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The following is a guest post by Karen Dikson. Karen is a marketing expert and business owner from New Jersey. She is a regular contributor to HuffingtonPost and several other marketing resources. In her free time, Karen enjoys traveling. Follow her on Twitter.

Content marketing has become a very popular form of promotion. Most of the successful business organizations, brands, and blogs are currently leveraging content in order to improve their brand’s awareness, leads, and sales.

According to some interesting statistics, around 27 million pieces of content are being distributed on a daily basis. Moreover, 86% of B2B organizations are leveraging content marketing to improving their performance. This sounds very nice, but have you thought about the performance of their content marketing efforts?

To tell you the truth, not every company knows how to properly organize their content marketing strategy. A successful content marketing campaign requires efficient planning and organizing, precise goals, an in-depth understanding of the company’s target audience, and a powerful promotion plan.

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According to the same resource, only 21% of B2B marketers feel that they’re doing the proper ROI analysis and measurements around their content marketing campaigns. 48% of content marketers do not have a documented and concise strategy, a stat which is very worrying (or pleasing for those who have a strategy).

How to Step into the White Side of Content Marketing

The white side of content marketing basically refers to doing things right. You can’t afford to spend your time and money on actions that don’t bring you the expected results. Here are some useful tips on how to avoid failing your content marketing campaigns:

Document Your Strategy

Documenting your content marketing strategy revolves around planning and organizing. Perceive your documented strategy as the reference point that lets keeps you on track on the longer run.

For starters, you need to ask yourself a few broad questions that will set the foundation of your strategy. For example, “What is my challenge?” or “What is the biggest risk in case of failure?”

Then, you need to be more specific and figure out things like opportunities, needs, target audience, and unique proposition value. Moreover, you have to strictly document your content creation and distribution process.

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Here’s a step-by-step guide which contains the necessary questions that need to be answered while creating your content marketing documentation strategy.

Create a Publishing Schedule

Once you’ve documented your content marketing strategy, you can start scheduling your content activity. This means that you need to set up a schedule for your blog posts, social media shares, and everything that’s related to publishing actions.

You should always know what you’ll publish a week before, as this saves you from a lot of stress and keeps your content marketing strategy organized. Moreover, you can create different strategies around your publishing frequency so your most loyal followers will be drawn to what you’re actually doing behind the scene.

Develop Your Content Goals

Every content marketing strategy needs to contain short and long terms. Developing goals is not efficient just for content marketers, but for everyone who wants to follow a roadmap towards something big. When it comes to content marketing, things can never be simpler.

In order to improve your overall blogging performance and productivity, start setting longer-term goals. You should stay realistic, but don’t be afraid to overcome your limits. Whenever you’re setting goals, put yourself through a confidence state of mind. Set the biggest three goals related to your current content marketing strategy.

Once you have the big perspective, start creating three monthly goals that are extremely connected to the three big goals. Continue with the weekly, and follow the same selection process. Finally, you need to create three goals each and every day.

If you perform smaller tasks that lead to the bigger goal each day, there’s no way to fail your content marketing goals. Be patient, and work hard until you accomplish what you want.

Is your content marketing not working out as it should – or you hoped for? We can help.

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Understand Your Audience Completely

Frank Michaels, content marketing manager at Bestessays states: “Understanding your target audience’s wants, needs, and problems is a fundamental requirement for leading a successful content marketing campaign. After all, you’re creating and delivering qualitative and valuable content for a specific group of people which expect a personalized experience.”

Now, even if the content is excellent, the outcomes that you’ll get won’t be as efficient as you imagine in case you’re not targeting your audience in the proper way. In order to get “closer” to them, understand them, and help them, you must become truly involved.

Start talking to your blog readers through comments – encourage them to express their opinions on every article that you publish, and tell them to get in touch with you in case they have any sort of inquiries. In addition, you contact them yourself by adding, following, or liking them on different social media channels.

Always Deliver Value

You read something because it delivers something that you need. We usually call it value, but it can also be expressed as a need, curiosity, desire, problem, or urgency. The most important factor that influences the success of a content marketing campaign is the quality and value of the content.

In other words, the content that you bother to create, publish, and promote must contain powerful advice, actionable tips, and practical guidance. Without that, it just falls into the basic average content that every mediocre blog and business keep passing around.

Companies that manage to create a better user experience all while leveraging the information value that they provide could consider themselves successful. Periodically, put yourself in your target audience’s shoes.

Then ask yourself…”Is this blog post properly organized and specific?”, “Does it bring new information or more-than-average relevancy?” Go on with the questions and you’ll eventually discover whether you did well enough or not.

“Content marketing is the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action” – Content Marketing Institute

Conclusion

Once you realize how content marketing works, your whole promotion results will change for the better. You’ll drive a lot of brand awareness, lots of leads, and eventually a lot of revenue. Use the strategies given in this article to keep your content marketing efforts to the highest efficiency.

Are you aware that you can get even more marketing success if you combine your content marketing with your SEO strategy? Or do you want to know what content marketing looks like from a blogger’s perspective?

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