This means that there are a lot of people using the internet and social media who could potentially see your brand. This is a good opportunity for your brand to try and engage with these people and grow your business.
Content marketing is one of the most effective methods for spreading brand awareness and attracting new customers.
Content marketing is a strategy where you create and distribute valuable, relevant content online to reach a target audience and get them to take an profitable action. Content marketing is a key factor in sustained growth over time.
Many marketers are not successful in implementing a content marketing strategy, even though it can have a big impact.
This round-up of content marketing tips will help you create a truly valuable marketing strategy. Keep reading to become a true content marketing expert.
Content Marketing Tips
1. Make sure your content has a clear, measurable business goal.
The possibilities for content creation for your business are endless – from Instagram Stories, to blog posts and e-books, to podcasts. You might feel overwhelmed trying to decide what to create first.
The best pieces of content tell a story that brings your buyer personas to life, and ultimately helps you achieve your larger business goals.” Cook emphasizes that every piece of content created should have a clear business goal in mind and that simply getting views is not a complete business goal. The best pieces of content are those that tell a story that brings your buyer personas to life and ultimately helps you achieve your larger business goals. Make sure that your content ties in with your marketing strategy, rather than just being created for content’s sake.
For example, if you want to focus more on blogging. If you want your content to be successful, you need to identify your target audience and figure out how your content can best serve that group. Use analytics to ensure your content can be found by the right people using the most appropriate search terms.
Once you identify how to serve your audience, you’ll want to make sure that your content is relevant to your business. Quality content is important to grow your audience, but if it doesn’t tie back to your business, it won’t attract new customers.
The HubSpot blog traffic plateau was broken by using a business-focused strategy for content creation. This can be helpful for learning how to cultivate a strategy that focuses on business.
2. Know your audience.
Content marketing is about attracting people who will be most interested in your brand and buying your products. You will not be able to write content that appeals to the right audience until you are aware of who that audience is.
You don’t need to interview every customer who has done business with you, but it could be very helpful. Gather your team and create an ideal customer, or buyer persona, that your product is best suited for. When creating your marketing strategy, it is important to consider both psychographic and demographic information about your target market. Creating a buyer persona document can help your team stay on target.
You can create content that speaks to your audience more effectively if you understand who they are and what they want.
3. Understand your buyer’s journey.
If you want to be a good content marketer, you need to understand how to engage and delight your readers at any stage of their buyer’s journey. The content on your website should not only be appealing to new visitors, but it should also be able to convince prospects who are undecided about making a purchase, as well as encourage customers to keep coming back and develop loyalty to your brand.
For example, some customers may not want to buy your product because they think you need a lot of video knowledge to be successful. If you’re worried about how customers will react to video marketing, you can create a video campaign to show them how it works. This will help your sales team by giving them a resource to share with customers.
If you’re struggling to come up with ideas for your content, try creating content for each stage of the buyer’s journey.
4. Solve for the reader.
When creating content, you should aim to educate your audience and help them solve a problem. The aim is to get readers to either buy something or subscribe, but you also need to build up your brand so that people see it as a reliable source of information. After gaining the trust of readers, businesses can then convert them into paying customers.
As a content writer, your ultimate goal should be to answer the reader’s questions, offer useful resources and tips, and gradually introduce them to what you have to offer and how it can help them.
If you want your content to be successful, it should be based around the main product or service that your brand offers. For example, if your brand offers vacation rentals, your content should revolve around travel and provide important information that potential travelers need. You would write city-specific travel guides that list the best places to visit and the best practices for traveling solo. If you can establish yourself as a trustworthy source of information, readers will be more likely to turn to you for help and advice.
5. Adopt the pillar-cluster model.
If you want to create a better reading experience while improving your SEO, you should try the pillar-cluster model.
In this model, a central “pillar” page covers an umbrella topic in depth, while “cluster” pages support that topic with additional, more specific content. After you select the appropriate keywords for your website, you use internal linking to connect the topics together and signal to Google that they are related. This aids in SEO by providing context for search engines.
An umbrella topic is a broad topic that encompasses all of the smaller topics that are related to it. For example, if you’re a web design firm, your umbrella topic might be web design. If you wanted to write an comprehensive guide to web design, you would start with a “pillar” page on that topic. Then, you would write individual pages providing more detailed information on related topics, like “UX design” and “How to Use HTML & CSS”, which would support the main pillar page.
6. Write in-depth content.
It has been shown that, usually, content that is longer does better in search engines than content that is shorter. When creating content for your website, you should aim for a length that is appropriate for the subject matter, rather than write for the sake of writing.
You should include all the information the reader needs to know about the topic in one post. You should avoid writing long, dense paragraphs full of superfluous information. Instead of answering the question directly, try to answer related questions and provide tips that will help the person get all the information they need.
By looking at the “People also ask” box when you search a keyword, you can determine the types of questions people need answers to. This will show you the types of queries Google has found that are related to your search.
It is important to keep each post and page on your website focused on one specific topic and to target one or two keywords. This will help your website be more successful. You’ll want to do this for various reasons:
- You’ll avoid self-cannibalization because you won’t be writing about general topics.
- You’ll strengthen topical authority by writing in-depth content on one specific keyword.
- With less keywords covered per page or post, you’ll have more keywords to target in other pages.
7. Visuals are more effective than text.
People who come to your website prefer to see what you’re saying, rather than just reading it. Whenever you have an idea for new content, think about how you could present it visually, through an infographic, podcast, video, or some other format. Google appreciates and ranks text that is accompanied by a presentation. Use visuals to supplement your text rather than replacing it.
8. Plan how you’ll generate content ideas.
Keep a file of content ideas at all times. What questions should you ask your audience? How do you listen to your audience?
9. CTAs should garner email addresses.
Aim to maintain a growing email base. Make sure there are plenty of opportunities for your readers to provide you with their contact information. Don’t forget to be creative with your email subject lines so that readers will open them. Include share buttons so that readers can easily share your content.
10. Neuroscience and Sales Psychology
Did you know that most purchases are made based on emotion, rather than logic? Neuroscience tells us which parts of the brain are stimulated by what aspects. Use it in your content marketing strategies.
How to Be Smart About Content Marketing
There are more digital marketing trends emerging all the time, but here are some of the latest ones and how you can use them to save time in your content marketing strategy.
1. Budgets are Going to Grow, Just Not as Fast
It was predicted that content marketing budgets would grow by 55% in 2015. This is one of the biggest marketing increases in recent years.
But there is a downside. The global content marketing audience is becoming fatigued because there is more content than ever being created.
These days:
- Everybody has a blog.
- Everyone has a video you can watch.
- Everybody has case studies or white papers that can be downloaded.
- Everyone wants you on their email marketing list.
When everyone is doing the same thing, it becomes more difficult to be noticed amidst all the commotion.
It is harder than ever to get users’ attention, so you need to create more high-quality content. We often find that the results are not what we wanted them to be.
B2B content marketers have invested a lot in content creation without seeing the results. That means that the salespeople are going to be experiencing push backs from the chief financial officers and from leadership since they have not met expectations.
We know that this is a long process and not something that can be done quickly, but even a marathon has to end eventually and all that content needs to start benefiting us in some way, right?
2. Long-Form Content Will Be in Demand
Some experts are saying that longer pieces of content are becoming more popular. Why? Because it thoroughly answers questions.
There are probably not a lot of writers who are generating posts with word counts in the thousands right now, but there are sure to be more in the future. As it stands, this year we’ve noticed:
- The majority of B2B marketers are creating more content than they did in 2014.
- Content over 1,500 words is being shared more often.
- The average length of content for a web page that is ranking within the top 10 results for any keyword on Google tends to have a minimum of 2,000 words.
We’ve been told that it’s best to keep our blogs to between 300 and 500 words. However, short posts are not currently ranking well. Not at all. Blogging for your readers is important, but you also need them to be able to find your blog. One of those surefire ways is long-form content.
3. Try Blogging Less, With Better Quality
You might be wondering how to create quality content that is a long as you need it to be.
This means that if you blog 500 words three times a week, you are already writing 1,500 words.
Rather than creating three shorter posts, it is more effective to write one longer post (1,500 words) once a week, based on your buyer personas.
If a business wants to start a content marketing program for their tech company, they should consider doing it when they are ready to engage with their customers and create long-term relationships. The post could be broken up into three parts:
- The common challenges that B2B technology companies face when wanting to start content marketing programs.
- Why these companies wait to start content marketing.
- The statistics that support when a tech company should start a content marketing program.
Instead of writing three shorter posts on different topics, it would be better to tie all three points together with a central theme. In the same amount of time it would take to write three 500-word blogs, you could generate a 1,500-word post that would actually rank for long-tail keywords.
4. Short-Form, Spammy SEO Content – It’s Time to Say Goodbye to Consultants
Search engine optimization has become a major part of content marketing. If you want your content to reach a specific audience, you need to optimize it for search engines, or you’ll just be wasting your time. Think mobile, social sharing, long-tail keywords. You don’t need a pricey consultant.
If you spend a day exploring Google, you will learn everything you need to know about how to optimize your content for the search engine. If you want to improve your skills, reading a book or taking a short course on the subject can help. Adding basic SEO knowledge to your skill set can also make you more valuable to employers.
5. Content Should be Creative
Ever wanted to do something more dynamic? Ever envisioned animated infographics and other cool themes? Go with it! If you want your audience to really engage with your content, ditch the dull infographics in favor of more creative, interesting visuals.
There are quite a few tools beyond WordPress you can use, including:
- Infogr.am lets you create and publish awesome visualizations of all your data. They offer some great pre-built templates that you can embed with your blog.
- Tableau Public is free software for anyone who wants to regale engaging stories with public data on the Internet. It’s a fantastic tool for visualization, particularly maps.
- Visme is a great tool that will let you create rich media infographics, presentations, reports, and even product demos
Let’s Wrap This Up
If your budget is similar to others in your industry and you’re experiencing content fatigue, you’ll need to work harder to be more effective.
To be more successful, you will need to be smarter about how you use your time and the content you create. This means creating content that will still be relevant and useful in the future. Use these content marketing tips and do just this. You’ll need to invest more time, effort, and resources to become a content marketing leader. You will get a direct return on your investment from your hard work.
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