To help you build an effective content marketing strategy, our friends at We Love Dates have shared some expert tips and advice with us through this guest article. Read on to find out how to grow your online dating business…
The Content Marketing Institute found that 91% of B2C companies are using content marketing strategies to primarily increase engagement, promote brand awareness and to attract, nurture and generate leads. Marketing an online dating site by distributing content such as news, videos, eBooks, infographics and blogs with the objective of lead generation and brand engagement, is a rapidly growing trend within the online dating industry.
Because of the increase in companies using content marketing strategies to achieve their marketing goals, your content now has to be better than ever.
Ask yourself the following questions to help set out your content marketing strategy to grow your business, even with little to no budget or resource.
1. What is your content strategy’s purpose and goal?
You are probably bursting with ideas for lots of fun pieces of content, but before that, you need to establish why you need to create a content strategy in the first place.
Ask yourself, do you need to increase your audience on your social networks? Do you want to capture leads? Are you looking to build your brand awareness? Are you looking to climb search engine results for certain keywords?
Establishing and sticking to your goals throughout the thought process will help shape your ideas into a content strategy that will help grow your business.
2. Who are you creating this content for?
Once you’ve clarified your goals, you need now to establish who you’re creating your content strategy for. It’s unlikely that your content will be relevant for both prospects and your existing customers, so it’s advisable to split your strategy out as necessary, keeping your goals in mind.
3. What type of content will help you achieve your goals?
Want to figure out the pieces of content that have been a hit in the past? Tools like BuzzSumo give you insider insight to how popular certain topics have been. For instance, if you want to see what the most popular posts about ‘online dating safety’ are, and who produced them, Buzzsumo gives you all the information you need to judge the subject’s potential.
If you’ve decided to target prospects with your content marketing strategy, think about what they might need from you in order to make an informed decision to join your dating site. Would prospects need to read reviews, online dating safety tips or success stories? Would they respond well to the prospect of being sent video clips on how to write about themselves on their dating profile?
4. Who will you share your content with?
Building an audience to share those great pieces with is the very first step to content marketing success. Without a large pool of sharers and advocates, making sure your content is the best it can be, and carrying out some outreach tasks (more on that later) will help get your content get the exposure it deserves.
Content Marketing Case Study
With the objective of improving SERPs, mature dating site, Older-Dating.co.uk carried out research into how the over 40s were using online dating, uncovering some never-seen-before data to release to the press. The indepth research was published on their site, and the most interesting stats were condensed into a press release with an accompanying infographic. The marketing team took time to create a list of online publications in the UK with a mature audience with the main objective to gain valuable and relevant links back to their site to help improve their SERPs. The campaign was published on 5 relevant online publications, adding valuable backlinks. A second and third round of outreach will be carried out with slightly different angles to get the most out of the time taken to create the research. As a result of their content strategy over the past few weeks, Older-dating.co.uk moved up about 20 places for the ‘mature dating’ keywords, coming in at 4th place.
5. What content types are you going to create?
After researching and brainstorming ideas, now’s the time to map out the content that’s going to achieve your objectives, and the formats in which your content will appear. Would your audience respond well to some data on online dating behaviour? Would they like a tool that helps them become better at online dating? Perhaps a well-written guide on how to date safely?
When mapping out your content, think about the times that online dating becomes a hot topic amongst singles and map it out on a calendar. New Year and Valentine’s are always a no-brainer for releasing content marketing campaigns.
6. Will you create the content yourself or will you outsource it?
If you have a team to help create your content, great. If you don’t, there are great resources out there to help you achieve your goals cheaply like Fiverr or Upwork are great for finding freelancers to help with writing, video production and design. If you don’t have a budget for a freelancing service, there are free tools out there for designing great looking marketing assets such as Canva, and free stock photography sites such as StockSnap are very valuable.
7. Who’s going to share your content?
Depending on your goals, do you have certain publications in mind that you’d like to publish your content? Do you know someone that will help get the word out? This is where contacts really come into play.
Sometimes the scattergun approach of outreaching your content to every online publication on the planet will work for you, but creating content especially for your list of targeted publications will mean that you can tailor the tone of the content to that audience and offer exclusives. This approach will help to get the content featured by these publications, but is also a gamble, as your content may not be what the publication is looking for.
Your audience, as well as online publications, are looking for new and unique news, data and insight. The better you make your content, the more likely you are to get the exposure that will help contribute to hitting your goals.
Content Marketing Case Study
With the objective of improving SERPs by gaining backlinks on major publications, dating site, WeLoveDates built an interactive map of the most romantic cities and released it to their press contacts back in September 2014. To date, the map has been picked up by over 90 websites, and has delivered 52,000 unique visitors to the site. Interestingly, the map is repeatedly featured on major publications like Mashable and The Independent over a year after it was first released.
This is the content that keeps on giving, having not been outreached since its initial launch in September 2014.
8. Are your marketing team all working towards your strategies goals?
To benefit and grow your online dating business, your content marketing strategy should include your whole marketing team working to one cohesive plan set out over a number of months. When you release a new piece of content, shouting about it on your social networks will help create a wider reach. Does your social team have the right assets to share? Your social media team can also find ways to share your content with influencers using twitter. Are your PPC team aware of your strategy? What could they do to make sure your content is being found in search engines?
If you think of your goal/s and your audience at every step of the way, staying true to your end game, your content will get you to where you want to be.