You Can Be 5X Better At Content Marketing On Twitter If You Do This
By
Shyamal Dave

We do some tweets in a day, is that enough? We sat down one day and developed a smart “tweet-a-day” strategy, what’s wrong in that? It’s not uncommon to hear such questions from online marketers like you who often tend to generate good ideas but are unable to execute them effectively. You don’t develop some content and then set out to prepare a strategy, they’re often interwoven. Allow me to point towards the one mistake that most Twitter marketers make.

The Cat’s Cut of the Bag: What’s the Mistake?

A recent study by the Content Marketing Institute revealed 3 key problems faced by content marketers today:

And what’s the root cause of these problems?

The study reveals that only 35% of B2B marketers document their strategy, 48% have a content marketing strategy, but it is not documented. Eventually, these numbers also lead to the fact that only 21% are successful at tracking ROI. These numbers point towards two things: documentation of your strategy and tracking ROI, and if you wish to get better at both, you need to be really good with your homework, your research. How?

It’s the research that shall drive up the quality of your content, and well documented research shall help in effective measurement of your ROI. It might come as a shock to you that all the while you had not been able to research properly, but if you feel that none of your homegrown content marketing tactics are working, believe me, that’s the issue that needs to be addressed here. Research, it is.

How Will You Avoid It?

Unlike people who built the Large Hadron Collider, you need not spend years behind research. It’s a matter of 1 or 2 hours at max and you shall have a plan in place. Allow me to show you a simple way of “pre-strategy research”. But before that, there are two things that you must keep in mind: do not spend hours and hours behind Excel sheets, grappling with past data and instead experiment at lightning speeds.

Roger L. Martin, Author of Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, validates my point:

Good strategy is not the product of hours of careful research and modeling that lead to an inevitable and almost perfect conclusion. Instead, it’s the result of a simple and quite rough-and-ready process of thinking through what it would take to achieve what you want and then assessing whether it’s realistic to try.

Gimme a quick-fix, then please.

Follow these steps for a quick fix to your unhinging issues:

1) Prepare a relation cloud [Estimated time: ~15 mins]

The most creative people are known to doodle their ideas on pen and paper. A relation cloud is basically a set of words that are related to your offering. Drawing such a cloud helps clear the clutter and assumptions that you may have made while thinking on the go. It boils down your content to a set of specific topics and themes around which you should develop your content.

2) Prepare a scheduling plan [Estimated time: ~10 mins]

Timing is most important and should be in line with the content that you plan to develop using the content cloud that you just prepared. A bit of research on your demographics and the category your followers fall into helps with the content and the scheduling based upon their usage patterns.

For Twitter, you might want to use Tweetdeck, which is Twitter’s own web client for managing multiple accounts and allows scheduling. PS: We recently developed TakeOff, the Smart Scheduler for Instagram, which decides and posts your photos at the best time for maximum likes and exposure.

3) Prepare MVC (Minimum Viable Content) & run trials [Execution time]

While at one of the companies I used to work earlier, we had wasted quite some time in developing content. The one mistake that we had made was in our scheduling: we thought the plan would turn out well and hence we should go ahead and prepare the content for the period of 3 months, the time frame in which we had planned to run the campaign. But, it did not and the entire content bank lay waste.

Now, it’s good to prepare a content bank so that you can schedule effectively, but you should also keep in mind that you might have to iterate, more number of times if you have not worked on Step 1 properly. Hence, it is advisable to prepare a small content bank [tweets, photos, graphic content], execute a mini-campaign and check metrics.

If the numbers show a upward graph, shoot for the stars. Else, dig a pit for a safe landing, and develop revised and refreshed content.

However, you would be able to track back only if you have documented all that you’ve done till this time. This brings me back to the point about documentation that I mentioned before, and I would like to emphasize on it once again. Please note things down, it helps.

Very often in all the planning and execution built up by the constant pressure from the competition, we tend to forget the little homework that needs to be done. It is these small mistakes that often snowball into dramatic errors, and at times small moves that lead to a winning game.

Shyamal Dave is the Growth Hacker at JustUnfollow. Earlier, he used to write about startups at YourStory and is an MBA in Communications Management from MICA, Ahmedabad.