Want to know a quick fact? Around 5 billion people use the internet every day. And with the growing social media stance, we now have over 4 billion people using it daily. Well, that’s a lot, isn’t it?
Since we have the internet and social media at our fingertips, why not take full advantage of them? The numbers we just mentioned are not just numbers but opportunities. Opportunities to introduce your brand to this huge population, communicate with them, and drive significant growth for your company. Wondering how? Content marketing is your answer.
It is among the most efficient ways to build brand recognition and rope in new clients. A documented content marketing strategy can also give you long-term, sustainable growth. The core of your marketing strategy should not just be creating content. It instead has to be about creating useful content. And to make this possible, we’re here with the 32 best content marketing tips to help you win over your audience and competitors.
What is Content Marketing?
Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as-
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
We can say that content marketing is a form of marketing. It is centered around different tactics for producing and sharing relevant content with your target audience. Content marketing is an amalgamation of these aspects:
- Choosing the type of content that suits your brand persona
- Defining the right content for your audience and company goals
- Creating content
- Publishing and sharing
There are several types of content marketing formats. It can be blog posts, podcasts, articles, social media ads, promotions, videos, and more. Content is an integral part of any content marketing funnel since you always need a way to communicate with your potential customers. An effective content marketing strategy helps you boost brand awareness, draw more clients, and generate more revenue. Read more about the benefits of content marketing.
You can follow these amazing content marketing tips for a great content marketing strategy.
Content Marketing Tips
We already know that content marketing is the key to helping reach newer heights. But the truth is that it only works when you do it the right way!
Given the competition today, every brand and individual is leveraging content marketing to its full potential. But how to stand out from the crowd? To explore all the secrets of a highly successful strategy, follow these content marketing tips
1. Have A Clear & Measurable Business Goal
If you don’t have established goals, what are you working for?
Having objectives is important, and so is planning for them. Every brand and all content marketing tips and strategies have different goals. They can be anything from creating brand awareness, targeting a certain audience, garnering more revenue, giving a social message, or something similar.
It’s impossible to create a marketing strategy for an absent goal. It’s like trying to find a flying pig. Hence, a set of clear goals should be the primary aim. Without this, moving on further steps is just weird.
2. Know Your Audience
Knowing your audience and putting them first is the best way to communicate with them.
It is one of the most important guidelines for content marketing.
Focusing only on what you want to sell and disregarding what your customers want to consume can be the worst mistake you make as a marketer. It is something that many brands struggle with, and hence, no matter how much effort or resources they put in, it goes down the drain.
Generally speaking, your content marketing efforts should add value to your audience. It could be:
- A solution to a widespread issue
- Thought-leadership
- Tricks or do-it-yourself advice
- Observations and analysis
- Any sort of entertainment
- Tracking and going with the trends
3. Find the Problem to Your Solution
What you call a problem is an opportunity for marketers. The finest marketing works on creating solutions for challenges. And if there isn’t any, they create one!
If your customers are not even aware of your products or services, how will they buy them? Therefore, presenting your product as a solution to a problem is essential. It increases the likelihood that your audience will search for and pay attention to your content. Also, you should form your content in a way that would convince your audience.
When you’ve determined the issue you’re attempting to address; it comes to keyword research. Looking into the highest searched keywords by users can help you get insights, and you’ll know exactly what they need. Given this, you can provide fulfilling content to them.
4. Understand Your Buyer’s Journey
Effective content marketing is all about the approach that captivates and satisfies consumers at any point in the buyer’s journey. Drawing new customers to your brand is one thing and persuading hesitant customers to make a purchase is another. Moreover, create a content marketing strategy focusing on customer retention and long-term loyalty to your brand.
For instance, some buyers may be hesitant to buy your product. It might be because they’re expecting substantial video knowledge to know more. You may make a video campaign to instruct customers on the usage of your products or services. It will allay their fears and support your sales team.
5. Solve For The Reader
Your two main objectives when creating content are educating people and assisting them in solving their problems. Generating leads or encouraging readers to make a purchase is the goal, yes. But you should first build your brand’s reputation as an authority on the subject. Readers can convert and become paying customers after they’ve grown to trust you.
Every content type and piece should provide a solution to the reader by addressing their concerns. Also, providing helpful links and advice is a great approach. After that, gradually introduce your customers to your services and your ability to help.
6. Adopt The Pillar-Cluster Model
Want to enhance the reading experience while boosting SEO? Pillar-cluster strategy is exactly what you need. This concept uses pillar pages to cover broad topics and cluster pages to support those topics. Then, you use internal linking to link all the subjects and let Google know they’re connected.
If you own a web designing business, web design might be your core topic. The pillar page you would create would be titled “The Complete Guide to Web Design.” Then, to complement that overarching topic, you would create pages like “UX Design 101” and “How to leverage HTML & CSS.”
Here’s another example,
The pillar page is ‘What is content marketing?’ and it is quite a broad topic. The cluster pages that support the topic includes content marketing examples, content marketing statistics, content marketing team, learn content marketing and many more. All of these cluster pages have a hyperlink to the pillar page.
7. Target Topics With Search Traffic Potential
It is a part of SEO practice itself. But let’s understand its importance briefly.
Suppose there’s a newly launched game, and it’s the talk of the town. People tend to search related to it more. Take advantage of this if you write on a topic that directly relates to it. You’ll appear in search results of a huge population. Similarly, going with your brand persona, you can track and research what’s trending and holds the potential of getting more searches. Writing on that topic will help you increase traffic to your website, more leads, and maybe better revenue.
8. Focus On Your Competitor’s Well-Performing Topics
To accomplish this, you only need to research a bit. You can look at your competitors’ websites or pages’ best-performing topics. It can be blogs, articles, products, offers, or anything similar.
Taking inspiration from that, you can cover the same thing with a bit of innovation and a better approach. It also provides you ample room for improvement. Though it’s your competitors’ best bet, everything has some disadvantages. You can provide the same thing by adding the things your competitors don’t have. It might attract their audience and let them know you have more to offer.
9. Prioritize Topics Having “Business Potential”
You must set some priorities if you’re looking forward to seeing your business booming. Writing on different topics is great, but focusing on some specific topics can make this possible. These topics are the ones that have some business potential. In other words, choosing topics that directly help your brand and products grow in the market is something you should work on.
For example, if you have a beauty brand, guess which topic will give you the most conversions
- Writing about some random beauty hacks
- Writing about genuine beauty tips concerning how your products promise to deliver them
Hope you know which one!
10. Use Specific Keywords In Your Content
Keyword research is very important in digital marketing or content marketing. It helps you with search rankings and lead generation.
Your audience searches for their solutions whenever they look for something. The most searched terms are the “keywords” you need to leverage. Make a list of these terms or keywords your consumers use the most. It helps you to create a strategy for each stage of the customer journey and content marketing funnel. To find profitable long-tail keyword variations, you can use tools like Google Trends and others.
Whenever you analyze keywords, consider all these points:
- Search volume
- Search intent
- Keyword difficulty
- The effectiveness of related keywords in organic search for your website
- How many linking root domains might you need to access page one?
- Websites ranked on page one according to their domain ratings or domain authority
11. Backup Your Arguments with Data
90% of people love pizza.
You almost believed it, right? Well, that was just a figure to show the data’s importance. As soon as we read some facts and statistics, we believe them. Why wouldn’t we, if it’s from genuine research and source? Having a data backup is a fantastic approach to emphasizing a subject’s significance and supporting your arguments.
By using content marketing statistics and data, you may create a compelling hook and explain why the reader should read the article in the first place. To illustrate how content marketing may help you connect with a sizable portion of the audience, the starting point of this article is an example.
Try to add pie-charts & graphs to your blog content such as the image you can see below. It helps the reader understand the concept better and they are more likely to continue reading it.
12. Ensure Your Content Reflects Your Brand’s Voice
If you’re a marketer, you’d be well versed with buyer’s and reader’s persona. And if you’re new to the game, welcome. It’s a way to represent your brand’s voice and personality. It’s how you show your brand to the world.
Since your brand already has a voice (it’s USP), creating your content according to that should be what you need to focus on. Your content should reflect your brand’s tone so that your audience can relate, suppose you’re a brand dealing in the social sector. All your audience will be either professionals or something similar. They expect a formal tone, but you start writing your content in teenage slang. Well, you can smell the disaster from 16 miles away. But yeah, that’s the point.
13. Don’t Copy Other Blogs
Taking inspiration from others is cool, but copying…not at all! Instead, this can cause you some serious damage. It can turn your audience against you since they’ll feel that you have nothing of your own. And all you can do is copy and paste. We don’t want that. Moreover, you might land in some awful legal situations too.
So saying a big NO to copying is what we suggest. Be fresh, unique, and original. All these words mean the same thing, but you got the emphasis, right? Also, it doesn’t matter if you’re just a struggling brand and others are way too good. Being consistent and polishing your skills with time will bring you better results.
14. Create A Content Calendar
Do you or your team fail to meet deadlines? Say no more. All you need is a content marketing calendar because just a bit of planning can make your work easier and faster than ever. Organizing can help you meet all your deadlines and maintain a smooth workflow and content frequency. Having a calendar means having an outline. It helps you determine everything in advance—for example, the date and time of posting, topics, etc.
This way, you and your team will know about the priorities, deadlines, client’s requirements, and everything else. And work accordingly to complete and meet all your targets easily.
Here is how content calendars look like.
Download more content marketing calendar templates.
15. Write In-Depth Content
Longer content outperforms shorter content in search engines and results. And it’s not what we suggest; the stats say so. Therefore, you should write lengthy content for your website, but it should obviously have relevant information rather than just a cluster of words.
When a reader sets on to reading a 3000-word article, they expect all the information they need. Otherwise, why would they spend their valuable time on it? Given this, the key is to include the smallest details that might help your audience with the particular topic. What to avoid here would be pointless fluff. Nobody is interested in reading the same thing over and over again. Instead, respond to relevant queries. And offer any advice that would enable them to leave with all the knowledge they require. To write converting blog posts, try our free blog post generator.
16. Use Conversational And Simple Language
You can understand what is written in this blog, right? Now imagine if we’d used Shakespearean English here. Would you be able to get the hang of it? It is where language and tone play their part.
Follow any content marketing expert, or read any book. They’ll always tell you to be simple, interesting, and conversational with your language. It is because you are here to communicate with your audience, not teach them a language or show them your proficiency skills. You do it at school and university or when the situation demands. Here, you only need to educate them and make them aware of your brand, product, and service.
17. Avoid Obsessing Over Word Count
It’s the relevancy and information that counts and not the word limit. Long-form blogs do perform better, as we mentioned earlier. But writing only for the sake of compiling 5000 words isn’t something that we would suggest.
Instead of obsessing over word count, you should be obsessing over deep research, tone, readability, and grammatical correctness. Little changes in the word count wouldn’t do much harm, but failing the latter aspects would certainly do. It’s okay to write over or under the limit sometimes. But if your content is crisp, to-the-point, factual, and interesting, it will land you more leads.
18. Optimize For Discoverability (SEO)
In the creative industry, “discoverability” typically refers to being found through algorithmically generated search results or suggestions. It is crucial to comprehend the ideal techniques for search engine optimization (SEO). The following are some fundamental and more complex pointers to help people find your creative work using search and recommendation engines:
Basic Tips-
- Recognize your (your audience’s) linguistic environment
- Deliver the top user experience
- Plan your content creation strategically
- Plan out how you’ll connect with others and distribute your information
- Demonstrate your authority
Advanced Tips-
- Use structured data marking up
- Participate in publicly available data sources
- Demonstrate your “notability.”
- Make the most of Google My Business’s potential
- Make a superb ABOUT US page
19. Rely On Analytics To Track Your Performance
All content marketers understand how important it is to regularly track and evaluate the effectiveness of particular pieces of content. This information will assist in both locating your best-performing content and identifying underperforming content that you can enhance. Even the highest-quality content you produce occasionally fails to connect with your readers. You can use data analytics to uncover the ideal content marketing “recipe” and then use it repeatedly to achieve success.
These are the 6 best metrics to track and analyze your content performance:
- Traffic
- Sales or conversions
- Engagement
- Digital Marketing Strategy
- SEO performance
- Authority
20. Be Consistent With The Content
You must have heard this repeatedly, “consistency is the key.” It sure is. So, use this as one of the content marketing tips that you can’t avoid. It is because, without consistency, you miss out on many things. Content marketing works directly and indirectly based on trends. And to follow them, you must be on your toes every day.
Using basic SEO techniques will ensure that your content is current and relevant to search engines. Time and date are really important in Google search results. Similarly, “keyword+year” also influences your search rankings.
You can take note of these ideas to keep your content fresh and current:
- When optimizing your content, exclude the year out of the URL. Great URLs are the ones that remain the same and unchanged.
- You should rather mention the year in the title of your content.
- You should plan to revisit this content on your editorial schedule once a year to maintain it. It may entail revising the title tag, meta description, and content.
21. Update Old Content
With time, everything changes. And when it’s about content marketing, it can be the stats, trends, names, years, etc. Updating your content comes in handy in this case. Let’s understand it through an example. Suppose you wrote an article on “5 Best Interior Designing Ideas in 2021.” Now it’s 2022, and we have new ideas, technology, trends, and more. So, rather than writing a whole new blog, you can choose to update the existing one by adding and removing a few points. You can do this by eliminating outdated ideas and writing new and quirky ones. You may change the year to the current one to improve search ranking.
22. Ensure Your Brand Voice Remains Steady Across Channels
Both in personal and professional relationships, consistency promotes connection. A consistent brand voice influences consumer decisions by projecting and instilling confidence in your business. Consistent brand identity will make it simpler for people to relate to your business. So how can you keep your brand’s voice consistent?
- Make a style guide for writing.
- Make the style guide simple to access and easy to understand.
- Maintain a consistent revision and editing schedule for your style guide.
- Be true to your brand voice.
- Audit your external communications
Any time you release a new style guide or significantly change your brand voice, there can be a short adjustment period. Yet, you may make the transition as swift and effortless as possible. You can do this by maintaining the rules in a clear, simple, and easy-to-follow manner.
23. Personalize Your Content
Content personalization refers to the practice of customizing content pieces and making them relevant to the target audience. It boosts user happiness and the likelihood of lead generation and conversion.
The technologies behind content personalization are cookies, collaborative filtering, user profiling, and data analysis. You can use these methods to personalize your content:
- Segmentation
- Persona-based content personalization
- Buyer journey-based content personalization
Strategies for content personalization rely on data about potential clients to offer unique experiences. Therefore, any client information is beneficial for increasing the relevance of customized content.
Customer information gathered to offer a tailored experience may include,
- Age group
- Geographical area
- Occupation and sector
- Internet searches
- Accessing data
- Duration and number of visits
- Device type, and more
24. Don’t Stop With Written Formats
At some point, you might wonder if the written format will work anymore. It is because content formats keep changing. Like now, we have podcasts and digital marketing with no written content. And people really love them. So, it’s common to have some second thoughts over written format.
But written content is always more informational. No matter what type of content takes over the market, the written form will always be evergreen. It’s the simplest and most effective format. Thus, you could never go wrong with written content forms.
Know more about why content marketing is important.
25. Design Shareable Images
If this isn’t one of the best content marketing tips, then nothing is!
Social shares help every campaign climb the ladder of success. Hence, designing something people can share and enjoy is a great idea.
Pairing their content with shareable images or even videos is a popular strategy of many digital marketing companies these days. It increases engagement rates, retains audience interest, and boosts conversions.
26. Do Blogger Outreach
Blogger outreach strategically connects with and forms relationships with industry influencers and publishers. It accomplishes a specific goal, such as content marketing and SEO. For example, getting guest posting opportunities, promoting new content, and gaining new backlinks.
Reaching out to bloggers can increase your internet visibility. It is an inexpensive and cost-effective approach. It provides access to new markets and audiences. Additionally, it raises your global visibility and brand trust. With blogger outreach, you can also experiment with different platforms.
A reliable email finder is an essential tool for any blogger who wants to connect with other bloggers and build relationships. By automating the process of finding and verifying email addresses, a reliable email finder makes it easy to connect with bloggers who are likely to be interested in your content. This can help you build relationships with potential readers and followers, and increase the reach of your blog.
27. Add Strong Calls-To-Action (CTAs)
It is a very useful trick from all those content marketing tips mentioned above.
A call to action is a crucial component of every webpage. Links and buttons with a call to action serve as waypoints, instructing users on what to do next. Users could find it difficult to understand how to purchase a product or join up for a service without clear CTAs.
Besides losing money, ignoring CTAs from your marketing approach would be a mistake. They are crucial in guiding a prospect through the sales funnel or process to the following stage. Sometimes those who fail to employ useful CTAs also fail to get conversions even after getting leads.
Some examples of great CTAs are:
- Sign Up Today!
- Limited Time Period
- Try Now
- Learn More
- Get Started
- Try It For Free, etc.
28. A/B Test your content
It is one of the most useful content marketing tips. To ascertain what content is effective, what isn’t, and why, A/B testing is crucial. Track factors like traffic, customer behavior, and conversions, such as headlines, formatting, and content type.
A/B testing is also known as Split testing. It sheds light on user behavior and the components of your content that influence crucial parameters like:
- Conversion and bounce rates
- Consumer confidence
- Revenue creation
29. Know Which Traffic Channels Are Worth It
Would you publish the same content on LinkedIn and Instagram? I doubt it. On your social media platforms, various followers have varied expectations for the content you post. While your professional thoughts belong to LinkedIn, your weekend adventures are better suited for Instagram. You are aware of what to post in your private life.
To communicate the correct messages to the ideal audiences, increase sales & conversions, and improve return on investment, you must optimize. Optimizing your communication for various digital marketing platforms is an excellent deal. Identify which channels would work the best for your content and audience.
30. Repurpose Your Content
Finding ways to reuse existing content will maximize productivity because it takes time and talent to create highly relevant, engaging content. Repurposing content also enables you to connect with new audience. Consider the case where your podcasting crew released a successful episode. Why not write a blog entry about the subject of the episode?
Or perhaps you wrote a blog post that got a lot of traffic; in that case, you might think about producing a YouTube video that addresses the same subject to appeal to viewers who prefer video to text.
By repurposing your content, you’ll give your audience extra opportunities to see it. Your viewers, readers, and fans are occupied. So, if they miss out on your content, a new content promotion plan might prove advantageous to you.
31. Remarket Your Content
Repurposing your content means taking a previously covered subject and adapting it into a new format. Remarketing involves taking previously published content and attempting to re-engage readers who have already interacted with it but failed to convert.
Several factors hamper your content marketing. It can be a bad day, a lack of budget, and much more. You can improve your chances of piquing their interest at the ideal time by purposefully retargeting your content to those who have already expressed interest. And this is what you exactly look forward to.
32. Promote Your Content
Following all those content marketing tips but failing with this one will leave you in square 1 only.
If they hadn’t released a promo for the next Marvel movie, how’d you know it’s releasing soon?
Taking cue from this, your brand, services, and content need a promotion too. Many companies with successful content marketing include content promotion in their strategies. Because what people don’t know about will never sell. You can do it using many ways like:
- Sending an email broadcast
- Engaging with your community
- Paying to promote your content
- Taking the help of digital marketing
- Leveraging social media
- Collaborating with influencers outside of social media
- Ask different brands to include your content
- Writing for other brands, etc.
Bonus: Use content marketing tools to stay organized.
Following these content marketing tips for your content promotion will help you to make it reach a wider audience. And generate more revenue.
Here’s our complete content marketing guide for you
Create A Win-Win Content Strategy
Coming down to the end, we can say that content marketing is a trend that will never get old. It’ll stay evergreen and ever-evolving. But the core principle will always remain the same.
We don’t know what the future of content marketing holds. But we are certain on one point- it is entirely focused on the reader, not the brand.
It’s just a matter of time. But if you keep up with understanding your target audience, meet their requirements, and solve their problems through your content marketing efforts, you’ll surely succeed. And you can also bet on the fact that great initial efforts will bring a legion of brand advocates who’ll effortlessly advertise your brand. You must follow the best content marketing tips, build trust, and outshine your competitors.
FAQs
The best way to do content marketing is by planning and executing. Following the best and proven content marketing tips and researching can make your strategy more efficient.
The four main components of a successful content strategy, according to industry experts, are-
Distribution of the information
User experience
Brand focus
Targeted content production.
Many content marketing tips work. But some of the most important tips are-
Having proper goals
Knowing your audience
Understanding your buyers
Providing solutions to customers
Using the pillar-cluster approach and more