By now, you’ve probably dabbled in content marketing. Perhaps your brand has tried its hand at launching a blog. Maybe you managed to produce a stream of posts on a regular basis. You created a few videos or had some success sharing posts on social media. But you want more. Perhaps you have a specific goal in mind for your content marketing, and so far it hasn’t met that goal. That’s where advanced content marketing techniques can come into play. With advanced content marketing, you go beyond the basics in an effort to reach your goals and help your content reach its intended audience.
What Makes Content Marketing “Advanced?”
When you hear the word “advanced,” what comes to mind? You might think of something that’s ahead of the curve, something that’s a bit complicated, or something that’s forward thinking.
All those definitions of advanced can apply to advanced content marketing. It’s going to be a bit more complicated than just putting together a blog, it’s going to be forward-thinking, using the latest technologies, and it should (ideally) be ahead of the curve, using tactics and techniques that few others use.
Advanced content marketing can be distinguished from “simple” content marketing by a few features.
Customization
When it comes to content marketing, you don’t want to be doing the same thing that everyone else is doing. That’s where customization can come into play. Custom content is exclusive to your brand. It’s a blog post or video that expresses your brand’s point of view or thoughts. More importantly, it’s content that meets the specific needs of an identified customer base.
Personalization
Personalization and customization are often used interchangeably, but there are some differences. One significant difference is that personalizing content means that you are shaping it for a specific customer. For example, if you are a jewelry company and someone purchased a necklace from you, you can follow up by recommending that they watch a video on caring for or cleaning the necklace. You might also send along a blog post on how to style that type of necklace. Personalization recognizes that customers are different, remembers the actions of customers, and recommends content to them that is most likely to best meet their needs.
Optimization
Another component of advanced content marketing is optimization. What are you doing to get your content in front of its intended audience? People often think of SEO when they hear the word optimization, but it also refers to tactics that make a piece of content more appealing to users, not only to search engines.
Data
If you love numbers, there’s really never been a better time to be alive. Advanced content marketing thrives on data. It looks at how many people are looking at a piece of content, and what they do next. With data, you can see if you’re getting any sort of return on investment on your content marketing efforts, or if the content you’re putting out into the world is just languishing there.
Examples of Advanced Content Marketing
NakedWines
NakedWines helps people invest in new wines by collecting a $40-per-month fee from them. Investors can then use the money they’ve contributed to purchase wines made by up-and-coming vintners. Since buying wine can be tricky, the company has developed a system to help people choose bottles they’ll like. Once a person has made a certain number of purchases, a green checkmark appears next to wines a customer is likely to enjoy. The site also includes user ratings and reviews so that people can figure out if they’ll like a wine or not based on the opinions of others who might have similar tastes.
Spotify Discover Weekly
Spotify’s Discover Weekly feature gives the streaming music service a chance to get people to use it more, by recommending songs to them. Discover Weekly looks at songs people have listened to and loved, then creates a new playlist for them based on what it thinks are a listener’s preferences and tastes.
True&Co
Bra shopping is a pain, and True & Co is trying to change that. One way it’s doing so is through a bra fit quiz. Instead of asking customers to measure themselves, the site asks specific questions about bra fit and breast shape, all designed to match people with not only the right size bra, but also the right style.
Why Should You Use Advanced Content Marketing?
Advanced content marketing definitely has some benefits to offer brands. For one thing, using advanced content marketing techniques helps your content and content marketing efforts stand out from the crowd. When you take the time to create custom content and then take the time to personalize content to people’s past purchases and interests, you’re already steps ahead of the crowd.
Another benefit of using advanced content marketing is that doing so can help you reach your specific goals. For example, if you are using content marketing to boost website traffic and a glance at the data shows that you aren’t getting that many hits, you can go back to the drawing board and find ways to optimize the content to increase traffic.
Steps to Putting Together an Advanced Content Marketing Strategy
Although the word “advanced” might make you think that an advanced content marketing strategy is going to be complicated or difficult, that’s not necessarily the case. As long as you remember to include the features of advanced content marketing in your new strategy, it shouldn’t be particularly challenging.
Set a goal
Having a goal for your content marketing will help you determine if you’re on track or in need of a course adjustment.
Define your audience
You’ll want to put together buyer personas, and then go a step beyond. Look at your actual audience, such as your current or past customers. How can you personalize your content marketing efforts to best meet their needs?
Brainstorm content ideas
Advanced content marketing should move beyond the basic blog. Think of content that you haven’t tried before, such as a white paper, an infographic, or an ebook.
Optimize your content
Use SEO to get your content pieces to rank high in the search engine results. Remember to keep the human user in mind when you optimize, though. Is the content scannable and easy to read? If it’s visual content, is it clear and not blurry? Can you hear the audio clearly on a video? Are there captions on your videos?
Determine how you’ll measure the content
How will you determine if the content is helping your reach your goals or not? What key performance indicators (KPIs) will you examine? If your content isn’t living up to its potential, what can you do to adjust it or course correct?
If you want to step up your content marketing game and take things to the next level, you don’t have to do it alone. You might find that outsourcing some advanced content marketing tasks, from strategy development to content creation, allows you to reach your goals and stand out from the crowd.
