Perhaps more than any other type of marketing or advertising, content marketing invites comparison. “Did you see that case study that our competitor just put out? Powerful stuff. We definitely need to produce something like that!”
Maybe you do. Or maybe you don't.
Stand Out
The key to effective content marketing is to find your niche. You will make little impact with your content marketing if you say the same things that your competitors are saying about a topic that has already saturated the web. That doesn't mean that your entire product offering has to conform to the niche, but it does mean that the overwhelming volume of content you produce should be focused on an element of what you do that is unique or different. And you need to find the most appealing and appropriate venue and format for your content. Some companies absolutely clean up by feeding their audience a steady diet of informative whitepapers. For others, colorful infographics generate the most buzz. Still others produce a loyal following with checklists and brief “best practice” guides.
Use The Available Tools
There are tools like Google Trends that can help you find your niche—a content topic that you are an expert in that is different from your competitors and hopefully that is trending in a positive way or better yet is considered by Google to be a breakout term. After researching where your target audience hangs out, start producing content of various types, set it loose in the wild, and then watch it like a hawk. (By the way, marketing automation tool like HubSpot can be extremely helpful in this type of process.) Very quickly you’ll learn what kinds of materials and what topics really strike a nerve with your prospects.
Find YOUR Custom Equation
Now of course, despite the examples given above, no company has a content marketing strategy that utilizes just one type of content. So once you’ve started to get dialed-in on your prospect’s preferences (plural), the next task is to play around with the mix. Based on input from your analytics tools and your gut, you adjust all the variables (medium, message, frequency, etc.) until you come up with just the right formula. Content titles are extremely important, and it's important to make sure your content is rich with the keywords your personas are searching for. Producing consistently amazing and persuasive content is a process that takes a combination of skills and practice.
Guess, Test, and Revise
This process takes significant time and effort, but you will find it far more effective in the long run rather than basing your decisions on what everybody else is doing. (Especially since you have no visibility into the results they are achieving.) And when you dive into content evaluation, remember that to remain effective you must keep experimenting, monitoring and tweaking, as the buying public’s interests and inclinations change frequently.
Ultimately, to be truly successful with your content marketing, you need to tune out the noise, tune in to your prospects and march to the beat of a different drummer.
