The world of marketing can be an absolute minefield, but, with the help of a few simple concepts, your brand can easily create a content strategy that reaches, engages, and converts your audience. One of our favourite concepts to help develop this strategy is with the help of a ‘Content Cocktail’ – but what do we mean by this?
A ‘Content Cocktail’, more commonly known as a ‘Marketing Mix’, is a way of crafting the perfect content strategy. Each strategy will have a blend of ‘ingredients’, i.e. the types of content that you create. Your business’ target audience will prefer a different mix of content, compared to a business in the manufacturing industry, for example.
Read on to learn how to shake up the perfect content strategy for your business, plus tips on tweaking your strategy when your audience just isn’t as enthusiastic about your content any more.
What Do We Mean By a ‘Content Cocktail’?
A content cocktail is a term I was taught very early on in my content marketing / SEO career. You may also refer to it as the ‘Marketing Mix’ or the ‘Four P’s’ but come on, who doesn’t love a good marketing pun!
A content cocktail essentially describes the way a content strategy should be created – balanced with all the right ingredients in order to hit that sweet spot for your audience. Your audience’s perfect drink will contain a mix of tasty ingredients (the content you create), all balanced to produce great results for your business.
Your Content Cocktail Ingredients
Now, let’s talk about ingredients! Not every cocktail is the same, and different audiences will have certain preferences as to what they drink!
In fact, your business will likely need a very different content cocktail compared to a huge brand like Oatly, for example. Let’s take a look at how your cocktail ingredients might change, depending on your business:
Take Wildcat Digital, a small digital agency in Sheffield. Our content ‘cocktail’ is made with a base of long-form articles and SEO-optimised web pages, contains a few shots of email marketing, and finished with a splash of social media to stay top of mind.
For us, SEO is critical – we rely on it to drive organic traffic and build authority in the SEO / digital marketing space.
Now, let’s take a very different business – Oatly.com, for ease. Oatly already ranks highly for “oat milk,” so they don’t need to focus heavily on SEO. Instead, their content cocktail might include a mix of PR campaigns and influencer marketing, with a touch of social media engagement.
Oatly’s cocktail likely includes some strong-tasting ingredients like billboards and print ads, which help maintain its brand presence and reach a broader audience.
Mixing Your Content Cocktail
Once you’ve identified your ingredients, it’s time to pop them into the shaker to whip up something tasty. But how do you do that?
The goal is to create balance. Every element of your content mix should work together, just like the flavours in a great drink. For example, if one of our main KPIs is to drive traffic to the website, we may create lots of informative articles as the “main ingredient” in your cocktail. But just like a cocktail, one ingredient on its own won’t do the trick – it needs complementary elements to really shine.
To help balance our ingredients, we’ll:
- Repurpose our blogs to create informative social media posts, which can then link back to our website
- Direct traffic from our monthly newsletter to any new articles and vice versa
- Dedicate time to create videos and visual content that support the articles on the website, increasing engagement time
Remember, a successful content cocktail isn’t about throwing every ingredient behind the bar into the mix, start with a few tried-and-tested ingredients, and tweak from there.
Measuring Your Content Cocktail
Like any delicious drink, accurate measurements are key. If you don’t track the performance of each ingredient in your content cocktail, you won’t know what needs changing, or what you need to do more of to convert your audience.
At a minimum, you should actively monitor the following metrics:
- Engagement – The quickest way to identify which types of content are performing the best is by measuring engagement metrics. This may be likes, comments, and shares on social media, or clicks and forwards on your email marketing campaigns. High engagement means your audience finds value in what you’re sharing, while low engagement may signal a need for a different approach.
- Website Traffic – Most businesses want customers to land on their website in order to convert, so measuring your website traffic is key. Use Google Analytics to measure which channels are sending the most traffic to your website, and where customers are going once they land there. Ensure landing pages are well optimised, and your other channels are consistently linking to the right pages to maximise conversions.
- Conversion Rate / Revenue – Ultimately, your content should encourage users to take action, whether that’s signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or downloading a resource. You should keep an eye on which channel’s traffic is the highest converting, and consider investing more of your time there.
- Customer Feedback – Sometimes the most valuable insights come directly from your audience. Use surveys, social listening, or social media comments to gather feedback on your content and identify areas for improvement.
Use these metrics to understand how your content cocktail is performing. Just like you’d adjust the sweetness or bitterness of a drink based on feedback, you should adjust your content strategy based on the data. Keep what’s working, and tweak what isn’t.
Tweak the Ingredients, Or Try a Completely Different Recipe?
Your audience’s tastes will change over time – the cocktail they liked when they first started drinking will definitely be different a few years down the line. Sometimes, all it takes is a tweaking of a few ingredients/content styles. However, there are times when a completely different content cocktail might be necessary.
Maybe your current content cocktail is too bland, and your audience isn’t responding as expected. Or, a competitor has brought out a much tastier cocktail, that you need to be able to compete with!
Do your research before crafting your recipe – analyse your internal data and analytics, take a look at the market, and your audience, and of course, look at what’s working (and not working) for your competitors. Use your findings to create a new marketing cocktail for your business. Trial it for a few months, analyse the results, and tweak as often as needed!
Craft the Perfect Marketing Cocktail With Wildcat Digital
At Wildcat Digital, we love a great cocktail (in more ways than one!) – whether you need help adding the perfect PPC garnish or creating a brand-new SEO recipe, we’re here to help.
Get in touch with our team of master mixologists for a free consultation either via phone, email or by using the contact form on our website.
What are you waiting for? Let us shake up your perfect content strategy today!
Jasmine Savery
SEO Account Manager
