Having a proper content marketing strategy is key to developing brand awareness.
Knowing who your audience is, what their needs and concerns are and how your product or service can help with those needs is key to developing that strategy.
Content marketing allows you to build trust with your audience, which leads to an increase in customer loyalty and drives new leads to your business every day.
Your online presence is an essential part of the consumer journey and something that is valued by consumers.
Whether connecting with your audience through blog posts, social media, or e-books, it’s important to take the time to establish a well thought out strategy to reach today’s average consumer.
This article will give seven tips on how you can improve and bring new life to your content marketing strategy.
Contents
Focus On Your Audience
Targeting the right people allows you to better understand the direction in which you can take your content marketing efforts. Once you know who your audience is, you can determine how to adjust your marketing message to target them and their needs.
Your content is ultimately focused on catering to your customer’s needs and wants. Sometimes the content you put out isn’t necessarily focused around making a sale.
Developing a relationship with your audience can help build your brand awareness while establishing credibility within your industry.
Your content should always provide some sort of value to your audience. Whether it’s providing them with knowledge on a given topic or product, or using your content to yield sales, there needs to be some sort of value-added.
Diversify Your Content
There are many avenues you can go when creating content, so take advantage of all of them. Your content marketing strategy doesn’t have to only consist of long-form articles with tons of information.
When people think of content marketing, they often think of blog posts. While blog posts are an extremely effective and essential part of your content marketing strategy, diversifying your content can help heighten your chances of being seen online.
Bringing new, fresh ideas to your content marketing strategy will make your content original and keep your audience engaged.
Mixing up your content can attract more potential leads and get you noticed in the search engines. Here are some of the many kinds of content you can use:
- How- to guides
- Lists
- Features
- FAQs or Q&A’s
- Surveys
- Infographics
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Ebooks
I Am Net Worthy is a great example of diversified content. They took valuable tips from their eBooks and made them into useful images. They made the images easily shareable across social media platforms, which will help them reach a wider audience.
Work On Your Existing Content
An easy way to help your content marketing strategy is to build off what you already have.
You may have old content that is no longer relevant or is outdated, so refurbish it.
Make the pieces evergreen so they can continue to drive traffic to your site.
Refurbishing old pieces of content can help boost SEO with minimal work required on your part. Editing old content and optimising it for SEO can also help drive additional web traffic to your site while boosting your overall authority.
Optimise Your Content
If you want your content to be seen on search engines, you need to properly optimise it. SEO keywords will make all the difference here.
Research what keywords people are searching for depending on your given topic, then:
- Pick a primary keyword and secondary keyword
- Pick 1-2 long-tail keywords to include in your content
- Include the keywords in the title of your content, the first paragraph, the URL structure, within the meta description, in your image’s alt tags, etc.
Insert external and internal links to relevant sources that support your topic. This will increase your site’s traffic and authority while providing your readers with additional valuable content.
Today, the average consumer access information primarily through their mobile phones and Google is now prioritising mobile sites over desktop sites. Make sure that your site is mobile-friendly and can be properly viewed by any device that is accessing it.
Be Consistent
Another important step in an effective content marketing strategy is consistency.
For your content to be seen, you need to be consistent. Part of developing your brand means staying consistent with your brand’s style, as well.
Develop a unique brand voice and be consistent in your writing style, colour schemes, fonts and image style. Audiences should be able to tell a product or webpage is yours just by looking at it.
Determine Your Overall Goal
Every piece of content you produce should have an end goal. Think about these questions:
- Are you focusing on getting traffic to your newly started business?
- Are you trying to get new customers and referrals?
- Are you trying to support existing customers?
- Are you trying to teach your customers something?
Of course, different content yields different results, but your content should always be focused on reaching that common goal. Again, you want to make sure that the goal is bringing some sort of value to your customers.
In this example, we can see how TransUnion ShareAble for Hires used a content strategy focused on answering their customer’s common questions. They diversified their content by providing their customers with in-depth video answers.
Their goal was to educate their customers and answer their questions, and they executed.
Document Your Strategy and Monitor Performance
Part of staying consistent with your content marketing efforts is documenting your strategy and monitoring your performance. Having proper documentation in place will help you remain organised should your strategy change over time.
Your strategy should include how you plan to monitor your content marketing efforts and what specific metrics you plan to track.
Whether it be leads generated, overall traffic, or social media engagement, you will be able to shift your strategy based on your metrics.
Monitoring your contents performance will help you understand what content is helping or not helping you reach your goals.
Developing a common goal, no matter what stage you are in in your marketing efforts, can help you develop a targeted approach throughout all your content.
Again, know what your audience’s needs are, how your product or service can help them, and how you can bring value to their lives.
If you keep that in mind, you are well on your way to a successful content marketing strategy.
Want more? Check out one of our top articles:
- Facebook Page Likes: How to Get 1,000’s for FREE
- The Best Chrome Extensions for Marketers
- How to Increase Your Instagram Post Reach
- 3 Big Mistakes Killing Your Organic Reach on Facebook
