Ever feel as if something is missing in your marketing strategy?
If you are producing content regularly and are not seeing corresponding grains in SERP and traffic, you might need to revisit your content marketing strategy. Start by making sure everything is aligned with the latest trends. Next, your content creation processes should help in creating content that appeals to your audience.
When doing the review, make sure you cover all aspects of the process, from content creation to distribution of content through your preferred marketing channels.
An important reason why your content might not be performing as intended is the challenge of distribution through social media platforms. For example, you might post the updates conveniently to you while overlooking the fact that your target audience might keep a different schedule. Many brands face this challenge, and the solution is a social media scheduling tool that takes care of the posting and distribution on your behalf.
Understanding your audience and generating content the way they like is hard work. But it is worth it because of the direct impact on the traffic and sales.
So if you haven’t already done it, start by building an audience profile. Next, discover their pain points and create content around them. For this, you can leverage popular digital marketing tools such as Ahrefs and BuzzSumo to find trending topics that resonate with the audience.
Before we move any further, it’s essential to understand what content marketing is and why it has become crucial for the success of brands.
A Short Primer to Content Marketing
It might surprise many, but content marketing has been around for a very long time. However, many brands still face difficulty planning and executing successful content marketing campaigns, with a predictable impact on their marketing ROI.
Content marketing is the process of showcasing a diverse range of information to the target audience without doing complex sales. As such, it is one of the best ways to boost your traffic and give your customers what they have been looking for.
Consider Coca-Cola, perhaps the most recognizable brand in the world.
Ever notice how Coca-Cola never fails to impress people with its fantastic content campaigns. For example, consider their campaign where they introduced bottles with common names printed on them. Now, who doesn’t want to buy a bottle with their name? That is a perfect way to promote your brand with straightforward content marketing campaigns.
Another amazing thing about Coca Cola campaigns is the fact that they create a piece of content and use it for cross posting on multiple channels. This enables them to extend the shelf life of the piece and use it to its maximum potential.
Great digital marketers know how to create attention-grabbing content that relates to the target audience. They know how to market it to their audience in extraordinary ways to fulfill customer needs and queries. In addition, they understand the process of using social media platforms to reach out to the right audience.
Pro tip: Understand your audience and their requirements, Keep track of post analytics and be ready to update the content to ensure consistent performance.
Before jumping on what kind of content you can create for your audience, let us first go through the essential qualities of good content. If you could bring all your content to this baseline, you will see a significant jump in your traffic and SERP positions!
The Qualities of Good Content
Generally, three qualities differentiate good content from mediocre.
First of all, good content can grab the reader’s attention. In technical terms, this means that a good piece of content has a lower bounce rate and higher click-through rate. Over time, these two metrics are easy to track, and you would see good performing content as the hub that diverts a good chunk of your traffic to the other landing pages on the website.
Secondly, all good content pieces deliver actionable advice that users can use to fix their problems. This advice can be directly applicable or provides new ideas that the readers can use to narrow down possible solutions.
Lastly, you most definitely need the right audience on your platform to market that content, try using platform-specific tools, such as a LinkedIn automation tool to build the right set of connections on your profile.
All campaigns based on great content have a higher-than-usual impact on the traffic and sales numbers. This is the direct outcome of producing content that addresses pain points and presents solutions rather than a sales pitch. As a result, visitors start to prefer your brand over the competition as a great source of information.
Content Marketing Tips And Tricks
Now you know what great content looks like, you should now understand the four core components of content marketing to have a good idea of how to produce content that has a visible impact on your marketing ROI. In effect, you should focus on:
- Brand positioning
- Owned media value proposition
- Business cases
- Strategic planning
- Cross posting content on various channels
Let’s discuss the five tips and tricks of content marketing.
Produce Captivating Visuals
You might not remember the text, but visuals remain at the back of your mind for a long time. If your content is just huge blocks of text without pretty visuals the audience will leave because of the monotony. Visuals capture the eyes and force the readers to concentrate on the associated text blocks.
This is particularly important for the content produced for social media because all social media platform feeds are a continuous line of text and images. Therefore, you need to use all your creativity to make sure your visuals compel the visitors to click your link.
Don’t Be a Bore
Brands, particularly those with pretty technical products, produce heavy content on text and has little appeal for the readers. As a result, they do not see much success with content marketing campaigns.
The complexity of the product is no excuse for producing content that does not appeal to the readers. While it might be difficult to water down technical details, the content itself should be appealing and easy to follow.
Opt for a professional tone that does not scare away the readers. In many cases, this is easy enough if you target a non-technical audience through your content. This might need more effort, but the impact is worth it.
A good example is the content produced by Google itself. If you follow any product blog, you will see that Google uses a friendly tone to retain the reader’s interest.
Produce a Range of Content
If you are writing on the same set of topics and publishing the same old content again, you will quickly see the negative impact on your traffic. People love variety, and the same content ideas could mean that they would not find any fresh thoughts from your side.
Try out some new things by following the trends in your niche. Create content for brand awareness so that more and more people discover your services or products. Experiment with content formats to check out which ones can get the maximum reach.
Upgrade Old Content
Every content has an expiry date. But visitors generally do not forget good content.
The best way to sustain your content health is to republish it. Reposting or republishing your content isn’t time-consuming. However, you need to add things that spice it up for the readers.
Many marketers know how to spin their content and reuse it later. When your content is good to go, replace all dead links with the new ones so that Google gives it more points for freshness.
Focus on Headlines
It only takes 2.5 seconds to get the attention of the readers. A catchy headline is half the work in producing a good content piece. It is often the headline that compels the readers to click open the article.
You can use a headline checker tool to increase the click rate. Make sure the headline follows the right combination of power words and emotions.
Conclusion
Understanding the tips and getting your hands over it is the real win-win moment. Choosing the right platform and generating the relevant content matters the most. You can target your potential customers if only you know the right direction!
Suppose your audience and customers do not understand the type of content you share.
In that case, it’s just like you speak French. And your audience or customer says and understands English. But you are generating content in your language – or another example; your customers may ask “How?” and you are replying with “Why?” – Is it doing justice with your customer’s queries? Not at all!
First, learn to use the new strategies in your content marketing. Know your customers through analytics and engagement on posts. Then hit your audience with the most accurate content.
By developing a strong connection and understanding with your customers, you can win your customers’ loyalty to their business.
