3) Content, content, content.
You’ve read and heard it a million times: Content is king. It’s your brand, and doing it right requires alignment with your overall company strategy and resources. Think it through and come up with a plan that makes sense, again by working with professionals.
Digital content falls into three distinct categories:
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- Paid (traditional advertising)
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- Earned (typically part of your PR efforts, advertising campaigns, events and the content you create within your owned media channels, including product mentions by bloggers and customer mentions) and
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- Owned (content that your brand has complete control over, such as a website, video, still photos, articles, blogs, vlogs, reports, games, white papers, case studies, podcasts – this is all content). Professional content is so important to you business that, according to Demand Metrics, on average, a company blog delivers 67 percent of leads per month.
The channels to distribute content continue to grow and format and type vary by outlet. For example, you can have a long video on YouTube, but on Vine the approximately length is 6 seconds and on Instagram its 15 seconds. All of these are important, especially if you want to reach a particular demographic, but more so for some industries than others. For more on this subject, check out my article Content Creation for the Successful Small-Business and a short video about content strategy.
4) If content is king, then social is definitely the queen bee.
Equally if not as important as a sound content strategy is a solid social-media strategy. Deploying content without one is meaningless and will not yield the results you want. I hear this all the time: marketers talking about the ROI on social media. Many times, it’s not absolutely clear how this impacts the bottom line, but if you don’t do it right, you’ll see how it can affect you in a negative way.
