Digital marketing. It’s everywhere we look on the internet. Literally, it’s everywhere. And good digital marketing involves good content, which sometimes calls for you or your brand to create original content to grab a potential viewer or consumer and build your brand aesthetic and name. And if you don’t have good content, your marketing plan can’t be effective, therefore you’re probably losing to the competition and people are less aware of your product or services.

Today’s blog is a long one, so grab a snack, maybe some coffee, a glass of wine if it’s five whenever you’re reading this, and strap in. Let’s talk creating original content, folks.

So, what is “original content?” It’s any sort of blog, email, or social media post that you came up with, designed, created, directed, whatever you want to call it.

Now, your feed doesn’t have to be 100% original, but that’s not our focus today. The point is original content can help define your product or service and lead to less brand confusion and drive more sales (we hope). A good example (and a flashback to our last blog post about UGC which you should totally check out) are brands that have a good mix of different types of content on their instagram feed. Popular swimsuit brands such as Frankie’s and Black Bough Swim have a good mix of people promoting and wearing their product, and original content of their models in various locations wearing their products.

Their original content is recognizable – and even the UGC that they have sprinkled in on their feed mimics that, which is our goal for you guys at the end of the post! Good, original, recognizable content. (Word of advice, if you’re treating this blog post like a drinking game and take a shot every time we say “content,” you might not make it through this blog. BEAR WITH US.)

A brief review of the different types there are:

Blogging: Any sort of blog posts about any topic: Lifestyle, Business, Beauty, the list goes on.

Email Marketing: This type allows for a more personal touch catered to your audience, since people have to subscribe to your email list in the first place. You can create an eblast with links to blogs, with how to guides, with articles, the list goes on.

Social Media: Any post on any platform: Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram.

Website: A place where you can post more in depth updates about your products, services, about who you are as a brand, etc.

LET’S GET STARTED

The first step in your process towards original content should be research. Pretty obvious, right? Focus on these things when researching: Who is your audience? Who is your competition? Are there any industry specific trends you should know about? Is there a specific type of platform your content fits best on?

• Knowing your audience is crucial. These are the people you want interested in and eventually buying/using whatever you’re marketing. What’s their age range? What are they interested in? What do their daily lives look like? What other product/services do they use in tandem with yours? Knowing the answers to these questions will help in defining what your original content will look like.

• What/who are you competing against? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right? Knowing your competitors is important because they can be a guide to what works, what doesn’t work, how you can be different from them. 

• Be up to date on industry trends. Updates to social platforms you can use, things that might impact your marketing strategy, pop culture references you can use in your content. All of these things are useful in creating content that speaks to your audience. 

Know what platform will benefit your content the best. This is another sort of obvious one, but we’re gonna talk about it anyways. Video content can go on multiple platforms, but longer videos (over a minute) should stick to Youtube or Instagram TV. Short and sweet videos are good for Instagram and Facebook. Graphics and images are best on Instagram and Facebook. Updates and anything funny/relatable can be used on multiple platforms, but is best used on Twitter. (Fast food twitter, anyone? Wendy’s, we see you).

Alright, so once we have our content researched, now what? How are you measuring if it actually works? Or are you just throwing your content out into the internet abyss and praying you catch a big fish? (We really, really hope not). There are a few things that are signs on how well or not well your content is doing – and we’ll talk about ‘likes’ later.

Most importantly, we want to discuss your engagement goals. In a nutshell, engagement is any sort of interaction with your content that isn’t a like. Comments, DM’s, emails, tagging, sales. The more you have of these, the better. Followers can be bought and likes aren’t everything.

Another good way to see how your content is doing is to see what percentage of your followers are actually liking your content. If you have 8,000 followers but only get around 800-2,000 likes, that’s less than 50% of your total following. So then you need to start asking yourself, okay, how can I reach the rest of my following?

And then you can bring in a professional to talk about the instagram algorithm that no one completely understands, but that’s for another blog.

Point is, engagement is a most important statistic than ever now.

So now we know who we’re creating content for, why we’re creating it, and our goals for it. We can move onto actually creating it, and most importantly, scheduling it.

INTRODUCING THE MARKETING EDITORIAL CALENDAR.

Enter everyone’s holy grail tool- the Marketing/Editorial Calendar (or simply, the content calendar). This ensures we don’t create and upload all in the same day, and that we have a steady feed of repeatable content related to our business goals. We can now brainstorm what we want to make, topics for them, categories to sort them into, etc.

There are three categories, however, that we want you all to think about when creating for your platforms: does it serve your goals, does it reach your user’s needs, and keyword targeting (these are the words that people look up when researching your product/service/brand).

Last, decide what you have time for, and what you don’t. Do you have time to go out and take pictures of, say, new clothing at your boutique to upload on Instagram? Or making a preview video of a new product launch for YouTube and Facebook? What about creating original graphics/planning a contest to introduce a new campaign? Once you’ve figured that out, then decide if it’s in your budget to outsource for the things you need – obviously that’s where we come in (shameless LBMG self plug). Find an agency or someone who matches what you want in content and budget, and then let them handle the rest.

There you go! You thought it out, you’ve created it, you’ve scheduled it, you’ve set your goals. In the end, we live in a content owned world. Content is king, and you want yours to stand out. Now get out there, own your brand’s content, and be a content king yourself.

Blog written by Kyla Patton.