If you believe that content marketing may not be worth the substantial cost that your company would incur, you may want to think again. Below marketing experts from jatapp explain how you can execute an effective content marketing campaign on a dime when you take a smart approach. Have a Content Marketing Strategy As is the case with all business activities, you need to develop an effective content marketing strategy to guide your efforts. The most effective strategy will have several key components. This includes a list of goals that you want to accomplish through your campaign. These goals should be achievable and relatively simple, but they may be long-term in nature. Your strategy also needs to be driven by research. You need to identify how your product or service will help your customers and how your offerings stack up against the competition. Another aspect of your strategic marketing plan is keeping track of your KPIs, or key performance indicators. These are the metrics that you will use to analyze the results of your efforts, such as shares, click-throughs, views, and more. Before you launch your campaign, you also need to define in your strategic plan how you will promote it. For example, what platforms will your target audience use frequently to view your content? Finally, your strategic marketing plan needs to have a calendar that details when each aspect of your campaign will be launched. Start a Blog When creating your strategy, it is important that you include blogging in your plan. A blog is a free or almost-free component that can have incredible benefits. You can easily create blog posts on your own, and you can use WordPress to add them to your blog page within seconds. If you are not a writer, you can always hire a copywriter, but this will eat into your overall ROI. The typical cost for a freelancer is approximately $20 to $30 per article. An alternative is to ask an employee to write the posts for you. Your employee could even work remotely to create the blog posts, and this can enhance their productivity while minimizing overhead costs. Remember to choose topics that are most relevant to your target audience. Media monitoring is an affordable way to research topics that you could cover in your blog posts. Focus on Quality Over Quantity Some companies spend a fortune on content marketing because they blast new content out at a rapid pace. While this is one strategy that you can take, a more cost-effective approach is to maximize the benefit of each piece of content that you create. Each content item should be high-quality and effective at producing desired results. In addition, you should focus on posting that content or links to that content in as many places as reasonably possible, such as through social media marketing platforms. Remember that it is better to get the most benefit out of a single post than it is to pay for five or 10 posts that are only marginally beneficial. Through media monitoring research, you can identify highly-relevant topics that your audience is concerned about, and you can also determine the most relevant outlets to publish your content on. Repurpose Existing Content You may think that posting a new blog article on your website and creating different links to it will maximize the exposure of that content, but this is not necessarily the case. For example, you can use the content in that blog post to create different forms of media. This could include a slideshow, a podcast or something else. Remember that you have already paid for research and for creation of that specific content, so it makes sense to maximize the benefit of the related expenses as much as possible. An alternative to this is to repurpose outdated or old content. For example, you can pull a blog post from 10 months ago that is still relevant to your customers and update it by putting a fresh spin on it. Promote Your Content Creating effective, well-researched pieces is important, but it is equally important to promote that content. You want your content viewed by as many people as possible, but you need these people to be included in your target audience. Simply blasting your item out there for all to see is not generally cost-effective. While targeting your primary consumer base, consider using Facebook posts, tweets, email blasts, newsletters, and other formats to encourage views, shares, and mentions. When possible, link the content or promotions back to your own website so that you can take advantage of SEO benefits as well. In Conclusion Content marketing can be expensive, but you can see that a thoughtful strategy can help you to maximize the effectiveness of this type of campaign while reducing costs as much as possible. In addition to focusing your attention on quality, remember that you can also scale back your approach so that you can take advantage of content marketing benefits on a budget.
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