Content marketing can help your business gain higher visibility on search engines, generate more leads, improve your brand reputation, enhance your relationship with customers, increase brand awareness, and establish you as an authority in your field.
About 90% of organizations are using content marketing, but 66% of businesses are not happy with the content that they produce and give it a basic rating.
As useful as content marketing is at driving conversions, the channel is highly saturated. The only way to get better results and stand out from the crowd is to produce higher quality content and promote it effectively.
If you’re not capitalizing on content marketing, your business will be missing out on numerous opportunities to attract or capture leads and acquire new customers. You’ll also fall behind your competitors who are making content work for them.
Whether you’re finding it a challenge to create exciting content or get the engagement you need consistently, I will show you a few simple and actionable tips you can use to transform your content marketing efforts and improve results.
- Develop a concrete content marketing strategy.
- Create a buyer persona before producing content.
- Write irresistible headlines.
- Publish relevant and valuable content.
- Write detailed, long-form content to get more attention.
- Use content to guide consumers through your sales funnel.
- Actively promote your content for better exposure.
- Update and repurpose old content.
- Optimize your content around keywords.
Creating great content that resonates with your audience and produces results that are in line with your marketing goals takes effort and a willingness to go above and beyond.
You may face some problems initially, but by always experimenting and implementing these strategies, you’re sure to get a good grip on things and take your content to the next level.
1. Develop a concrete content marketing strategy
According to a study by Contently, only 39% of companies have a documented content strategy.
Jumping into creating and sharing content without having a content plan in place is a recipe for disaster. You can’t just throw ideas at the wall and hope that one of them sticks. You need to have an actual strategy that’s guiding your content marketing efforts.
When creating your content strategy, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
- Who am I trying to reach?
- Where can I reach them?
- Who are my competitors?
- What content opportunity are they missing out on that I can take advantage of and use?
- What objectives do I want to achieve, and how will I measure success?
- How do I go from where I am now to where I want to be?
- What content format works best for my industry?
- What tools and resources do I have?
- What’s my budget?
Your answer to these questions will help you flesh out a content marketing strategy that you’ll implement when creating content to ensure that you align your efforts with your business goals.
Your strategy should tell you who your audience is, the types of content you’ll be producing, how you’ll share, or promote the content once it’s ready.
2. Create a buyer persona before producing content
How can you create compelling content if you don’t know who you’re targeting?
Sure, it’d be nice if everyone in the world was your ideal customer, but the reality is that only a select group of people would be interested in your products and services.
Your focus should be on creating content for audiences who are most likely to buy from you. If you don’t already know who they are, you need to take a step back and build a buyer persona.
If you don’t understand who your target audience is and what they want from you, you’ll end up pouring time, energy, and money down the drain.
Having well-defined buyer personas will help you deliver relevant and useful content that will interest your audience.
3. Write irresistible headlines
No matter how beautiful your content is, many people won’t get to see it if your headline isn’t appealing enough to get them to click through.
Keep in mind that there are about five times as many people reading your headline than those reading the content itself. The headline is usually the first thing people notice, and it can influence check out or ignore your content.
Don’t just add a title as an afterthought. Make sure that your headline is exciting and optimized to capture the attention of consumers who might be searching for content on a specific topic.
A few tips you can use to create clickable and captivating headlines that accurately represent your content are:
- Present your title as a question
- Use comparisons to create intrigue
- Address the
customer’s pain points - Use keywords in your headline
- Include numbers
- Make it seem super urgent and beneficial.
Your click-through rate directly affects how you rank in search results. If Google notices that people aren’t clicking on your headlines, your rankings will begin to drop.
Instead of short headlines, try writing longer ones with eighty or more characters. Studies show that longer headlines generate an average of 76% more shares than short headlines.
4. Publish relevant and valuable content
Even though the point of content marketing is to make people aware of your products and services, and ultimately convince them to make a purchase, turning your content into an overt sales pitch will turn people away from you.
What you want is to educate prospects so that they come to trust you before you start subtly suggesting your product/service to them.
Find out what problems your audience is facing and create content that provides answers and solutions to them.
Write and develop unique content that’s better than what’s currently out there. People should be able to stumble on your content years from now and still find it useful.
Beyond articles and blogs, there are other content formats that you can explore, such as videos, infographics, white papers, case studies, webinars, podcasts, eBooks, and eCourses.
Don’t restrict yourself.
5. Write detailed, long-form content to get more attention
It’s a myth that people only want to read short blog posts and other forms of content. The truth is that most people do prefer longer content, and so does Google.
Consumers today want explicit content that gives an in-depth look into a particular subject. They want to come away feeling like an expert after viewing a piece of content.
They want suggestions, guides, tutorials, opinions, debates, reviews, and tips that are backed by research and experience.
A study by Quicksprout showed that pages with long-form content performed better and generated more qualified leads than those with shorter content.
Creating specific content takes more work, but the results more than make up for all the hours you spend putting it together. For articles, aim for your post to be at least 1500 words long.
6. Use content to guide consumers through your sales funnel
Content can help you capture the interest of a prospect who is still at the awareness stage and gently move them to the point of consideration, and then get them to open up their wallets and make a purchase or enlist the services of your company.
You can start by creating great content that helps drive traffic to your website. Make sure that you’re baiting the reader to move to the next stage by offering high-quality lead magnets or content upgrades that they’ll find hard to resist.
You could offer an in-depth guide related to the article that the visitor just finished reading in exchange for their email address and personal information.
Once you add them to your email list, you can keep monitoring their buyer journey and offering relevant content to them even further down the sales pipeline until they’re ready to convert.
7. Actively promote your content for better exposure
Sometimes the problem isn’t that your content isn’t good enough, but that you aren’t promoting it well enough, so it’s not getting the traction that it deserves.
If you’ve been doing content marketing for a while, you’ll want to make sure that you’re following SEO best practices, and reevaluate the marketing channels you’re using to spread the word about your content.
However, if you’re a content marketing newbie, you should concentrate on acquiring quality backlinks and increasing social shares, which will help you boost traffic in the long and short term.
Use social media advertising, search engine marketing, native advertising, online banner ads, and other paid methods to distribute your content and get more eyes on it.
8. Update and repurpose old content
Don’t just publish content and forget it forever after you’ve promoted it. You can always update content that has performed well in the past to make it better and republish it again so new audiences can discover it.
Research to see what has changed or become outdated on the topic, then rewrite parts of the post to include these changes.
Add more tips, citing new data from authoritative sources, replace outdated or irrelevant images, and rework your intro and conclusion. Include fresh/relevant keywords, remove links that are no longer working, and replace old links with newer ones.
Refreshing your old posts will improve their ranking in search results and save you the trouble of creating an entirely new post.
Instead of struggling to create new or different types of content, just find a popular piece of content that you’ve already created and repurpose it into various formats for different channels.
For instance, you can take one of your articles that people loved and turn it into a podcast, adapt it for a newsletter, make an infographic, create a video or slide deck, or even expand it into an eBook.
9. Optimize your content around keywords
Don’t start developing your content until you’ve carried out keyword research to understand what people are searching for and the intent behind their queries.
Use tools like the Google Keyword Planner to search for relevant and untapped keywords that you can incorporate into your content.
Consider what your target audience would be looking for. What topics would interest them? What questions or problems do they have?
Keywords give you an insight into what your audience is searching for. Once you know what they want, you can then create content that provides exactly that.
With the right keywords, you can use your content to attract more of the right audience and acquire new customers for your business.
Make sure you include keywords in all the right places—title, main copy, meta description—on your page to make your content more effective and help drive search engine traffic.
Conclusion
Now you have an understanding of proven tactics that you can incorporate into your content marketing efforts in 2021 to get better results.
Content marketing is a game of endurance. There’s no need to rush to get things done. Take your time to create quality content that will endure despite the passing of time.
Hopefully, the tips I’ve provided in this article will help you make the most of content marketing for your business.
You don’t have to apply them all at once. You can start with one and implement the others as you go. Don’t forget to monitor the changes you make to determine whether they’re working or not.