The starting point in planning a successful content strategy is setting SMART goals. This means goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely. Churning out content for your various business marketing initiatives can be a time-consuming, process. Unless you have a lush marketing budget which allows you hire unlimited talent to develop content, you have to find ways of maximizing the impact of whatever resources you have in your content bank.
Blogging is probably the most effective method of connecting an audience to your business, because it engages them with content that is educative and entertaining without coming across as a hard-sell product advertisement. And by now, we already know that email marketing isn’t dead, but here to stay. Both platforms cater to audiences at different stages of their journey. From the initial awareness about your business, to generating leads, and long after they’ve become customers, your content should continuously offer value for whomever is at the receiving end.
Integrating blog posts as part of your email marketing strategy is a goldmine of opportunity that never stops giving. Here are a few ways to get you started:
• Send Blog Updates via Email: sharing new content through email is a sure way to keep your mailing list in the loop. Most people check their emails on their mobile phone and are likely to see your message sitting in their inbox. Also, email subscribers are an ongoing audience that you can reach whenever, unlike social media where they may miss it on their feeds and aren’t always online. Make sure to keep a visible subscription feature on your blog where readers can enter their emails to stay updated.
• Newsletters: blog posts are a ready source of content for your email newsletters. Depending on the amount of content on your blog and frequency of posting, you can consolidate your posts into weekly, bi-monthly, monthly, or even annual newsletters. There is no rule on which posts to include, so a collection of older and recent posts can be optimized. While your newsletter could just be a rundown of the new content on the blog for a given period, it could also be based on a common theme or topic.
• Repurposing/Recycling Content: this is a smart way of getting the most out of your top performing content and milking it for all it’s worth. Not only can you reach different audiences, you rank better in search engines. A few ways of doing this are revisiting existing topics from a new angle, changing the medium in which it is presented, or republishing content. You could draw inspiration for new content from existing ones by picking specific areas within a wide-reaching post, or updating it with new information. Content on your blog can be republished as guest posts, or on sites such as Medium, with links to a landing page on your website. You can have a lot of fun changing content from one format to another. For instance, the same blog post can be adapted to mini Tweets, a YouTube video, an infographic, e-book/guide, a Slide Share deck, email series, webinar, or even Facebook live –the possibilities are endless! – all of which can be shared in your email campaigns.
• Segmentation: a great way to achieve maximum impact with your email marketing is to make the content relevant to your audience. If you run a global fashion magazine, chances are your subscribers in all-year round tropical climates will never be able to identify with your ‘Top 5 Winter Trends of 2018.’ You could segment your subscribers into categories based on interests, demographics, or some other common factors and create different campaigns tailored for each group. This deepens the connection between your audience and your brand.
Blog and email cross-channel marketing is the new game plan and the method in which you exploit your available resources could make the difference between a struggling content strategy and a mean content marketing machine. To help you achieve those SMART goals and larger business objectives, Cloudy.Email offers expert content marketing and SEO services so you don’t ever have to stare at those large, nerve-racking gaps in your editorial calendar again.
