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There was a time when companies had a handful of channels that they could use to reach their target audience. They could use radio and television ads, billboards, printed content, clothing, and of course, the all-mighty word-of-mouth. In the 21st-century, though, the number of marketing channels has risen exponentially. 

The internet, in particular, has created so many marketing opportunities that it’s difficult to parse through them all. While this is good news for modern marketers great and small, this abundance of options has its downsides as well. If you don’t slow down and approach your marketing campaigns with careful consideration, it’s easy to spread yourself too thin, prioritize quantity over quality, and ultimately water down your message (and your results) in the process.

Maintaining Omnichannel, Growth-Minded Marketing

Marketing “content” can be a video on Youtube, an ad on Facebook, a billboard on the side of the road, and even a magnet on a fridge.

With so many choices and one primary purpose behind them all, it’s essential that marketers adopt an omnichannel approach to their planning. Each piece of content must be thoughtfully created with a mind towards how it affects your campaign as a whole. To put it another way, every piece of content that you create should be crafted with the homogeneous goal of collectively and seamlessly taking a consumer and converting them into a paying customer.

In addition, you must maintain a growth mindset towards your marketing activities. This attitude of continual learning and change enables you to keep up with the ever-evolving technology and trends of the 21st century. Rather than creating a single formula for how you’ll create your company’s content, you must cultivate a level of flexibility and adaptability that can react as new, cutting-edge marketing avenues become available.

Having an omnichannel approach and a growth mindset provides you with a solid foundation from which to build a larger, more detailed marketing content strategy. 

Further Tips for Creating Compelling Marketing Content

While omnichannel and growth mindsets are basic marketing essentials, experienced marketers know that they’re only the tip of the iceberg. 

With that said, here are several tips and suggestions to help guide you as you detail a marketing strategy aimed at building your audience, increasing sales, and generally leading to growth for your business.

Note that these are not specific recommendations for what kind of content you should create. That detail will vary dramatically depending on your industry, company, resources, and goals. However, the ideas presented below serve as guidelines to help lead you through the process of creating consistently compelling marketing collateral, no matter what form it might take.

Always Study Your Audience

If you want your marketing content to enrapture consumers, you need to make sure that it’s specifically tailored for them in the first place. This is why a good marketing campaign always starts with your audience.

You can study your audience by conducting broad-stroke research within your industry as well as directly asking existing customers for feedback. As you collect information, consider creating a buyer persona — that is, a semi-fictional “character” that is meant to represent your ideal customer. 

This buyer persona should be directly based on your customer research and should be designed to help you better understand who it is that you’re trying to market to. In addition, it’s worth regularly conducting market research on your audience’s changing preferences so that you can update your persona accordingly.

Analyze the Competition

Along with studying your audience, it’s important to take some time to analyze your competitors. As you do so, consider the following: 

  • What kind of content have they used in their marketing campaigns?
  • What channels did they utilize to reach your shared target audience?
  • What feedback have they publicly received for their efforts (Remember, not all of your opponents’ efforts will be successful, and you don’t want to emulate the failed attempts)?

As you identify what your competitors have found to be successful and what marketing efforts haven’t been received well, integrate the information into your larger content strategy.

Keep Your Content Consistent 

When it comes time to begin creating content for your marketing campaigns, it’s crucial that you make an effort to stay consistent across all of your marketing channels. This includes everything from your color schemes and your wording to your voice and tone. 

Basically, if you see a piece of marketing content on Facebook and another on a company blog, while they may be formatted quite differently, both should clearly belong to your brand. 

One clever way to maintain consistency across your content is by creating a space where brainstorming and ideas from your marketing team can be shared. In the COVID-19 era, with so many marketing teams working remotely, it’s a good idea to set up a virtual idea board where you can all remotely log your various concepts and ideas. This can help everyone to stay on the same page as you create content for various marketing campaigns.

Be Engaging at All Times

Along with consistency, it’s important to place an emphasis on engagement. If your goal is to engage with consumers, you will naturally create more compelling marketing collateral in the process. For instance, if you’re creating a video for YouTube, you can make it engaging by:

  • Creating a compelling hook.
  • Staying concise and to the point.
  • Optimizing the thumbnail for the video.
  • Including cards and end screens as calls to action.

All of these strategies will make the content more specifically optimized for your ideal end-user, organically increasing its applicability and, by extension, its compelling nature in the process.

Use Each Marketing Channel Uniquely

Finally, just because you’re attempting to create an omnichannel experience doesn’t mean you should use each marketing channel identically. On the contrary, each platform has its own unique strength. For instance:

  • Email is an excellent way to retain existing customers who like you enough to opt into your email list.
  • Company blog content should aim to attract new customers, both by establishing your brand as an authority within your niche and by boosting your search engine optimization.
  • When it comes to social media, each platform can be used differently as well — Facebook for live video, LinkedIn for long-form written content, and Pinterest for visuals as a few examples.

Whatever channels you use in your strategy, always consider how they can uniquely represent your content and your brand.

Consistently Creating Compelling Content

The marketing world is always advancing — often at a breakneck pace. With that said, it’s always wise for marketing teams to be ready to adapt to changes in customer expectations, marketing tools, and shifting industry standards.

If your goal is to consistently create compelling content throughout this change, you must establish a deep-rooted strategy that serves as your marketing philosophy regardless of the specific channel, message, or campaign that you’re running at the moment. Each piece of content should be assessed based on:

  • The platform where it’s being published.
  • Its consistency with both your brand and your other collateral.
  • Its relatability to your audience.

If you can maintain this standard for each piece of content you create, your larger marketing strategy will be able to thrive, regardless of the industry, audience, time, or place for which it’s created.