5 Content Marketing Tips for Your Business
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There are a lot of buzzwords and phrases that get thrown around when discussing business initiatives.
Sometimes these phrases are used because they sound nice and intelligent but end up being superfluous because users and listeners don’t truly know what they mean.
A great example of this is the use of content marketing. It’s very easy to interpret content marketing as simply online marketing that reflects the business.
While that’s true on the surface, a good content marketing strategy is so much more; it requires producing purposeful content targeted at a specific audience. Your strategy should also include regularly measuring the success of your campaigns and making necessary adjustments along the way.
With the right strategy in place, you can:
Position you as an industry authority
Generate leads
That said, revamping or creating a new content marketing strategy can feel daunting — even if your business has a substantial marketing budget. If you don’t know where to start, this article is for you!
Keep reading for 5 tips for developing an effective content marketing strategy.
5 Easy Content Marketing Strategies
Before we get started, it’s important to note that there are a lot of nuances to content marketing. Learning the ins and outs can take some time, but these 5 tips will give you a solid place to start. As you get the hang of it, you can dig deeper and add new strategies to your marketing plan.
Now, let’s dive in!
1. Create Content with a Goal in Mind
Brainstorming sessions can be powerful for coming up with content ideas, whether it’s for a blog post, video, or newsletter. The possibilities often seem pretty endless. While ideas are great, if they don’t serve the overall objective of your businesses, you may be wasting your time.
The good news is that you can easily avoid falling into this rut by determining what your goals are before you even start thinking about content marketing strategies.
Thinking ahead to what you want to accomplish within the next month, quarter, year, and so on makes it easier to prioritize different areas of your content marketing.
Do you want to improve your business’s search engine rankings and domain authority?
Are you trying to connect with a new target audience or engage with an existing one?
Will your content help to promote a specific product or service?
Are you trying to be seen as a reliable and trustworthy expert in your field?
Do you want to get more people to subscribe to your email list or sign up for a membership?
Once you have something to work towards, you can then develop content that is meaningful.
2. Focus on Creating Quality Content
After you’ve determined your goals and have a plan in place, you can focus on the content itself.
One of the most important tips for content marketing is to focus on the quality of what you are producing. Don’t just create content for the sake of creating it. It doesn’t matter if you’re putting out more content than your competitors. What matters is whether or not it provides something of value for your audience.
If your audience isn’t engaging with your content (i.e. clicking through to your website, commenting, sharing, etc.), it’s essentially dead in the water. Not to mention that it’s wasted your time, and likely money, to produce.
As Neil Patel says, attracting the right audience requires you to “blog strategically and not just more frequently.”
The key is to make sure your content has a purpose. When someone has finished reading your content, they should feel like they’ve gained something whether it’s the answer to a problem or a step-by-step guide on how to do something.
When you’re creating valuable, high-quality content, the frequency matters less. You definitely don’t want to go months between content, but quality always trumps quantity. Publishing a few key pieces of content once a week or every other week can give you excellent results.
3. Repurpose Content
Any great marketing team knows that quality content should be shared on as many appropriate and available channels as possible. This is an especially useful content marketing tip for small businesses, as it gives you the most bang for your buck.
Consumers are busy and the more opportunities they have to engage with your brand, the more successful your campaign will be.
When you develop a piece of content that you’re really proud of, you should be repurposing it to fit other outlets and reach other audiences. Consider using a successful blog series as your next webinar topic or take the themes of your last YouTube video and create an infographic for your other social media channels.
If you want to be really efficient, try to think about the different ways one content idea can be used during your brainstorming sessions.
But, remember: every platform is different. What does well on Facebook may not work on Twitter or LinkedIn. Be sure to tailor repurposed content to each specific platform.
4. Write with SEO in Mind
If you’ve been around the web a time or two, you’ve likely heard the acronym “SEO” at some point.
SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, is another one of those phrases that some people shy away from because they don’t quite understand what it means. If you fall into that category, SEO can seem overwhelming, not to mention downright confusing.
So, what is SEO and what role does it play in content marketing?
Simply put, it’s the practice of optimizing a website to improve its visibility on search engines like Google. The better your SEO, the better your content performs in search results.
One of the most commonly known elements of SEO is using keywords that your audience uses when searching for content. When done well, SEO drives traffic to your content and increases the potential to make conversions.
Think about it this way: Most people using a search engine like Google are looking for the answer to a question. They’ll type in something like, “how to write effective copy” and choose from one of the top results. When creating content, you need to think about how your audience will search for it.
There are some really good free and paid tools to help you determine which keywords and phrases you should be focusing on. Some of my favorites include:
You can also use various tools to ensure you’re writing SEO-rich content.
WordPress users will benefit from a plugin like YoastSEO or All In One SEO. If you tend to write content in a Google Doc, an add-on like GDoc SEO Assistant is a huge asset.
5. Use Analytics to Track Performance
Another effective way to improve your content marketing strategy is to monitor its progress.
Before implementing a new strategy, create a benchmark indicating how your content is performing now. It will give you something to compare your results to as you get going.
Many content marketers can tell you the woes of thinking content is gold, only to find it’s not performing well. The truth is, you can think you have the best goals and greatest content output, but if it isn’t yielding results then adjustments need to be made. What is the point of all your hard work if it isn’t bringing in customers?
Having a benchmark to look back on will let you know if a specific piece of content is outperforming others. From there you can identify what aspect is resonating the most with your audience. It may be anything from the topic to the writing style/format.
My favorite combo for analyzing my content marketing strategy is Google Analytics and ExactMetrics.
Google Analytics by itself is an awesome tool, but it can be confusing — especially for beginners. Getting it set up on your website requires injecting code, which can be tricky. WordPress users can get around that with the ExactMetrics plugin.
With ExactMetrics, you can get easy-to-read analytics reports right in your WordPress dashboard. This makes tracking the performance of various metrics simple, including:
Outbound links: Identify where traffic goes when leaving your blog
Referrals: Know where your traffic is coming from
Posts and Pages: See which articles and pages are getting the most visitors
Landing and Exit Pages: See which pages attract and repel visitors
Affiliate Links: Identify the affiliate products that bring in the most money
eCommerce: See your best-selling products and identify obstacles in the customer journey
Once you know what is working with your audience, you can replicate it to continuously grow and improve the overall health of your business.
Patience is a Virtue
Now that you have a foundation for developing your content marketing strategy, I want to offer one last piece of advice:
You need to understand that content marketing is less of a sprint and more of a marathon.
Developing an effective strategy can take some trial and error, and the results aren’t always immediate. This is especially true when it comes to SEO and search rankings, which take time to be indexed and gain traction.
While it’s crucial to be flexible with content marketing for your business, it’s just as important to be patient. Regularly measure your efforts to see how your content is performing and pivot when needed to maximize your results.
Not sure you have the time to devote to content marketing?
Feel free to get in touch. I’d be happy to discuss how I can help improve your efforts with consistent blog posts and other types of content.
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