10 Ideas for Killer Content Marketing Campaigns

Publishing content? Here are 10 keys to turning publication into actual killer content marketing campaigns that bring targeted views.

Killer Content Marketing

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As found by a 2019 Statista study, 54% of marketers see the creation of content capable of generating quality leads as the main problem in digital marketing. Since even hardened industry professionals struggle with this task, many smaller firms may find this problem insoluble. With scarce resources and a lack of extensive expertise, they either have to recruit expensive external help or avoid the use of this powerful digital marketing tool altogether. 

 

While the first option may be a valid solution, there are some tried and true practices that can help practitioners in this sphere to get consistent results without major investments and long-term experience. Below, you’ll find 10 ideas for killer content marketing campaigns that will help you succeed no matter what. 

 

1. Set Clear Goals

One of the main reasons why universal content marketing recommendations do not work for all firms is the vast difference in their resources, brand power, and competence levels. The optimal course of action for a small firm would be radically different from the one used by large corporations and vice versa. Here are some questions you should ask prior to launching your campaign: 

  • What KPIs should define its success or failure?
  • Do you want to increase brand awareness or generate sales?
  • Are you targeting existing or prospective clients?
  • What are the key customer persona characteristics?
  • How long should the campaign last?
  • How much are you willing to spend?

 

These questions should help you identify the audiences you are trying to reach and the number of resources you possess. Clear KPIs will also allow you to track your progress and promptly shut down the campaign if it fails to generate the desired outputs within a specified period of time.

 

2. Identify the Right Time

Customer personas come in many different shapes and sizes. Using the same strategy for reaching stay-at-home mothers and busy office specialists is a surefire way to waste your content marketing budget and get zero results. Since you can’t kill two birds with one stone, you have to make do with limited resources and set clear priorities to succeed. 

 

While demographic characteristics such as age and income may be important, the behavioral qualities of your customers may be of greater value to you for planning a killer content marketing campaign. More specifically, you need to choose the optimal time for uploading your materials. 

 

Most successful marketers use a schedule to ensure that their audiences receive new and quality content on a regular basis and know when they should come back for more. This means that you must select the time period when most of them check their newsfeeds. Here are some ideas: 

  • Analyze your audience and choose the largest and/or most important customer segments. 
  • Think about their daily schedules and plan several possible publication times.
  • Test each of these periods to see how your reach KPIs change.
  • Use the most effective option when launching your content marketing campaign.

 

3. Choose Your Content Type

Content type preferences are another parameter that may differ depending on your audience’s demographic and psychographic characteristics. Older audiences may value blog posts, long reads, eBooks, and YouTube videos. Younger digital-native customers may prefer shorter TikTok videos or Instagram visuals due to a shorter attention span. Unfortunately, there is no universal content that works best for all audiences. 

 

Considering your resource limitations, you need to prioritize 2-3 main types of materials you will be using in your future campaign. The most logical options may include: 

  • Short videos (30 seconds or less).
  • Social media posts.
  • How-to articles.

 

Ideally, you should experiment with these content types prior to launching your large-scale campaign to ensure that the selected options create high engagement and ROI. 

 

4. Demonstrate Your Expertise

In recent years, there has been a surge in the popularity of how-to content. Even short TikTok videos lasting 30 seconds or less frequently contain tutorials or quick recommendations creating value for viewers. You absolutely must use this trend by adding some how-to content to your content marketing campaign. 

 

Here are some types of materials you may choose to experiment with depending on your earlier made choices in this sphere: 

  • Short how-to videos (30 seconds or less).
  • Brief instructions on using your products and services. 
  • eBooks.
  • Expert recommendations.
  • Real user experiences of using your products and services. 

 

The main goal you should set in this sphere is to avoid the feeling of ‘reading the manual’. No one wants to be forwarded to a 100-page FAQ with their problem. In the age of ChatGPT, consumers expect fast answers to their questions. Your goal is to provide brief instructions allowing them to start getting value from your products and services right away.

 

5. Always Add Subtitles to Your Videos

Whether you are producing Instagram Reels/Stories, TikTok videos or long YouTube videos, you must always include subtitles. While some marketers ignore this rule, there are some tangible benefits to strictly following this recommendation: 

  • Many viewers cannot watch videos with sound while at work or commuting to work. 
  • Subtitles allow them to read video content.
  • This makes your materials compatible with auto-play newsfeed demonstrations where videos are automatically muted by many social media platforms.
  • Non-native English speakers from any part of the world can understand your videos. 
  • This allows your materials to reach new audiences and go viral despite language barriers.

 

Adding English subtitles to all your short videos does not take much time. While longer YouTube uploads may require some more effort, you should try to add text captions to all published materials to achieve maximal efficiency and content marketing reach. 

 

6. Set Up a System

Many firms view content marketing campaigns as one-time events. Each of them is analyzed in isolation with its results not contributing to any larger strategic adjustments. This approach is doomed to fail in the world of big data and AI-powered neural networks. Here is how you avoid this pitfall:

  • Analyze any past content marketing campaigns in terms of their audiences, channels, resources, etc.
  • Perform a competitor analysis to see what things worked for them in the same niche.
  • Ask your loyal audiences or track engagement data to get more first-hand information. 

 

Your campaign plan should be completely self-executable and must include the following elements: 

  • Clear KPIs that can be measured and understood by any person in your company.
  • Threshold limit values indicate the success or failure of some campaign elements. 
  • Alternative strategies you can shift to if your plan fails in the process.
  • Feedback mechanisms grant you insights into your audience’s reception of your campaign.
  • Monitoring mechanisms collect valuable data for your future campaigns. 

 

Keep in mind that your future content marketing campaign should be viewed as a part of a larger marketing strategy allowing your company to reach its long-term goals. This means that you should develop systems for preparing, launching, and managing such initiatives rather than focusing on isolated initiatives. While this strategy may be more resource-intensive in the short-term perspective, it will promptly lead to a seamless content marketing process. Over time, you will learn more about your audiences, which will allow you to create a unique communication experience and win their trust and loyalty.

 

7. Give Them a Glimpse of What Is to Come

As noted earlier, every content marketing campaign should have a target and a clear plan. Since you already know your schedule, why not share it with your audience? While some experts think that keeping your campaign plan a secret creates suspense, modern users are simply overloaded with information. This means that many of them do not really feel like keeping track of all of their newsfeed subscriptions. Well, unless you give them a pretty good reason to do so. 

 

Here are some recommendations for sharing your plans without spilling some major spoilers: 

  • Announce the value your users will get by the end of your campaign.
  • This may include new skills, new product knowledge, etc.
  • Inform them about any interviews with experts or live streams.
  • If possible, provide recordings for any how-to videos people may miss due to their busy schedules.
  • Clearly outline the upload times and automate this process to help them plan their own time.

 

If you purchase a Netflix or HBO subscription plan, chances are you are doing this due to some upcoming series of interest. The same is true for your content marketing campaign recipients.

 

8. Embed Direct Communication and Brand Personalisation

If your content marketing campaign involves some how-to materials, try to embed some webinars or live streams within it. The concept of brand personalization implies the idea of making brands look like real people with their own faces, personalities, and views. Engaging your staff in direct communication with consumers is one of the best ways to implement this concept in practice and build a strong brand voice

 

The examples of many companies demonstrate that regular team members can become real crowd-pullers due to their charisma or likable appearance and information delivery style. A good way to add this layer to your content marketing plan is to organize 2-3 Q&A sessions or webinars during your campaign. This will allow you to answer some emerging queries from your audiences and will help them get acquainted with your brand at a personal level.

 

9. Give Them More

The goal of many content marketing campaigns is to create long-term brand fans. If some of your prospective customers become interested in your company, make sure that they can learn more about it and find new materials. You can link some of your content to your popular website publications, how-to guides, or other pieces creating additional value. For example, if your content campaign teaches your subscribers how to write academic essays, you can embed links to your PhD writing service for those interested in more advanced materials.

 

The addition of such links draws your readers and viewers to a wholesome brand experience and may also be beneficial for getting more outputs from your older materials. If you regularly update your existing publications, re-using them can help you save advertising budgets and create more customer value with less. Well-designed FAQ sections or how-to guides have the potential to go viral and become the ‘go-to’ resource provided on many professional forums in response to user queries.

 

10. Close the Deal

Any marketing initiative has its goals in the form of the earlier set KPIs. This should be reflected in the customer journey plan embedded within your campaign. If your goal is increased brand awareness, integrate some incentives for your followers to subscribe to your social media and/or share their email information. Alternatively, you can integrate links to your product and services store to the videos covering corresponding offerings.

 

Many marketers make the mistake of publishing ‘push’ messages coercing their recipients to buy from brands in the past. Within the scope of the ‘pull’ approach, this strategy is deemed ineffective since modern consumers need to develop relationships with brands to start trusting them prior to making a purchase. However, this does not mean that you should discard all ‘calls to action’ from your marketing communication. Gradually embed these triggers during the second half of your campaign and monitor your audience’s reaction to them to reduce their frequency if their engagement decreases. This is the difference between a meh campaign and a killer content marketing campaign.

 

Developing a killer content marketing campaign is as hard as building an effective white-hat SEO strategy in the modern rapidly changing environment. The ideas provided above represent the areas where you should conduct experiments and measure specific outputs in your particular scenario. Keep in mind that every company and customer audience is different, which is why thoughtful experimentation is the only way of achieving superior results. Make sure that you use KPIs and monitor your performance at all times while also accumulating the knowledge and data from each consecutive campaign to continuously improve your future projects.