What if you managed your content marketing strategy like you manage your Farmville (or Township, a restaurant game or even your latest junk-food inspired match 3 addiction)? If you’re not into mobile games, what if you managed your strategy like that one friend on Facebook who seems to manage his mobile gaming habit?
Here’s what I think: You’d get more done and see more results with less stress and burnout for yourself or your staff.
Take a break from that mobile game for a minute, and check out these tips for converting gaming habits into winning content marketing habits.
[ctt template=”4″ link=”48jgP” via=”no” nofollow=”yes”]Learn how to convert your mobile gaming habits into winning #contentmarketing habits. [/ctt]
Play Every Day
Successful virtual landowners log into their games every day — first, because it’s fun and addicting, but also because daily streaks garner more points and rewards. This is true for most mobile games — and it’s true for content marketing.
If you don’t play every day, you don’t get extra rewards that include a more engaged audience, increased exposure, brand loyalty, and upwardly trending conversions and revenue.
In the context of your content marketing strategy, playing daily means:
- Keeping your strategy in mind as you make business decisions, even those that seem to fall outside of the purview of marketing
- Posting regularly on social media (for Twitter, that means daily posts; for other social profiles, follow best practices and run A/B testing to understand what works for your audience)
- Responding daily on social media; don’t check in once a week and post half-hearted replies to dozens of messages within minutes
- Maintaining website content; that includes regular (though not necessarily daily) blog posts plus relevant, unique landing pages and product descriptions
- Stay abreast of both changes in your niche and trends in content marketing — read industry publications, review surveys and studies, and conduct proactive keyword research to tweak on-page content
Related: 3 Reasons Your Blog May Not Get the Traffic You Want
Develop a Routine to Cover the Details
A friend of mine makes playing Farmville a morning ritual. In the few minutes before she gets out of bed, she feeds the digital animals, harvests the crops, makes deliveries and sets up the farm be productive for the rest of the morning. She checks back in again mid-afternoon and for a few minutes before she goes to sleep, spending about 30 minutes total during the day playing the game but achieving level after level quickly.
Building similar strong content marketing habits is a key to consistent results. It’s very much quality over quantity here: choose a few time slots in the day to devote to social media posting and sharing, reading content news and reviewing your own content performance. The secret to success here is easy: keep the habit, and make sure when the person in charge of a certain content strategy habit is out, he or she has a backup in place. Missing just a few days or weeks of these details can be detrimental to your entire content marketing strategy.
Luckily, playing daily doesn’t mean you have to write daily — you can even contract content companies to do some of the hard work for you.
[ctt template=”4″ link=”a7J0b” via=”no” nofollow=”yes”]The kind of consistency games like Farmville demand is exactly what’s needed for sound #contentmarketing. [/ctt]
Gamify Your Own Strategy to Keep Yourself Invested
Mobile gaming companies have invested millions in understanding what drives users to their smartphones and apps. Gamification plays an enormous role in keeping players coming back, and you can use this principle to ensure you and anyone in your organization sticks with good content marketing habits. Consider applying some of these principles.
Streaks
On mobile apps, streaks are how long someone keeps up a habit of logging in, playing or posting daily. Offer incentives to content marketing staff for keeping streaks, such as posting on social media daily or hitting deadlines on blog posts for the entire month. If you manage your own content, set up rewards for yourself and work with a trusted business partner or friend to be an accountability partner.
Level Up
Leveling up in a mobile game means moving forward or accessing new game components; in content marketing, leveling up lets you leverage new relationships and tools. Reaching a level of thousands of unique site visitors a month opens new advertising, monetization and sponsorship doors; getting to the next like-count level on Facebook lets you do more with Facebook ads. Even if some levels don’t come with inherent rewards, simply reaching a new milestone can be exciting for you and your marketing staff.
Set realistic, meaningful milestones for your content marketing strategy, and revisit them regularly. Without a new level to work toward, it’s easy to stop playing.
Related: 5 Tips to Revitalize a Lagging Content Marketing Strategy
Invite Others to Join in Your Content Marketing Strategy
Inviting friends to join you on social mobile games is one of the easiest ways to power up, share rewards or increase the fun. Inviting your audience to participate in content marketing is one of the few ways your brand can get exponential exposure. Include contests, Q&As, reviews and other audience-centric options within content marketing strategy regularly to amp up the relevance and make it easier for consumers to engage.
