Traditional advertising and outbound marketing methods are in a slump, so it’s time to give content marketing a try. You’ve read tantalizing statistics, such as the fact that content marketing gets three times as many leads per dollar spent than paid searches, and drives conversion rates almost six times higher than other marketing methods. But the facts hide an uncomfortable truth: Content marketing isn’t easy, and there’s no guarantee of success. Producing great content is only the beginning. If you want to tackle your own marketing strategy, here are five content marketing skills you need to master.
5 Content Marketing Skills You Need to Succeed
1. Technical Writing
Thanks to mobile phones and the internet, it’s easier than ever before to communicate with people across the world. Yet surprisingly, many people fail to develop the necessary content marketing skills to convey a marketing message coherently. Research reveals that blue chip companies spend as much as $3.1 billion every year on remedial writing training, while 26.2 percent of college students have deficient writing skills.
If you want to create content that catches the eye and promotes your brand, you need to be better than that. Spelling and grammar mistakes hurt your reputation, and damage your chances of becoming a trusted name or a thought leader in your field. In fact, some experts suggest you have less than a second to showcase your professionalism. Poor grammar muddies your message, making it harder for visitors to understand your content — and if they’re scratching their heads trying to figure out what you’re saying, you’ve probably already lost them as potential customers. But if you get the basics right, you have a firm foundation to work from.
2. Researching
You’re itching to craft your first piece of content, but before you do, there’s some groundwork to deal with. The basis for good content is good research, because you have to ensure that everything you say is valid. Remember that content marketing is about building your reputation by providing comprehensive, accurate answers that your potential customers need. You must find credible sources for the facts you share.
Researching is one of the most necessary content marketing skills. Knowing what to write about in the first place is something necessary. You need to sniff out the stories and identify the information that people need so that you’re always the first source for solutions. Keep up with trends, search for keyword terms relating to your business so you know which subjects are under the spotlight, and always check in on your competition. Not sure who your competition is? Well, finding out is the perfect opportunity to hone your journalistic skills.
The final element of research is establishing your target market. This involves mining your existing client data and then creating personas that reflect your average customers. By having multiple personas, it’s possible to tailor individual campaigns to talk to specific market sectors, either to improve retention rates, expand your customer base, or break into a new market.
3. Storytelling
Knowing all the facts is one thing; finding an interesting way to share them is another. It doesn’t matter how good your research is — if the resulting content is boring to read, and if you’re just reciting the same tired facts and statistics that everybody else has already used, then you’re going to have difficulty standing out. Keep in mind that 43 percent of people admit to skimming blog articles, so you need to catch their attention from the very first word. Write engaging prose, employ proven techniques such as “best of” and “top 10” titles to capture interest immediately, and use infographics and numbered lists to make your densely packed content easier to digest.
4. Analytics
Producing content is a creative process, but it’s also an analytical one. A necessary content marketing strategy is knowing how to establish your company goals, define the type of content that helps you achieve those goals, and then monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs) — such as sales, sales leads, website visitors, subscriptions, and social media engagement — to ensure you’re getting a return on your investment. Your content is only as good as the results it generates, so study your campaigns, establish trends, identify problem areas, and adapt your strategies accordingly.
5. Organization
Does this story sound familiar? You start a blog, and you’re excited to share your thoughts on a particular subject. You feverishly write your first piece and upload it at 2 a.m. Then nobody reads it.
It’s disheartening when you put your heart into something and it doesn’t get the results you want — and if it happens enough times, you may simply stop trying. But content marketing is far more complicated than writing and publishing an article. It requires a focused and determined attitude, and a commitment to growing an audience organically with a structured schedule of regular, high-quality content.
It isn’t enough to know what your strategy is. A necessary content marketing skill is knowing how to write your strategy down so that everybody on your team is on the same page, and it’s easy to refer back to your goals. Studies by the Content Marketing Institute reveal that most B2B marketers have content marketing strategies, but only 35 percent have documented it; and of those marketers, 60 percent consider their organization effective, compared to 32 percent of the marketers who don’t have any documentation.
It’s also important to maintain a regular schedule of content. The world moves at a rapid pace, and internet users have a constant stream of information vying for their attention. A day without new content is a lifetime, and companies publishing at least 16 blogs a month have almost 3.5 times as many visitors as companies publishing four or less blogs. Good content is vital, but so is having lots of it.
Investing in Content Marketing Skills
Taking the role of content marketer for your small business or startup is no simple task. It requires you start managing several roles. For example, you need to become a research journalist, technical writer, storyteller, graphic designer, and data analyst. You have to create articles and then pick them apart. You have to be just as meticulous going over the results of your marketing campaigns. It’s time-consuming work, and requires a lot of skill and determination. However, if the struggle is real and you’re concerned that your content marketing skills aren’t up to date. Consider using other tools such as outsourcing the work. It’s easy to find the right talent through a content marketing platform or marketplace. And with your content creation in safe hands, you have more time to focus on other areas of your business.
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