The Internet has grown into a powerful marketing tool, and when it comes to your business, your site can, and should, provide much more than the bare minimum.
Research shows that 59.5% of the global population are active internet users. That’s a ton of opportunity for your brand to tap into and achieve maximum growth for your business.
Powerful content will attract and retain customers. On the other hand, content marketing enables your business to sustain brand loyalty, increase brand awareness and credibility, and build an online community of engaged and responsive customers.
Ultimately, a functional content marketing strategy is a critical component for long-term, sustainable growth. To help you create a successful one, here is a round-up of ten versatile and priceless tips to help you achieve the desired results for your business.
1. Set Measurable Goals
Every content marketing strategy must have clear, concrete, and measurable goals. Simply ‘getting views’ shouldn’t be the business goal. So before you get started, determine what you hope to accomplish with the strategy and create pieces that tie back to that.
Crafting and publishing content is never enough for a marketing strategy. Instead, you must identify your target audience and decide how your content can best serve that group. Additionally, you’ll want to use analytics to ensure your content can reach the right people with aligning search intent. While it’s crucial to write quality content to grow your audience, you must also ensure it ties back to your business.
2. Know Your Audience
Content marketing requires writing articles, blog posts, and graphics that engage and attract the right audience. To do that, you need to understand what your potential customers want. What are their interests? What do they need help with? And what words and phrases do they use to find answers online?
There are many prospective customers for your product, so you can’t go out and interview every one of them. However, you can create a buyer persona and identify what they would need from your products. Alternatively, encourage your current customers to provide feedback, so you will know what they expect from your products. Having a solid understanding of your audience means your content marketing efforts will be more successful.
3. Create for Your Audience
It is not enough to know your audience, you also need to write for them. From topic selection to your final edits, your audience should be at the center of how you present information.
When you’re creating content, you have two primary goals: to educate and help solve a problem. Right from the start, you should select topics that solve for the reader by answering their questions, offering practical resources and tips, and getting them acquainted with what you sell and how you can help. Once a reader continues to come to you as an authoritative source of information, they’ll trust you enough to make you their provider.
4. Stay Relevant
The internet is full of content, with articles, videos, webpages, and media being uploaded every second on an unimaginable scale. 4.4 million new blog posts alone get on the internet across all platforms every day. For this reason, creating evergreen content that remains relevant over extended periods is critical.
Evergreen content drives more traffic and has lower maintenance costs, as you don’t have to keep updating or replacing it. It also sustains high SEO ranks and can be shared on social media for a long time. Once you master the art of writing timeless content, you can ensure your articles, e-books, and tutorials stay relevant for years to come.
5. Narrow Your Focus
As you select the topics you want to write about, you may find yourself coming up with broad, general topics. However, unless you’re ready to spend time creating comprehensive long-form content, you should narrow down each one so that you can cover it entirely.
In addition to making content creation more manageable, this will also help you create more effective topics. It’s better to have ten pages that comprehensively answer a specific question than one page that answers multiple questions, but with minimal explanation, more so if each question deals with a different topic.
6. Understand the Buyer's Journey
A buyer’s journey is the active research process a potential buyer goes through leading up to their purchase. It follows them through the stages of becoming aware of a need, considering different solutions to fulfill that need, and then deciding between them.
As a good content marketer, you should understand that your strategy needs to engage and delight readers at any stage of the journey. While your content should initially attract new visitors to your business, it should also convince hesitant prospects to purchase and encourage customer retention and long-term brand loyalty.
7. Re-purpose Content
It takes time and talent to craft convenient, engaging content. However, you can ensure peak efficiency by recycling existing content. Additionally, repurposing content allows you to reach new audiences. For instance, let’s say your podcast team published a high-performing episode. Why not turn that episode’s topic into a blog post to get the same content to your reader audience? Alternatively, if you created a blog post that performed well, you might consider making a YouTube video on the same topic to reach an audience that prefers video over text.
Repurposing your content will ensure your audience has more than one chance to see it.
8. Research Your Competition
You’re likely not the only business in your industry attempting to attract customers with content, considering that 82% of marketers actively use content marketing. Although this means that you have a lot of competition, it also means that you have the opportunity to see what other people are creating.
Everything you need to know about your top competitors is on their websites. Look at what they are doing with their content strategies and understand their formats, topics, and how their readers are responding. Moreover, this will give you ideas and help you create unique content to better your content marketing strategy.
9. Find a Unique Angle
While your competitors can be substantial sources of topic ideas, you should avoid publishing content that’s too similar to anyone else’s. After all, the goal of content marketing is to provide your customers with personalized information that is not readily available.
Whenever you see a great idea, fight the urge to replicate it by making minor alterations. Instead, see the topic as a starting point, and look for a unique angle to create content. This will keep you from becoming part of the “echo chamber” of content online and create more personalized content for your readers.
10. Monitor Your Progress
It’s easy to merely look at the volume of pages you’ve published and feel like you’ve accomplished something. However, it’s necessary to look at whether or not those pages are actually generating results. As mentioned earlier, you need to set clear goals for your strategy, so as you utilize these content marketing tips and publish content on your site, ensure you regularly monitor your progress against your goals.
Make checking Google Analytics, or another program, part of your routine. Analytics programs carefully monitor, track, watch, and report on the numbers. If things are going well, keep doing what you’re doing, and if not, use that data to revise your strategy to be more effective.
