We’re all social creatures, each with a deep-rooted evolutionary need to find consistency. From our morning routines to a typical day at the office, we build our lives around patterns of sameness. Consistency gives us predictability. And it lets us know what we can count on and allows us to build trust. What does this mean for challenging your content marketing team to be consistent?
When it comes to content marketing, consistency is what builds trust between a brand and its audience. So, the key to creating content that outpaces your competition might just be showing up. Here is a look at how you can bring consistency to your content marketing strategy this year.
Fundamental #1: Blogging is a Vital Part of Your Customer Journey
First, understand why you are blogging in the first place. As the fury of content marketing success exploded, everyone seemingly jumped on the blogging bandwagon–each with very different results. Here’s why:
A customer relationship is deeper than sales pitches and solving surface-level problems. Sure, you’ll get some low-hanging fruit by posting in-depth sales copy about your products and services on your blog. But you’ll get a lot more if you cater to all the different touchpoints in the customer journey.
Your content can provide:
- Relevant News on Industry Trends
- Entertainment
- Education
- Solutions to Common Problems
While all roads may not lead directly to a sale, each one feeds a customer relationship that establishes your brand as a go-to resource in your industry. If you can be the place your customers turn to for the latest industry news, then you will also be the place they turn to when making a purchase.
Fundamental #2: Challenge Your Content Marketing Team to Go Beyond Company News
While it’s important to keep a finger on the industry’s pulse and highlight your on-trend market position to remain relevant with your audience, there’s a lot more to creating successful content than simply sharing company news.
That’s the equivalent of the social faux pas of spending too much time talking about yourself. If something new or noteworthy happens, it’s customary to acknowledge it. But talking about your company shouldn’t be in the mix for your standard content strategy.
Here’s what to post instead:
The focus of your content strategy should be consistently providing a variety of content to reach different points in the customer journey because everyone isn’t in the same place at the same time. And for a large part of your audience, you need to maintain a connection and brand visibility.
Fundamental #3: Ensure Your Content Answers the Right Questions
According to Hubspot, the largest search engine–Google, processes 63k searches per second, and about 14% are questions. That is more than a half-million questions every minute of the day. The only question that matters for your content development plan is, ‘are you answering the right questions?’
Figuring this out takes a little humility. Instead of assuming you know your audience’s needs, go through the research steps individually. Dig through comments, social media engagements, and product feedback submissions and compile a list of common themes. Then, pour through groups and public threads for your competitors and industry channels. Round out your research with predictive text searches and popular conversation platforms like Reddit threads.
Build out a content strategy that focuses on answering the top 10 questions uncovered for that month. Then, because trends change quickly, repeat the process again and again to ensure that your content maintains relevancy. This way, you’ll be able to catch new trends as they emerge and become among the first in your industry to address concerns and provide solutions.
Fundamental #4: Understand How Often Your Marketing Team Should Post New Content
There are many opinions about nailing down the ideal frequency for posting new content. The average blog post takes about 3.5 hours to write, while most viewers spend just 37 seconds reading it. Still, for the smaller percentage of readers finding what they’re looking for, you’re planting seeds and cultivating loyalty one post at a time. For upwards of 89% of marketers, content marketing is worth every minute.
When it comes to finding the sweet spot between maximizing your reach and exceeding the point of diminishing returns, keep these rules in mind:
- Rule #1: Consistency is more important than frequency. Commit to a number of posts you can keep up with rather than choosing an arbitrary number.
- Rule #2: Quality ranks higher in importance than quantity. Keep in mind that it takes time to develop quality content, and one or two high-quality pieces are far better than five low-quality pieces.
- Rule #3: Know what you want to accomplish first. Your content can increase organic traffic to your website, promote brand awareness, or fuel customer loyalty. Knowing what your primary goal is will help you choose an appropriate frequency.
There is no hard number for how many times you should post weekly. If you want to fit the mold, 44% of content marketers report posting three to six times monthly (or 1-2 times weekly).
How Leveraging Content Creation Services can Help You Maintain Consistency
Planning is just one step in the process. Deploying your content strategy and keeping up with the volume weekly takes a dedicated team. Almost half of all marketers have limited resources. According to an SEM Rush survey, 44% work on a content marketing team of one to three people. That doesn’t leave much bandwidth for content development. These companies can effectively scale content needs with support from content creation services like nDash. Here, you’ll find a community of writers, editors, and content marketers to easily meet your goals.
Do you have time to dedicate 10-15 hours per week or more to create new content? For most marketers, the answer is no, or at least not consistently. Since consistency is what we need most, content creation services can quickly become an invaluable resource for finding talented writers that can produce content on demand. With a content creation service, you don’t need an in-house team to pull off great content marketing that outpaces your competition. You can get a little extra help when you need it without the commitment of hiring additional staff.
The nDash platform provides access to more than 10k skilled writers spanning expertise in every subject area and offering project support that fits nearly any budget. Plus, you’ll get cutting-edge content management tools like content calendars, publishing tools, and ideation support. Get in touch with our sales team today.
This post is by nDash community member Marissa Snider. She’s a freelance writer with a decade of instructional design and corporate learning experience.