Content Marketing in the Entertainment Industry

Step 1: Do Your Research

Before you can start jotting down ideas or typing up an article, you need to spend some time doing your research. While it may not seem like the most exciting thing, the research you do now will inform everything you do in the steps to come. Make sure you put in the time and effort so you can proceed with confidence. Take your time, because this is laying the foundation for your content strategy, and you'll rely on this information to meet your goals.

If you haven't already, now is the time to conduct in-depth research regarding your brand and its audience. You should be able to answer the following questions without hesitation. The answers should be based on demographics and statistics — not guesses or hopes.

• Who is your ideal customer? Where can you find them? How do they like to consume content?
• Who is your brand and how do you want to interact with customers? Why do they resonate with your company?
• What do you offer? How does it solve your customers' pain points? What do your customers care about the most?

Write down your answers to these questions and prepare two resources for yourself: A customer persona and a brand book. You may come up with two or three customer personas in all, but it's important that each one is thoroughly researched. Your brand book might mention the traits of these customer personas, but it should focus on who your company is and how it should represent itself.

Your brand book and customer personas will be resources your company continues referencing as you move forward. These two documents will inform many decisions you make as a company.

Step 2: Set Goals and Metrics

What's a plan if you don't know where you want it to take you to? As a business, it's essential that you take at least a few minutes to define some clear, actionable goals. You also need to choose the right metrics to track your progress toward your goals. Most businesses set "driving more website traffic" as their overall goal for content marketing. That's great, but you need to get more specific.

• Goals should be specific, measurable, actionable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART).
• You should set both short-term and long-term goals that support one another.
• You need to define metrics to track your progress along the way.

You should aim to establish three short-term goals and one or two long-term goals that you can work toward. Your short-term goals need to coincide with and support your long-term goals. For instance, if your long-term goal is to increase your website traffic by 25%, your short-term goals may include doubling your social media followers and increasing engagement by 20%. Both of those things will help you drive more people to your website.

As you go about setting your goals, remember to make them achievable. It's okay to be optimistic, but if you set goals that are simply impossible to complete within the amount of time you give yourself, you're only going to get discouraged. Set lots of small goals that you'll meet along the way to a larger goal to stay motivated and enable you to track your progress.

Step 3: Create Your Content Calendar

Now that you've done your research, you've laid the groundwork for the next step of your content strategy. In this step, you'll create your content schedule or "content calendar." A content calendar is exactly what it sounds: it's a January through December calendar that has slots for every piece of content you want to publish.

In order to create your content calendar, you need to know three things:

• Where are you going to publish? (Ex. Facebook, Twitter, your website, etc.)
• What are you going to publish? (Ex. Video, blog post, podcast, etc.)
• When are you going to publish? (Ex. once a week on your blog, etc.)

Your content calendar will specify what type of content you're publishing to where and how frequently you'll be doing it.

One fundamental component of effective content marketing is consistency. It's important that you come up with a schedule that you can routinely and sustainably execute.

When it comes to choosing which platforms you're going to publish on and how often, you need to think back to the customer research you conducted earlier. With it, you'll be able to decide what platforms your audience favors, what type of content they most enjoy consuming, and when/how often they're online. Your content production capacity will also affect the type and amount of content you create.

If you're stuck between publishing an article twice a week to match your competitors or once a week to fit your budget, go with the latter. Remember that it's quality over quantity. Content marketing is about offering value. So, you need to create a content calendar that empowers you to do that rather than a schedule that stretches you too thin.

Step 4: Finalize Your Content Plan

You've got your content calendar laid out. Now you have a year's worth of empty slots waiting for an idea. That can be very intimidating to any business, so breathe a sigh of relief because you don't need to plan a whole year's worth of topics all at once. Most businesses do just fine staying 1-3 months ahead of their topics. If you focus on the latest trends or news, you may even need a shorter period of planning.

Whatever the case may be, when it comes to filling in your content calendar with ideas, your research will do a lot of the legwork for you. Keyword research should inform your content strategy because, after all, it will reveal what your audience is searching for and what they care about.

Building your content plan around keywords will also aid your SEO efforts because Google and other search engines want to see you targeting all of those semantically-related keywords. It shows them what your site is about and that you offer a variety of valuable content. Of course, not all of your content can be driven by keywords.

As a brand, you should create a healthy mix of content. In addition to keyword-based content, you should create content that builds your brand up. Here are some examples:

• Take your audience behind-the-scenes to show the inner workings of your company.
• Introduce your audience to your team members and the faces behind the brand.
• Dig into your company's history and back story.
• Showcase your company's values and good deeds, especially in the local community.

These are just a few ideas to help you round-out your content strategy and reap all of the benefits associated with content marketing. For now, focus on sprinkling in some ideas from every category. Testing out new formats and series is a great way to see what works and what doesn't. That trial-and-error will eventually help your brand find the perfect balance.