Content marketing is a challenge. It’s easy to run out of new, relevant content to share with an audience. So, it’s important to stay in front of content planning with as many available channels as possible.
Good, strong buyer persona development is great, sure. But what else can we do to come up with content ideas?
Let’s look at how to use social media to help guide future strategies.
Map Out Your Marketing Strategy
Establish a marketing strategy on a quarterly or monthly basis. Make sure to incorporate the following marketing initiatives as a foundation.
- Monthly emails
- Blog posts
- Content offers
- Social media contests and polls
Keep all of these initiatives under the same basic thematic umbrella and make sure they support one another.
Pro-tip: Depending on the frequency of the content offer being generated you might want to stagger the monthly blogs and content offers being launched.
So, launch a blog that supports a content offer the month after the content offer launches. This way you can use that content offer call-to-action in the blog.
Make Sure that Social Media Contest or Poll Gets Seen
First of all, plan out several of these posts with varying degrees of time investment required by the participants.
You might want to put some money behind this post to make sure it gets in front of as many people as possible.
Attaching some kind of giveaway can incentivize engagement while boosting the quality of responses. The more the prize is something people really want to win, the truer this becomes.
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Gather as Much Data as Humanly Possible
Use the responses generated from your contests and posts to guide future content development. There are two main correlations between research and content creation:
Direct correlation between post feedback and future content development
Use hard stats from polls or surveys to build out a report. If these reports are especially significant you might want it to guide larger portions of your strategy.
For example, let’s suppose people respond to a post and list off their biggest fears of migrating to a new project management system. You might let this data guide your lead nurturing and onboarding experiences so common fears get addressed early on.
Additionally, a report like this can also make for a compelling content offer that can then be referred to in blog posts. Consequently, you can turn that content offer into a pillar page and link to all those blog posts for improved SEO.
Indirect correlation between post feedback and future content development
When it comes to contests on Instagram it can be hard to gather hard data that can be turned into a report.
You can pull good qualitative data across all the pictures submitted. Here are some things to look for:
- Are the pictures taken in cities, rural areas, parties, in cars, on subways, at parents houses, or at work.
- What are the comments on the pictures? Do you see any questions, pain points, or similar values or beliefs coming up?
- Did the person posting the image use hashtags besides the one for the contest? What’s going on in that community?
All of this information can evolve your personas, which can indirectly impact how you create or position your content.
Document Data and Dish Out the Winnings for Contests
Running a campaign and gathering data is only the beginning. Make sure you’re capturing data somewhere.
Spreadsheets work pretty well for this, but if you find yourself running a bunch of campaigns for yourself or clients it might be a good idea to look into digital promotions tools.
I recommend looking for one that has all the legal support and prize fulfillment services you could possibly need. Realtime Media is a good solution for this kind of support.
