Content buckets are an essential part of any social marketing strategy. They are a way to organise your content and make it easier for your audience to find what they are looking for.
However, if they’re not created correctly, your campaign could be ineffective. In this article, I’ll share five best practices for creating successful content buckets.
What are Content Buckets?
A content bucket represents a group of content created with a specific goal in mind.
Marketers have different content buckets for website visitors (new users, returning users, subscribers), social media followers (Facebook fans, Twitter followers), and email subscribers (newsletter subscribers). It helps create a more personalised experience for each prospect and focuses on using a platform’s elements to advance a brand’s marketing strategy.
It is essential to create specific goals for each content bucket and ensure that it is consistent with those goals. For example, if one goal is to create engaging content, then the content in that bucket needs to be appealing and exciting to immediately grab the audience’s attention.
Creating content buckets can be a great way to organise and manage your content. It assists in staying updated with the shortcomings in your social media marketing strategy and always keeps businesses on track with the type of content that needs attention.
Now that the definition of content buckets is out of the way, we must understand how you can create content buckets.
Steps to Create Content Buckets
The creation of content buckets does sound like the best social media hack, but it can get messy if you do not know how to develop them. Below are the things you must always do before finalising your content buckets.
Step 1: Define Your Goals
Before you start creating content, it’s essential to understand your goals. What do you want to achieve with your content? Are you looking to grow your website’s traffic, convert more leads, or build brand awareness? Once you know your goals, it will be easier to create content that meets those needs.
Step 2: Identify Your Audience
Next, identify your audience. Who are you writing for? Are you writing for a specific group of people (like business owners), or are you targeting a wider audience (like consumers)? Once you know your target audience, it will be easier to understand their pain points and address such queries in the content buckets. Tailor your content accordingly by including keywords relevant to your prospective customer’s concerns.
Step 3: Choose the Right Platforms and Tools
Before getting into content creation, businesses must select the channels they will be using to post the content. Knowing beforehand the kind of online medium a brand will use to communicate with its audience makes it easier to create formatted content suitable for a particular channel.
For example, on Instagram, most B2C businesses present highly consumer-friendly and casual content. In contrast, B2B companies utilise LinkedIn to reach out to their target clients, keeping content professional. Research and select platforms with a higher population of your target audience.
After choosing the right platform, you have to also connect it with the right web page to generate quality leads. Redirecting the traffic to the company’s website might only build brand awareness; a lead generation landing page will bring the traction and visitor to lead conversion that you desire. A rightly curated landing page encourages the audience to fill in the web form and explore your brand. Therefore, it is best to navigate the interested prospects from the social media sites to a single CTA driven landing page.
Step 4: Create and Fill Content Buckets
Content bucket ideas must be coherent with the stages of the lead generation workflow you want to target.
A lead generation funnel has four stages:
Awareness
Awareness content aims to get your audience aware of your product or service. It contains content relevant to the prospects and establishes the brand as an expert in the targeted industry.
It can include content buckets like:
- Guidebooks
- Whitepapers
- How-to’s and other information blogs
- Checklist
- Market updates
Consideration
In the consideration stage, your audience considers whether or not they want to take the next step in their lead generation process. At this stage, content talks explicitly about your brand, its achievements, services, benefits, etc.
It can include content like:
- Case Studies
- Webinars
- Catalogues
- Brand’s success story
- Quiz landing pages
Decision
The decision stage is where your audience makes a purchase or signs up for your service. It could be filling out a form, clicking on an ad, or even calling you. Content at this stage should be clearing uncertainties that the prospects might have with your product or services.
It can include content like:
- Sales Pitch
- Social Proof
- Competitive Comparisons
- FAQs
Retention
At this stage, the lead has converted into a paying customer. Keeping in constant touch with your existing clients is the goal of content at this stage.
It can include content like:
- Training blogs
- Appreciation
- Event-related content
Businesses can create content roadmaps according to a buyer’s journey by keeping these lead generation stages in mind while creating content buckets.
If you want to understand how you can curate all the content mentioned, then check out this blog:
Content Marketing for Dummies: 6 Tips To Build a Successful Strategy
Step 5: Test and Optimise
Testing and optimising your content buckets is vital to ensure success. It can help you identify any issues early on and ensure that your content is as effective as possible.
There are many different ways to test your content. You can use A/B testing and follow metrics like open-rate, CTR, and website visits to understand your content strategy’s impact and where it needs optimisation. Ultimately, testing and optimising your content is essential for creating successful content buckets.
Conclusion
Creating content buckets helps your business stay clear on its social media marketing plans and cater to every audience’s needs at every stage of the sales funnel. Keeping in check the content in each bucket makes it easier to curate and re-purpose earlier content for lost leads or new prospects. Whether you are planning a social media marketing plan for a restaurant, real estate, or any other business, content buckets will make your work easier.
Now go on and start planning your successful content buckets.
Suggested read:
Learn About The Periodic Table of Content Marketing
Content Marketing vs Brand Journalism: Which is Worth Your Marketing Efforts?
