Is Your Content Marketing Strategy Focused on the Wrong Thing?

When it comes to your content marketing strategy, what is your most important priority?

If your answer isn’t creating demand, your content is missing the mark.

Most content marketing thought leadership focuses on a brand’s output: the content that’s being produced. And that makes sense – identifying your content’s tone, who’s going to write it, what form it’s going to take, how you’re going to promote it, and other ‘content how-tos’ are all important steps.

However, to succeed you must go beyond checking items off a content creation to-do list.

The first priority of content marketing is to focus on the actions you want your content to inspire.

Today’s sophisticated content marketers know that they have to do more than create content, they need to create demand for their brand, products and services. They need to create that next step in the buyer’s journey.

The good news is that it’s easy to right the ship if your content marketing has lost sight of its guiding purpose.

Start by working backwards:

4.  Ultimately, you want to cultivate advocates and evangelists for your brand — people who love you so much that they repeatedly and loyally use your products and openly share that love with their peers.

3.  However, before you can inspire customers to advocate for your brand, you need to inspire them to purchase and adopt your products.

2. Before you can inspire prospective customers to purchase and adopt your products, you need to inspire them to engage in conversation with you.

1. Before you can inspire prospects to engage in conversation with you, you need to get on their radar. To do this you’ll need to be continuously present and active in the places where they’re looking for information about their needs.

Then Produce and Promote:

Once you plot out this roadmap for creating demand, the production and promotion of the content that’ll accomplish it can follow.

Listen to your marketplace and figure out trending topics to write about that will start conversations. Create high-value and relevant multimedia content that’s easy to engage with. Share that content to help shape the conversation around your brand, products and services.

And don’t forget to analyze — continuously. Frequently take stock of which content assets delivered the best results, which delivered the worst, how your message was perceived, and how your content drove action through your customer roadmap.

By constantly listening to your audience and analyzing the results of your efforts, you can determine how to optimize your strategy and create the demand your brand deserves. Get more tips with our Buyer 2.0 Content Strategy Checklist.

Amanda Hicken is senior manager of strategic content, overseeing PR Newswire’s Beyond PR blog. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram @ADHicken for tweets and photos from Content Marketing World 2015.