badges to members for achieving certain milestones. Such recipients may find their work on the manufacturer’s homepage. Notice that the real award is the newfound status of the contributor – something they can leverage for their personal brand.
The key is by offering incentives to contributors by providing real value. An individual with sparse contributions will contribute more regularly with proper incentives. We’re not saying they’re going to devote all of their time writing and sharing quality content for coupons or discount codes, which they can get through more straightforward means. We’re saying they’ll get through your platform, what they can’t get elsewhere.
The list includes influence, status, or substantial financial benefits. LinkedIn is one platform where users share blog posts and share links for these reasons. The platform improves a person’s reputation as an expert, leading to excellent opportunities down the road.
Can your brand offer customers something they couldn’t get otherwise? How about a unique and priceless service, a dream getaway, or a backstage concert? Can your site connect users with actual domain experts or other individuals with similar issues? By engaging in and contributing to the site, users can have better control over their grappling circumstances.
MedHelp and GHD (Good Hair Day) are two brands that are utilizing this strategy to great success. Their contribution is similar to the value of getting professional help where to buy essay online like from EduGeeksClub.com for your project. They’re making personal empowerment and better quality of life for members central to their mission.
3. You Should Go One Campaign At A Time
Brands should split their buyer’s journey content into consumable campaign chunks. If there are three personas, and each persona has five blog offers in their buyer’s journey, you need to create 15 content offers. List out all content based on priority. It’ll help you divide a long-term content marketing plan into short-term activities with an intrinsic action component.
Organizing your content allows you to home in on your first content offer and create a campaign. Whatever the campaign is, it’s necessary to treat it like a puzzle – something with several pieces which you need to piece together. It’s a strategy that allows you to reverse engineer your content offer through blog posts or other content installments, instead of writing the entire book in one swoop.
Launching the content offer means your brand will build a conversion funnel, which is nothing but the process the buyer persona will encounter on the website. The process exposes the persona to your content offers and nurtures them into a lead.
4. Auditing: Analyze And Pinpoint New Opportunities
Campaigns generate data which you should analyze. You’ll review what was effective and what wasn’t. More importantly, you’ll be probing why. Some campaigns will improve the bottom line, while others don’t do as well, which is okay. It’s normal for this to happen.
Some campaigns are valuable from your perspective. Your concern should be to understand the source of that value. Was a blog post series responsible for attracting your personas? Or was it a tweet or LinkedIn post?
Knowing what content is working is crucial, just like knowing what sources are providing the highest value. The simple formula is to let personas get more of what they’re looking for.
Conclusion
Aligning your content with a compelling mission allows your brand to rally a passionate base that feels an obligation to a shared cause. The result is a thriving network that accumulates valuable social capital, enabling you to win customers and prospects, retaining them over the long term. Now, you’re guaranteed a lasting return on your content strategy investments.
