For part three in this series, we will look at your content channels…
- You know what content you’re going to create
- You’ve established your buyer personas
- Now you need to determine where to post it
If your content sits on a website and no one reads it, does it do you any good? Of course not! You can’t expect to post content on your website or blog and get tons of traffic out of nowhere. You need to promote and share this content.
Your content marketing channels are your outposts, with your blog or website being your homebase. Or you can think of content marketing like a wagon wheel.
You post your content on the hub of the wheel, your website or blog. It then gets shared via the spokes and around the wheel, your marketing outposts.
You have to share your content. In sharing it, you will see links and qualified traffic return to your website. This is what you want.
You aren’t simply creating content to fill up space; this content needs to work for you and be useful to your audience.
When developing your channels consider your audience. With each one of your Buyer Personas, do some research and figure out where they spend their time:
You’ll also want to consider the types of content they might prefer and the channels they would use to find that content:
- Social (see above)
- SlideShare or AuthorStream for PowerPoints
- YouTube or Vimeo for video
- iTunes for PodCasts
- BizSugar or the like for blog posts
There are many homes for many types of content. When Wood Street writes a post, not only do we post it to our many social channels but we also find ways to repurpose it (or re-imagine it as Ann Handley and CC Chapman would put it).
Let’s chart a possible journey that one piece of content might take…
Seminar or presentation slides –> posted to SlideShare –> section of presentation taken out and reworked as a blog post –> blog post shared via social channels and in email marketing newsletter –> blog post picked up by syndicated channels like Business2Community.com –> blog post shared on BizSugar.com –> blog post content tweaked and added to other related posts to make eBook –> eBook posted as reward for joining online newsletter…
This post you are reading right now has already completed half of the journey detailed above. It will likely make its way through the rest in about a month or two.
Join our newsletter to be kept up to date on its travels… see what I did there?
You don’t have to recreate something new for each and every channel. You just want to know enough about your target audience, what they want, how they want it, and where they want it.
If you know these things, mapping the content journey will be easy and begin to seem like second nature. We will be discussion this “mapping” process in the final installment of our Content Marketing Series, Editorial Calendars.
How have you re-imagined and shared your content? Let me know some of the clever methods you use in the comments section below.
A custom WordPress website is a powerful tool in your content marketing arsenal.