How to keep your content quality high​

Summary

A marketing and communications strategy today cannot ignore the production of high-quality content. The benefits of well-calibrated content marketing can be summarized in three key concepts:

1. Brand awareness.
2. Ability to capture attention.
3. Retention.

And what are the best practices for designing and deploying an effective content marketing strategy? Again, they can be gathered around three points:

1. Having your goals clear in mind.
2. Addressing specific targets, aiming at personalization, and therefore at truly one-to-one communication.
3. Modulate your campaigns by paying close attention to the channels and tools you choose, with an omnichannel perspective.

In this post, we want to focus on the importance of designing marketing campaigns based on high-quality content. We’ll do this by focusing on the main benefits, grouped according to the three guidelines that seem most important to us. And then suggesting best practices; again, grouped around three main points. Let’s start at the beginning, though. And let’s define what we mean by content marketing, identifying its main objectives and crunching some numbers that help us understand its centrality in today’s world.

Content marketing: What it is, what it’s for, its effectiveness

To put it succinctly, content marketing is a marketing approach focused on creating, sharing, and distribution of high-quality and valuable content.

We can summarize the main goals of this kind of strategies in three points:

1. Acquiring new customers
2. Generating sales and conversions
3. Retaining existing customers.

Of course, there are many other more indirect (but often no less important) goals; but we’ll come back to those later.

There are many forms where content marketing is put into practice: from articles in trade journals to custom interactive videos, webinars, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and any type of storytelling strategy.

There are also many hybrid forms that combine several of these areas.

All of these different modes have one thing in common: the primary goal of content marketing is not to sell right away and immediately (we’ll come back to this shortly, too).

Now, as promised, let’s quickly analyze some statistics, which demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach and, consequently, the attention marketers give to it.

• According to CMI (Content Marketing Institute), more than half of marketers plan to use content marketing for their strategies. And 72% say it’s a great way to increase engagement (contentmarketinginstitute.com).
• As many as 78% of companies have a team specifically dedicated to content production (hubspot.com).
• According to Havas Groups’ Meaningful Brands report, 84% of consumers expect brands to create valuable content (studioid.com).

This other data is also important: as many as 64% of marketers said they’d like to learn how to build a better, more elastic and scalable content marketing strategy (marketingcharts.com).

That means there’s plenty of room for improvement and growth; companies know that. More importantly, they know that the benefits of a strategy based on high-quality content are huge.

As promised, let’s take a look at some of the benefits below, collected into the three fundamental elements.

The top 3 benefits of a high-quality content strategy

1. First of all, brand awareness

The term “brand awareness” means something very simple, at least at first glance: the recognizability of a brand, its ability to be relevant to consumers with a well-defined image, without getting lost in the crowd of similar brands.

It’s something very simple, in short, but very difficult to achieve.

Content marketing is the best ally to achieve such a goal. For one main reason: the production of high quality content requires, first of all, a reflection of the brand on its identity. This is an internal reflection that will then be communicated externally, with as much strength and coherence as possible.

Aiming at quality means, therefore, aiming at authenticity, distinction from competitors, and long-term planning. Without these three elements, there is no brand awareness.

2. Capture attention, generate trust

With digital technology, we all live a daily life bombarded with stimuli that reach us from a wide variety of sources and through a large number of different devices.

The main challenge for brands today is to capture attention.

But you have to move carefully and with almost surgical precision.

It’s not a matter of “shouting louder than the others;” such an approach could prove counterproductive and even annoying for your target audience.

And here again, producing high-quality content proves to be a formidable weapon, especially when this content is crafted from the characteristics of the target audience.

(And we’ll come back to this shortly, in the best practices section).

To put it metaphorically: in the midst of the noise, content marketing allows you to speak directly to individual customers, in an intimate and non-invasive way.

This generates trust. Which is the first step to loyalty.

3. The ultimate goal? Loyalty

We have already emphasized that the primary objective of content marketing is not immediate sale.

Rather, it is the creation of a dialog with your customer, a lasting relationship of trust.

This is what we mean by loyalty, which is the most ambitious goal to achieve for a company of any sector and any size, especially in a fast and liquid ecosystem like the current one.

Why is it so important?

We could go on and on about it. But the best thing to do is to remind you of a very significant fact, which emerged from a well-known analysis by Bain & Company: For a company, conquering a new customer costs 6 to 7 times more than retaining one.

The 3 best practices on which to base an effective strategy

1. Objectives: Inform, educate, excite…and more

Every company has its own objectives in terms of marketing and communication. What’s more, every campaign has its own specific objectives, which can be very different from each other.

You can aim to inform.

In some cases you can aim to educate, creating awareness around the importance of a product or service.

Then there’s the whole emotional aspect, with the attempt to create a deeper connection between the brand and potential or actual customers.

There is no one goal that is better than the other.

It’s all about setting goals very precisely, and building your strategy based on them.

At this point, what remains is to identify the target, the most suitable channels, and the most effective tools with the utmost precision.

And it is on this that we continue and conclude this post.

2. (Re)start with the recipients – Aim at personalization

The time of one-to-many advertising campaigns is over. Producing high-quality content means knowing how to adapt it to the characteristics of the individual recipients who make up your target audience.

Attention: the challenges of marketing and communication, today more than ever, are played out here.

And thanks to digital technology, they can be won through data analysis.

Today, brands can “know” their audience by collecting the digital traces that each of us leaves online. Personal, geographical, social and behavioral data, with their changes in real time. This is the Big Data revolution.

But beyond Big Data is personalization, or the technology through which you can tailor your messages and marketing content based on the characteristics of individual recipients. One by one.

All this even when we’re talking about a potentially endless audience.

And that’s not all. It’s not just about a shift from one-to-many to one-to-one. Today, we can also implement the side of interactivity, to move from a one-way communication to a truly bi-directional one, based on the navigation choices of individuals.

All this is made possible by specific cutting-edge means, such as Babelee.

In the final point, below, we will also focus on the tool that can be the ultimate boost for a strategy based on high-quality content.

3. The right tools and the right channels

Once you’ve set the objectives of your content marketing campaign, and once you’ve precisely identified your target audience, you need to pay attention to the last decisive aspect. An aspect that, in reality, is twofold: the tools and the channels.

With digital transformation, we have seen an explosion of both.

Among these tools are corporate blogs, white papers, case studies, ebooks, but also infographics, for example. Another increasingly interesting and popular tool are podcasts. And we could go on and on.

There is no such thing as the perfect tool: it all depends on circumstances, strategies, objectives, and targets. But when it comes to effectiveness and quality, there is one tool that offers the best performance: we are referring to video. Without any doubt, it is the king of high-quality digital content.

We won’t dwell on the numbers and the reasons behind this effectiveness here; we refer those who want to delve deeper to this other post on our blog.

However, one thing that is important to underline is this: the video tool can be integrated with personalization technologies. This is precisely what happens with Babelee.

In short, the right message, which arrives with the right tools to the right recipient. But that’s not all; the last box is missing. In fact, you have to know how to choose the right channel. And, in this case too, digital transformation has acted as a multiplier.

There are company websites, with the importance of implementing blogs or newsletters (and here it is essential to put on track an efficient and targeted SEO strategy).

There are online newspapers, trade magazines, but also forums and communities.

There is a whole expanding ecosystem based on apps.

Above all, there is the enormous and increasingly decisive world of social networks (with all its internal diversification).

In this varied and multiform panorama, the imperative to follow is one: aim as much as possible at the omnichannel perspective. Intercept people in the “digital places” they frequent, make your voice heard, clear, recognizable, but also very “close.”

The secret of high-quality content marketing lies here.