What is the best Content Marketing Mix?
As we know from our recent article (you can read it here if you missed) content is king in the marketing world, it helps develop the foundations of your marketing strategy, it allows you to reinforce your sales pitch and communicate across numerous channel types in various formats from written word to audio or even video.
But how do you determine as a business what the right content marketing mix is?
How do you find out which are the best channels for your message and what that message should look like?
Collective Industries specialises in marketing and design, and often helps clients discover their best marketing mix, be that using modern methods like blogs and social media, or more traditional formats such as brochures, magazine adverts and tradeshows.
So where should you begin?
Below are 5 simple steps to creating your perfect content marketing mix.
Step 1: Understanding your audience
The first stage, and possibly most important, when it comes to putting together an effective content marketing mix is to understand your audience – who are you trying to communicate to?
You should know their basic demographics along with possible interests, where they like to hang out, what they are likely to read and the various types of websites they might use. There are many ways to do this, you could use existing market and industry reports, or you could design and distribute a survey either on or offline.
Step 2: Knowing your ‘Why’
Once you have discovered these things and created a strong client profile, you can very quickly put together a list of possible channels that you might wish to utilise in your campaigns. However, be careful – just because they might use these channels’ they might not necessarily be relevant to your business or brand.
Top Tip: Always make sure you choose the right channels for your product or service.
Step 3: Creating your message
Now that you have an idea of where you are going to communicate your message, you can begin to start thinking what your message actually might be, but before you write it down, think about your ‘why’ – so many businesses make the mistake of selling their what and how, but forget that most people when they finally make a purchase will choose the product or service that best appeals to their emotions, knowing and communicating your why is the foundation to your sales message. Once you know this, the what and how will follow easily.
Step 4: Choosing your mix
From steps 1 -3 you should now have a clear idea of the channels that are best suited to you. When choosing your final selection think about how each channel will fit in on your buyer’s journey – at what stage they are likely to be touched using this method of communication.
You can learn more about discovering your buyers journey here.
Make sure you have at least 2 – 3 channels for each stage of your buyer cycle. Not every buy will just be on one particular channel, so you need to make sure you cover all bases but without creating too much work for your self.
Also try to make sure you use a mixture of on and offline methods – this helps create a deeper awareness.
Step 5: Delivering your content marketing strategy
Now you understand your audience, you know your why, you have created your sales message and you know exactly what channels you want to communicate through its time to deliver!
Make sure when posting out to your various chosen channels you have a consistent plan of action in place. It takes several touches to get a potential customer to make the transition from un aware to aware and then a few more to get them to purchase. You need to make sure your brand or business is at the forefront of their minds – but be careful, it’s a delicate balance from ‘being seen’ to ‘becoming just plain annoying’.
For more information on creating a content marketing mix, or for a free consultation please contact our team.