Content marketing isn’t like traditional advertising, where you pay for advertising content to appear in certain places at certain times. Rather, content marketing is an approach based on creation and distribution of content with demonstrable value and relevance. The ultimate goal is the same: drawing in interested parties and turning them into customers. But how you go about it is different.
With content marketing, you could, for example, show how your clothing firm’s new skirt design can be styled to work on five different occasions, from casual to semi-formal. With advertising, you’re saying, “Here is our amazing new skirt, and it’s on sale for 25% off. Click here to shop.”
While you may have touches of regular advertising in your content marketing, such as a call to action at the end of an article or video, the article or video itself does the heavy lifting by capturing and engaging the attention of those you hope to sell to. It’s creative, but that doesn’t mean it’s random. In fact, building online forms and automated workflows for content marketing can be one of the smartest decisions you can make when mapping out your strategy.
Content Marketing Cannot Be Haphazard
Back in the old days of blogs being new and social media just beginning to emerge, businesses thought of these platforms as ideal for the one-off article or link that an intern could fire off once a week or so. All that has changed. Content marketing today requires a crafted strategy to be successful. You have to know what your goals are, create content with meat on its bones, and interact with your audience, whether that’s through comment threads on blog posts, or on social media posts. You must also monitor performance of content, so you can learn more about what works best in what situation, and what falls short.
Brainstorming, Creating, Editing, and Posting Content
Many companies, large and small, are seeing the wisdom in using workflow management software to develop content marketing workflows that ensure a steady drumbeat of high quality, fresh, original content. Trying to keep a content marketing strategy on track without a defined workflow puts you at higher risk of problems like content not being posted on time, or comments going unanswered on social media. A strong content marketing strategy has as key elements brainstorming, idea generation, content creation, content editing, and content posting. All these should be done on a regular schedule, so blog subscribers and social media followers get into the groove of anticipating and consuming your steady stream of content.
Managing Content After It Is Posted
Once marketing content is posted, however, you’re not finished. Blogs and social media accounts are like gardens in that they require regular tending in order to flourish. You may choose to create a separate workflow for managing existing content rather than having it as part of your content marketing production workflow. However you choose to do it, don’t forget to tend to your growing library of content regularly so you can fix technical issues, respond to questions, and generally show that you’re willing to engage with your target audience.
Steadiness Is an Advantage with Content Marketing
Have you ever started to follow a blog with great enthusiasm only to watch it fizzle out quickly? It’s disappointing, and you want to avoid raising your readers’ (and potential customers’) expectations and then dashing them by neglecting your content strategy. That’s why automated workflows are so beneficial to the content marketing process. They ensure that ideas get created, content gets written (or recorded, or animated), and content is polished and ready to go before it is released to your audience. It then keeps you in the loop as potential customers ask questions and make comments, showing consistently that your company is engaged with and cares about its customers.
PerfectApps is online form and workflow software that is ideally suited to running a content marketing strategy. Not only can you create online forms for tasks like content scheduling and social media posting, you can ensure that every step progresses automatically as previous steps are completed, so you can deliver a steady, curated stream of top quality content about your brand. Creativity goes further when it is part of a well-considered strategy, and PerfectApps is exemplary for strategy creation and execution via automated workflows. We invite you to watch our demo video and see for yourself how the creation of custom, polished forms and workflows is within your grasp.
