Whether a company operates in the B2B or B2C space, content marketing is one of the best ways for businesses to facilitate growth. Creating high-quality, educational SEO content helps to organically increase your online presence to find new customers looking for your services—while sharing that content on social media helps engage audiences and drives additional user traffic to your site.
To put it in less boring, less technical terms, I’ll borrow an analogy that Lifted Logic owner Adam loves to use when meeting with new clients.
Imagine your business as a single person, and your content marketing strategy is your diet and exercise habits. In this case, a marketing plan is the equivalent of eating healthy and exercising on a consistent basis.
But just like in real life, too many businesses trip up on the “consistency” part. If you slack on either, your health starts to suffer.
As experts in content marketing strategy, Lifted Logic has helped hundreds of companies grow their businesses through our ongoing marketing efforts. But in our experience, even the best strategies can be undone by a lack of consistency. Read on to learn more about why it’s so important 👇
Why is Consistency Important in a Content Marketing Strategy?
So, let’s go back to that diet and exercise analogy. No one would argue that it’s good to eat healthy and exercise, right? But, the key to a healthy lifestyle lies in your commitment to it.
If someone only eats healthy or exercises when they really feel like it—and does nothing outside of that—would you say that person is living a healthy lifestyle? Your content marketing strategy works in a similar way. Once you develop a plan, you’ll need to stick to it in order to see results!
With content marketing, it’s all about keeping your audience engaged and ensuring that they have the best experience possible. Putting out good, informative content regularly not only helps keep them interested, but it also helps:
- Build trust in your company
- Creates opportunities to interact with your company
- Establish your brand as a credible source
- Build a more loyal and active audience
And just like a healthy diet and exercise, variety makes you even stronger! If SEO content is your protein, then social media and newsletters are your fruits and vegetables.
Regularly posting SEO content and indexing it through Google helps your business rank higher and show up more frequently. This gives you the opportunity to hit new or additional keyphrases that may not exist on your site currently to help attract new users. Meanwhile, social media and newsletters give you the opportunity to showcase that content and engage with many of your existing customers.
Voice & Tone Consistency
I’ve touched on voice and tone in previous blogs, but consistency in both is another key part of your ongoing strategy. Your voice and tone are a personification of your company. Who do you want to be? What’s the vibe you want to give off? How do you want people to feel when they visit your site?
Your voice and tone help answer all of these questions and give your business an identity. Both will also vary depending on the target audience you want to reach. You can think of your voice as your company’s overarching personality—while your tone can shift depending on subject matter or a subset of people you’re trying to reach within your target audience.
Let’s use an example: say you’re a medical spa that’s trying to reach an older audience. The goal of the clinic isn’t to transform their clientele into the Kardashians—but instead perform treatments that help people turn back the clock on aging. With this in mind, it’s probably best to speak to them in a more caring, clinical, and authoritative voice.
Once you make that determination, it’s important to stick to it and keep both consistent across every platform in your content marketing strategy—whether it’s on social media, email marketing, or blog posts.
What Happens When I Don’t Have Consistency?
Whether it’s with your voice and tone or with your overall content marketing strategy, not having consistency can lead to incredibly detrimental results.
The above images are an example of an account that has struggled with consistently publishing content—both to the web and through social media and newsletters. Not only did their leads drop significantly, but the number of website visitors from their own home state dipped by 40%.
From a marketing strategy perspective, having consistency allows you to build up momentum and keep your company relevant in the eyes of your target audience. Posting infrequently increases the risk that your company slips to the back of their mind. In more extreme scenarios, they may start to consider you unreliable or even question if you’re still in business!
At the same time, there is a balance you need to keep.
Consistently showcasing content isn’t useful if the quality isn’t high every single time. When indexing, Google accounts for the quality of your content when determining rank—among many other factors.
Posting low-quality content just for the sake of staying active can make you seem unreliable in the eyes of your target audience. At the same time, posting constantly with no greater purpose or strategy can make it seem like you’re spamming their social media feed or inbox—causing them to ignore you.
Speaking of your social media, you also need to be consistent in terms of when and where you’re posting your content. Have you ever looked at a company’s Facebook page, only to see they haven’t posted there in years? It may not mean that they’re out of business, but it’s confusing to an audience.
What’s more, you should be posting where your audience will actually see you. If you’re targeting B2B or an older audience, it probably makes more sense to post on LinkedIn or Facebook than Instagram or TikTok.
And finally, with voice and tone, we can go back to our medspa example that we used earlier. If you spend all of your time building up a brand voice targeted for a more mature audience, it’s likely going to confuse or turn off users if you suddenly switch. Basically, what we’re saying is to not switch to Gen-Z slang to seem hip and cool if that’s not who you are.
Content Marketing Strategy Tips from Lifted Logic
When meeting with Lifted Logic to discuss your marketing strategy, we take the time to understand your brand’s unique voice and key performance indicators. From there, we can recommend one of 3 distinct marketing strategies to help generate website traffic, increase leads, and more!
Whether you decide to work with us or perform your marketing in-house, there are a few key things to keep in mind.
1. Establish Frequency: Consistency & Quality Over Quantity
A common question we often get with ongoing marketing campaigns is, “how much posting is too much or too little?”. Every client is different, but the key is to select a frequency and to stick to it! This will help condition your users when they can expect to see new content or hear from you directly.
Each company will have different goals with their marketing campaign, which means that some may create more blog, social, and newsletter content than others.
For instance, if you plan to produce a certain number of blogs, social posts, and newsletters each month, then your users (and search engines) will begin to expect to see content produced at that frequency.
Put simply, if you’ve set the expectation that you’re going to post social media content 3 to 4 times per week—or send out 2 newsletters per month— then you need to make sure that you rarely miss that mark.
2. Establish Platforms
Generally, Lifted Logic’s marketing team likes to suggest that clients select less platforms and do them well, rather than trying to do everything. Again, the platforms you choose to post from should reflect where your target audience is most likely to be.
While it’s okay to try new platforms, you should not deviate from your more established ones. If you stop posting on Facebook to grow your audience on Instagram, it’s going to confuse people and can lead to questions about your reliability (or if you’re still even in business). And if you do decide to try out a new platform, make sure you announce it on your more established social media platforms.
3. Create Legitimately Good Content
People will turn to your business for services if they see you as a trustworthy source of information. Not only that, but Google and other search engines will see you as a subject matter authority, which helps your ranking on the web!
Our suggestion is to create site content that matches with your marketing plan. The backbone of how we create quality content is to write detailed posts stocked full of internal links and some facts and figures from reliable external sources.
We typically recommend that these posts contain at least 1,500 words of content (called “cornerstone” blogs) centered around a specific keyphrase. Depending on your content marketing strategy, we may write 1 or more of these posts per month, in addition to 1 to 2 smaller blogs (known as “pillar posts”) to support a smaller topic within that larger blog.
Once you create that content, share it! These blogs, all centered around a specific topic, are perfect for sharing on social media and newsletters—as they entice the user to learn more about a topic that may be relevant to them.
4. Stick to it!
Deviating from your normal strategy can cause a sense of confusion or unreliability, which only hurts your ongoing marketing efforts. Not to mention, it can harm your presence on the web.
The most important thing to do once you’ve established the how, where, and frequency of your publishing is to keep at it! Whether you’re creating 1 blog and 5 social media posts or 6 blogs and 30 posts, it’s important for users to know what they can expect from your marketing efforts. No matter how good your content or services are, people need to know that you exist and are reliable!
Need Content Marketing Strategy Help? We Got You.
We’re a bunch of nerds who eat, sleep, and breathe content marketing. We are a small-but-mighty digital agency in Kansas City, and we serve a small number of new clients each year so we can dedicate our time and effort toward each project (no, we don’t believe in half-assery).
No matter the size, if your company needs help creating a strong content marketing strategy, we’re here to help. We’ve got you covered with high-quality content, superior web development and design, and all the SEO tools needed to ensure that your business grows.
To get started, contact us or use our free cost calculator tool.
Spencer Suckow, Senior Web Writer
A Senior Web Writer at Lifted Logic, Spencer brings a background in client relationship management and web marketing expertise to our SEO work. He currently runs various small-to-medium-sized website projects for businesses across the country. Yes, his picture captures his vibe perfectly.
