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Three words are at the heart of what’s wrong with content marketing. These same words hold the key to fixing marketing: connection, creativity and results.
Today’s content marketers often feel compelled to sacrifice the first two – connection and creativity – in hopes of demonstrating the third: measurable business results. Driven by impossible demands to constantly create new content, marketers believe they lack the time to be creative and always achieve business goals. Unfortunately, marketers often feel like they have to separate creativity of createwhich all too often results in high volumes of content that only adds to the noise and fails to truly connect with the audience.
Related: 9 Tips to Reignite Your Marketing Team’s Creativity
Too many marketers have succumbed to the lie that when it comes to content, quantity is king and only algorithms really matter. They double down on SEO and jonesing for higher SERP rankings, and it comes at the cost of rich, relevant, and creative work. And the results of these efforts show:
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An audience overlooked, confused and uninspired by unique content.
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Bold ideas abandoned mid-development in favor of a finished product, regardless of its quality.
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Decreased engagement and leads as the audience gave up and moved on.
In a perfect world, audience connection, marketing team creativity, and effort results should all work together. So how can businesses prioritize connection, make room for creativity, and still show revenue results from their efforts? By taking an amplified marketing approach, creating high-quality, audience-focused content and atomizing, remixing and refreshing it into multiple pieces of content across every marketing channel.
What marketers want
Casted spoke to marketers in his “State of Content Marketing“. Respondents said they needed a better way to connect their creative marketing efforts to business goals. They want to:
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Better understand the needs, wants and preferences of the public.
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Deploy high-quality content more often and across multiple platforms.
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Get better visibility into the revenue impact of their work.
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Simultaneously measure the performance of multiple multi-channel campaigns.
The answer? An amplified marketing approach. The strategy allows marketers to follow their creative ideas and meet bold big expectations to compete with the wonders and Pixars of the world. How? Breaking free from quantity shackles, marketers can seek out authentic, engaging, and profitable content and then deliver it across multiple channels. By amplifying reach, they amplify value and amplify results.
Related: Stop talking clichés: 4 tips for more creative and original marketing
Identify audiences, experts and assets
Amplified marketing starts with understanding the audience. Who is your audience? Who gets involved? What interests them the most? Determine the top performing keywords and topics for more information.
Then, rather than trying to write “like” an expert, talk to a real expert instead. Find the most qualified people to answer your audience’s questions and inspire them. You might find an inside expert with storytelling talent and energy, a customer who can talk about your niche, or an industry expert to provide strategic insights.
After identifying the characteristics of your audience and potential experts, dig into your archives for treasures. Use past segments — a podcast or music video, a blog quote that gained traction on social media, anything that sparked netizens or garnered an enthusiastic response — and incorporate it into your new work.
Create audio, video and text
Once you’ve identified an engaging topic and secured an expert, have a conversation. Record it with Zoom, a smartphone or any other equipment you have.
Remember that this conversation is not just a chat: it is a source for all your subsequent content creations. Divide the discussion into a series of webinars or podcast episodes. Use resonant quotes or enticing questions as embedded video and audio clips in social media and email marketing campaigns. Slice and cut the transcript into a set of blog posts. And don’t stop there. Reference older pieces of conversation-related content, mixing old with new to create more value and increase audience touchpoints.
Related: 3 All-Too-Familiar Writing Patterns You Need to Eliminate From Your Marketing Copy Today
Amplify across channels, formats and teams
When you amplify the reach of your content, you amplify your revenue. The easiest way to boost the effectiveness of your content? Make it available in a variety of formats and platforms. To maximize amplified marketing:
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Align your content and your teams, so everyone knows what’s available and works well.
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Take and share atomized content with your marketing teams.
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Identify your audience’s favorite channels and align the best matching content formats with those channels.
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Adapt these nuggets of content to perform better on each channel, based on past success.
Back to creativity
The alchemy of creativity and connection generates real business impact. I call it a return to creativity. Rather than seeing bold and creative content as time-consuming and one-time use, think of it as foundational and generative. Invest time, money, effort, and creativity into developing less of the best quality content. Then repurpose, restructure, and reuse your content source to maximize ROI and all your creative endeavors.
To see amplified marketing ROI in action, you need to measure the omnichannel effectiveness of your content. Look beyond vanity metrics like downloads. Focus on engagement and use technology that generates detailed insights to help you pivot in real time. And don’t bury those numbers in the marketing department. Share what works with sales and customer success teams, so they can leverage your knowledge! Every change and tweak to your content increases its relevance, engagement, and value to potential customers — and benefits your bottom line.
For too long, marketers have been forced to accept the frustrations and limitations of a disjointed existence. They publish content deemed “good enough to upload”. They seek the approval of algorithms at the expense of their audience. And they still struggle to prove the value of their work. Amplified Marketing invites marketers to reconnect — with their audience, creativity, and business goals — through better content, no After contents.