Give a compelling tone to your business- Content strategy

By Vignesh Prem, Chief Technical Officer at Hyper Destech

Over the past decade, the Marketing front has liberated itself from the outdated and traditional methods of reaching out to customers and virtually begging them to buy their products. The outbound forms of marketing including e-mails, flyers, billboards and direct messages have become obsolete. Inbound marketing, focusing on compelling the customers to come to the companies rather than vice-versa, has surfaced onto the marketing landscape. Companies now communicate strong messages, stories, ideas and propositions that resonate with the customers and persuade them to connect with the brand. In this scenario where the brands gradually form a niche for themselves in the minds of the audience, content strategy has become an indispensable element of marketing and promotion.

Is you content strategy doing what it should do?

Michelle Linn poses an important question that needs to be addressed by your content strategy, ‘Does the right person get the right content at the right place, at the right time, in the right format, in the right language, on the right device?’ Analysts refer to these as the 7 things to be done right by content strategists. These point form the checklist of your content marketing strategy and would integrally decide the success of your content marketing plan.

You audience shall fall in love with your content

Huge companies have revisited their marketing strategy, revamped it according to the trending styles of content marketing and employed it to actuate better results. ‘Morgan Stanley’ recently redesigned its website to show financial insights, articles, stories and trends on their homepage. This was done to captivate the visitors with the content on their website and once that is done, sales/ customer retention would follow. Among others is Starbucks that narrates engrossing stories of its endeavors and initiatives. One such story was titled ‘Supporting Coffee Farming families for generations to come’ which created an emotional countryside appeal amongst the people and connected them to the brand. All of this carves a positive impression for the brand and subtly markets their products and services.

Social Media Platforms are a whole market

Strategizing content has upped in importance owing to the new avenues and social media platforms which can be exploited towards efficient marketing. The trends on social media change faster than the minute hand of the clock. Hence, the likes of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), PR, Pay-per-click (PPC) etc. further elevate the importance of content strategies on the marketing scale.

What to do with your content after it is published?

It is not enough to produce readable, searchable and appropriate content because each line and fraction of your content has post-publication implications which need to be carefully handled. Content that does well needs to be reposted on various other platforms while content that receives flak from people calls for immediate withdrawal.

Content Inventories and Content Audit

You have voluminous aspects to your business which need to be addressed through your content. It is important to ensure that the customers grasp each of your dispelled stories and propositions. An efficient strategy makes the process agile by organizing the backlogs and prioritizing them for execution. First things first! A good method is to form a ‘Content Inventory’which stores the content already been published across various channels, and a simultaneous ‘Content Audit’ to see the performance of all the published content. This cuts the discrepancies and does well for the business by giving a benchmark to measure the progress of their campaign.

Know your customer before telling him anything about your brand

The psychology and intellectual levels of customers should to be thoroughly analyzed before employing a marketing strategy. According to a research by The Centre for Biotechnology Information, the average attention span of human beings has come down to 8 seconds with a number of people suffering from ‘The Goldfish syndrome’, thus reducing their retentive capacity. It is important to introduce the most important part of your content at the beginning, or position it such that customers retain what you want them to know.

With the advent of the internet and an exponential amount of information sources available to people, the customers are well informed about the market. This transfers the onus upon companies to be very accurate with what they say and propose. Hence, it is important to send across messages that are interpreted as anticipated by the company.