How to take the stress out of content marketing — with guest Pascal Fintoni

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that focuses on creating and delivering valuable, relevant and consistent content to your customers to encourage profitable consumer action and engage potential customers.

Doesn’t sound that difficult, does it?

In 2015, my business One Line had begun to pick up momentum through recommendations but in the back of my mind I knew if the business was to become sustainable I would have to make my website and digital marketing work harder for me to encourage more work to come my way in the future via online searches and web browsing. The problem was the more time I spent on social media and blogging the more stressed and overwhelmed I felt. Even worse, my hard-earned efforts didn’t seem to be providing any kind of return on the investment of my time.

So I took a step back and dedicated 6 months of my time to participate in a digital marketing training course run by Be Digital, Northumberland. I was cynical to begin with. Could it really be possible to secure clients through Twitter and Facebook? Wasn’t social media just for sharing funny cat videos?

What I actually learned about content marketing and have gone on to implement as part of my 2016 weekly routine for One Line has been invaluable to my business growth and I am going to share this with you in this blog post.

Here’s how to take the stress out of content marketing:

Does content marketing actually work? 

Yes! We’ve just started work on a branding contract for National Voices charity via Twitter and this month the lovely Sunshine + Glow got in touch (via Linked In) for a logo design which will be launching on her blog soon. Prior to that I started working with The Little Fair Trade shop via a Facebook introduction.
And as if that wasn’t enough bragging rights, we also received this email (below) from the WFTO World Fair Trade Organisation with regard to our general online profile!

I admit, I am still in shock that all of my hard work posting on social media is helping me to take on new projects and grow One Line’s ethically minded client base but proves content marketing works.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to know who you’re aiming at, what your brand personality and voice is going to be and whether there is a market for your product or service. Defining your ideal customer and brand archetype might mean you need to refine your product or service a little, but for me that part was very inspiring as it gave such a focus to the business.

Need a little help? Check out our 7 steps on how to build your brand.

Ok, so you know who you’re talking to and you know the type of voice you’re going to talk in. Now how do you do it? Take a look at our 4 simple steps below.

Step 1: Pick a topic and stick to it.

Sounds boring, right? That was my reaction when learning about this. (I mentioned I was cynical didn’t I?). What I found instead was that once I had defined a topic and started to research and test out different articles one idea would lead to another and before I knew it I had 3 months worth of article headings in my planner!

Step 2: Test out some link tracking apps.

Tracking your links to find out who clicked on them, where from and how often is essential. If you use a link tracking app you’ll be able to see which social media channels are getting the most clicks. This not only allows you to engage with your audience better it also means you can stop wasting time posting content out in places people aren’t interested in it.

Bitly and Hootsuite are our favourites.

I’ve learned there is no point posting on social media with what someone once told me was the ‘Spray & Pray’ approach. Instead, analysing the last 3-6 months of content showed me that certain channels work better for articles about ethical packaging whereas others work better for tips on our ethical approach to branding. Going forward I can now target my marketing more effectively which in turn means less time and even less effort — hoorah!

Step 3: Write your content.

I can’t tell you what to write but I do think it’s important to say write about things you’re interested in, passionate about and which your ideal customers will be interested in equally. On the course, I learned about this idea of star content. Which marketing expert Pascal Fintoni explains in this 30-minute video interview. (Watch this for everything you’ll ever need to know about content marketing.)

Getting to grips with the idea of support content was enlightening. What support content does is provides hooks that lead people to your star content. What’s great about this is you don’t have to write it all yourself. You can curate.

For example, say you’ve written a star content article about Healthy Eating. Have a look on the web for other writers, video bloggers and products on the same topic. Providing a short paragraph or quick video blog review or opinion on this content with a comment and link to how it relates to points in your star content starts to be a way of creating content quickly. This will drive people around the article pages of your website.

With this FREE simple excel download, you can see how you might structure content ideas for the 4 steps plus space to brain dump your reference links and keywords. If you’d like any more tips please feel free to get in touch.

Last but not least, avoid this in your content marketing strategy:

1. Don’t overdo it.
Content marketing is about providing information for people and letting them make their own mind up so try not to over do it or make it ‘salesy’.

2. Don’t forget to post content on your website.
This may seem like a no-brainer but the amount of information we share that simply drives our potential customers to another website is incredible.

3. Play by your own rules.
As much as this is a quick start guide it’s important you find your own rhythm and way of working. I prefer to dedicate 1 day per week to in-house content marketing and then the rest of the week on client work, that way I know which brand personality hat I’m wearing each day of the week.

Don’t forget your FREE download below. Use it and make it your own to see how you can start to plan out star and support content. This is just a simple excel document, nothing fancy, the more complicated things get the more that overwhelm can sneak back in. I find it’s helpful to have this template open as I’m working so I can just drop ideas and links on to it as and when they come to mind.