Brand awareness and customer engagement can be tricky. This is where content marketing comes in. Content marketing is a “strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” It’s reported that this strategy generates over 400% more leads per $1,000. Strengthen your marketing and reach your target audience by ensuring that your business has a strategy nailed down with these five helpful tips.

1. Analyze

Whether you’re a new business or you’ve been around for years it’s important to analyze your content every so often. Here are some questions to consider: What are your current goals? Does the content you’re putting out match your goals, or is most of it just fluff? What are your current strengths and weaknesses? Are there opportunities for you to pivot and try something new? As your business grows or changes, so should your content. Asking yourself these questions before posting something or sending out your next eblast or text will help strengthen your approach and ensure that your content matches your goals.

2. Examine Competitors

Keeping tabs on what other businesses are doing in your field can teach you a lot of things. What are they doing that you’re not and does it seem to work well? Seeing what your competitors are doing can help inspire you to innovate because now that you’ve got the idea, you can explore how your business can do it even better and add more value. You can also find out what you’re doing that they aren’t, and expand into that. What do you have that they don’t? Differences in product selection, services, locations, customer service, and employee experience are things that you can highlight in your content strategy to make your business stand out from the rest.

3. Value

Before putting your content out, ask yourself “why?”. Why should your audience care about this, and what value does it bring? 56% of customers stay loyal to brands which “get them.”  You must make sure your content and message resonate with your audience. Generally, we like to follow six content categories. The first is Entertainment, which includes things like fun holidays or viral videos. Inspiration, which includes quotes or personal stories. Education includes informational blogs, tips, case studies, or industry news. Conversation includes questions or polls. Connection includes behind the scenes, employee features, or reviews. Lastly, is Promotion, which includes information about services or the company. Keeping these categories in mind can help ensure that you’re sending out a variety of content and that it serves a purpose to your audience.

4. Consistent Design

Having a cohesive style and brand can help take visuals to the next level. Narrow down some design characteristics you like, and apply them to your brand. Figure out what colors, styles, fonts, and language works best with what your brand is trying to portray and maintain that across all of your content. TapOnIt recently rebranded to a more modern and mature look to fit our current company goals, so our team has spent a lot of time nailing down our new look and making sure everything flows together. This will ensure that your customers recognize your brand, and remember it each time they see it.

5. Plan

Come up with a realistic game plan that’s easy to follow, and keeps your business on track. If you start by aiming for 5 email blasts a week, 10 Instagram posts, and 3 blog posts, you could burn out quickly. Try to set a marketing plan that will be consistent, and reach the right audience on the right platform. If your target audience is teenage girls, a newspaper ad probably won’t work. Make sure to keep track of what things perform the best, so you know what to keep doing. There are a ton of great marketing tools out there that can help you schedule, plan, and stay organized. We broke down our favorites here.