Your marketing starts with what you already own. Before you enter wide world of paid marketing and affiliates, taking control of the content channels that you already possess and making them a part of your own inbound marketing mix will help you get ahead, and keep you on top of your own marketing strategy.
What is owned media? It’s your blog, your email, CTAs and social media, just to mention a few. Even your website is owned media, because it’s content that you create and publish in your own capacity. In reality, this means that you are able to have complete control over these marketing channels. The questions is, do you? That’s where we’re stepping in, to help you make the most of your owned media. Let's start with the 4 most common owned media channels and how to take charge of them.
Take Better Control of Your Content Channels
1. Blog
Your blog is one of the most important content channels that you own. In fact, HubSpot’s 2014 ‘State of Inbound Marketing’ claims that blogging can increase your ROI 13 times over! This makes it a great native marketing tool to promote bigger content pieces, to link to previous blogs or sections of your website and to inform your visitors on exactly what they want to know.
Perhaps the single best lesson when creating a blog is to diversify your content. For example, perhaps you're wanting to promote the download of your eBook ‘The How-Tos of Cost Estimation’. Don’t just write a puff piece promoting how necessary your eBook is, rather break down your promotion into various blog topics that will connect readers to your eBook naturally. Topics could include: Why is Cost Estimation Needed? The Benefits of Cost Estimation? A Quick Guide to Cost Estimation? What to Do with Your Cost Estimates? And the list goes on.
This diversification of content creates a wider digital footprint for you to gain awareness from, allows you to boost traffic by naturally including more long-tail keywords and engages with your captive audience regularly. All of this means you are simply easier to find by search engines, prospects and customers.
2. Email
According to Forbes, nearly 60% of marketers are considering increasing their email budgets. That’s just a hint at the value of this content channel.
But emails need to be more sensitively distributed than other content. The “SPAM” connotation is a hard one to shake, so make sure that every one of your emails is truly useful to your readers. They need to be valuable to your audience, to offer solutions to your readers’ problems and provide industry insights.
The best way to ensure this is to create a segmented email list. Segmenting your subscribers into different target groups, for which different topics apply to, will ensure that you always provide content that they need and love. Remember to keep it simple, focused and compelling.
3. Calls-to-Action
Many people forget the easiest way to promote content: the call-to-action (CTA).
A CTA is simply placing links in content on your site (blog, banner, comments) that drive visitors to new content which relates to whatever it was they were previously engaged with. The most important tactic when creating CTA’s is to ensure that you link content that is closely related. This makes the visitor feel that they are naturally being taken on a journey through your company and industry, and not being force-fed promotional content.
CTA’s help to draw visitors into long form content that they might not be immediately attracted to. By linking your longer content to short content pieces, like blogs, you allow your visitors to warm up to the idea of something longer. CTA’s should therefore compel your visitors to read more.
4. Social Media
Always be active and create conversations. As with emails, social media is about sensitivity in posting new content. Be specific to your buyer personas when writing social media posts. Entertain or educate to drive your audience to more content.
If your strategy is to produce new content every five minutes, try not to spam. Analyse which topics have the highest click-through rates and then plan to link these content pieces to your others.
When you’ve hit the nail on the head with your message, don't forget the visuals. Engage your audience with relevant and captivating images. By simply posting a link to your content and the title you're not likely to produce the results you want, because sharing on social media is about enticing people to want more. Make your feed interesting to read and absorb, not simply a list of convenient links to your longer content.
Content today should show some personality. It’s no longer just about creating “good content”. You now have to place it superbly, link it well and use it to build strong relationships with your audience. It's a simple recipe that will get you the most out of the media that you own.
