Content Marketing Tips For Success: Image – free for commercial use

Content marketing is an essential part of any marketing strategy for any kind of business; especially for ones that operate a lot online. It is focussed on the creation, publication, and distribution of online content, with the aim of reaching a target audience and converting them into customers. A content strategy can include blog posts, social media content, videos, and much more. But how do you get content marketing right? 

Set Clear Goals

One of the most important marketing tips is to set clear goals. There are so many options for making content out there. Therefore, choosing the right method for your business can be overwhelming. With options from blog posts and Instagram posts to ebooks and podcasts, where do you start? How do you know which method is the best one? 

To help you decide on the best options; set some clear, measurable goals for each piece of content to help you make the right choice. For example, if you’ve decided to write a company blog, you can’t just write the content and forget about it. Before writing anything, identify your target audience, and work out the content that will best serve that audience. What do they want to read? Use analytics to make sure the content finds the right people. How does the content link back to your business? You need to direct the people reading back to your company and your services. Make it clear who wrote the content and why you’re the expert on the subject. You can also hire companies to do this for you. If your business needs specialist content, then hire a specialist, such as a CBD marketing agency if you’re a CBD oil company. 

Understand The Buyer’s Journey

A well-crafted content marketing strategy must engage your reader at each stage of their buying journey. While content is mostly thought of as a way to attract new visitors to your company website, but it can and should also do double duty to convince a potential or existing customer to make a purchase. Good content keeps existing customers loyal as well as attracting new ones. 

Identify what might cause customers to not purchase and create content that addresses those sticking points. For example, are customers seeing your product as too complicated? If this is the case, then some content from your sales team like a series of simple instructional videos or how-to blog posts can help to convince customers that your products are simple to use, encouraging them to buy. If you have a large range of options in your products, this can help to simplify things too. 

Track Performance With Analytics

Your content needs to be converting viewers into customers. Analytics is the best and easiest way to keep track of how this mission is working out. Monitor and report on the numbers to see what kind of content is working for you and what content isn’t. This can then help you see how you can improve the content you’re creating to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. 

As well as traffic, look hard at your conversion rates. For example, if your blog only gets 1000 readers, but your Instagram has 7000 followers, it might seem that Instagram is more worthwhile and successful for you. However, if the blog has a conversion rate of 7%, while Instagram only has 0.5%, this shows that your blog is doing a better job of converting sales, and shouldn’t be ignored, despite having a smaller audience. An engaged audience is more important than a large one, as these are the people making purchases, spending money, and interacting with your content. 

Paying attention to your analytics helps you to improve your strategy with what you learn from the numbers. For example, if the numbers show that you bring in more readers on blog posts about how to work from home, then you know that your audience is interested in this subject. So, you should work to create more content of different kinds on that theme later on, increasing traffic even more and holding the interest of your customers. 

Keep Content Up To Date

Don’t forget about your old content. Keep it up to date and as relevant as possible to readers and search engines. Exclude the year in your URL when optimizing your content. Instead, include the year in the title of your content. Revisit the content every year to update the title tag, meta description, and the content itself. Don’t change your URL when you do this so you don’t break any existing backlinks or have to create redirects. Up to date content can continue to rank and draw in new customers. 

Look back at old content that performed well and see how it could be repurposed to generate more traffic. For example, if you wrote a very successful blog post on SEO, could you use that post to promote a live Q&A session on your Instagram Live, for customers to ask more questions about the subject. Could you make a video to post on YouTube that shows some of the strategies you’ve written about, with a more thorough how-to? 

If nothing else, even taking some time to read old content and doing small things like updating old images, adding in some new information, fixing broken links and other tasks can help to update old content to keep it sounding fresh and interesting if a new reader stumbles across it. If you update old content, reshare it, as it will still be useful to someone. Cross-promote all your content, across all your channels, so everything has the best chance of being seen and found. 

Lastly…

Content marketing can be one of the best tools for attracting new customers, increasing customer engagement and loyalty, converting leads into customers and much more. Content positions you as an expert in the market place, allowing you to share your expertise and show that you have the best knowledge around in your industry.