Effective Content Marketing: The Three Skills Your Team Needs to Master

Content marketing takes a team of experts to achieve your company’s goals. What skills are you missing?

Content marketing is more than tossing a couple of blog posts on the web and writing a few pithy notes on social media.

Though it may seem otherwise, the reality of content marketing is that you need to compose your content-development team of people who thrive on discovery, can create all kinds of content well for all kinds of people, and can navigate analytics flawlessly.

SKILL ONE: IN-DEPTH RESEARCH ABILITIES

Nothing in marketing effectively and efficiently launches blindly.

To do content marketing well, you need to hunger for answers: For whom do you write? Where do these people spend their time? What do they need to hear to take the action you need them to take?

To answer these essential questions, you need to have performed extensive research into the following key components as part of your marketing strategy and planning process:

• Who is your target audience? What are its pain points and what does it need to see, hear, or feel to believe your product or service will address its problems?
• Where does your audience get its information?

• What do you need to say to compel your audience to act on your product or service?
• How do you need to communicate your key messages to appeal to your targeted group? To what media and methods will your audience best respond?

If your team doesn’t have these answers, it must know enough to pause and get them before it charges forward with content-marketing activities.

SKILL TWO: WINNING WRITING ABILITIES

You need to have proficient, versatile content creators on your team.

After all, not all audiences respond in the same way to the same things. Can your team create blog posts, white papers, case studies, social media posts, slideshares, podcasts, videos, and beyond?

Further, even within these categories of creative, can your team create varieties of each type of item in such a way that they will evoke the needed responses in your specific target audiences? After all, there are many types and tones and looks and feels of articles and videos and more out there on the web—and they all have a form and function for a specific group.

For example, the content the FrogDog team created to connect with pharmaceutical manufacturers and get them to initiate conversations with our client’s sales team was quite different from the content we created to connect with golfers and get them to buy golf balls on-line.

SKILL THREE: AGILE ANALYTICS ABILITIES

To measure the effectiveness of your content marketing, your team needs to understand marketing analytics. Do people read your content and click through to the parts of your site you want them to visit next? Or do they drop in and drop out?

If you want to know whether the content you’ve created succeeds in achieving your goals, you need to continually review several factors—all in context of your distribution activity—including website analytics, search-engine rankings, keyword performance, and beyond.

With the right data and the right analysis, you can discover what adjustments your content program needs to have to more effectively and efficiently reach your goals. Without the right data and the right analysis, you’re wasting company resources.

If the amount of time and funds you spend creating content doesn’t return on investment when it comes to moving content consumers toward your end marketing and sales goals, you’d better adjust quickly. The right team knows how.

THE RIGHT TEAM WINS THE GAME

Finding the right team for content development pays dividends, we promise. Want to see how FrogDog can help you create winning content? Call us today!