Today, millions of consumers are online at any given time, providing your brand with ample opportunities to connect, engage, and win many of them over.
The question is, though, how do you break through all the noise and crowds online to reach them, your targeted audience?
While SEO measures will help, it’s your content marketing strategy that will get you noticed, increase brand awareness, and lead to an escalation in conversion rates.
Content marketing is the way in which you create, distribute, and manage your online content. Its purpose is to reach your target audiences where they are and with what they need.
Because of these lofty goals, your content needs to be the best it can be, and your strategy needs to be well-defined to be successful.
Whether you’re new to content marketing or already a pro, consider the following content marketing tips to help you meet those goals and improve your results.
1. Understand Your Target Audience
At the center of content marketing is attracting a certain audience that will engage with your particular brand and make purchases.
So, before writing or strategizing your content, consider and understand who your targeted audience is and what they need.
Create buyer personas and walk with them through the entire buyer’s journey. Get to know them on a personal level so you can create content that will speak directly to them.
2. Create Content for the Three Stages of the Buyer’s Journey
Once you understand your target audience, don’t focus on just one part of their buyer’s journey. Instead, create content specifically for each stage.
Awareness stage
Provide educational content for first interactions (e.g., blog posts, videos, social media posts, podcasts).
Engagement stage
Produce informative, more personalized content and begin to showcase your products or services and how they can provide a solution. (e.g., webinars, ebooks, email marketing campaigns).
Conversion Stage
Utilize your content to show how your brand rises above the competition and better solves their problem. Also, include a call to action so they can conveniently become customers right away (e.g., case studies, demos).
3. Focus on Building Trust and Authority with Your Content
Today consumers are looking for brands they can trust and who can be an authority surrounding the problems, issues, or interests they experience.
To accomplish this, focus on how you can inform or educate them on solving that problem or issue or feed that interest.
Take an empathetic approach to show you understand where they are coming from and how you can help.
In other words, resist the hard-selling approach. Keep the selling mindset at bay.
Become a trustworthy source first; then, you can factor in more persuasive content that moves them toward conversion.
4. Write Long-Form, Evergreen Content
More is not often better, particularly when it comes to the content you share with readers online.
For optimal results, include more long-form, evergreen content, and limit short-form and trending content.
Longer content not only performs better for search engine algorithms and improves your SEO efforts, but it also attracts and retains a dedicated audience.
Creating content that is evergreen, or long-lasting, will be the most valuable use of your time and marketing budget.
The reason for this is that that type of content continues to be relevant over time and will not cease to be valuable in the short term.
Evergreen content will also continue to attract and engage new viewers.
5. Maintain Brand Voice Consistency
Make your brand recognizable across the various marketing channels by ensuring you maintain brand voice consistency.
Align your brand’s messaging, and ensure all content follows suit and reflects the same voice.
To help with this, develop brand guidelines and editorial standards and share these with your entire team, including writers, editors, graphic designers, animators, and managers.
Your organization might even want to take it further and devise a full-scale content governance plan to track and manage your content marketing strategy.
6. Vary Content types
No longer are you tied down to text-only formats for your content offerings.
Today’s consumers like variety, and it’s easier than ever to create various types of content to reach them. Popular formats today include:
- Videos (short and long-form)
- Infographics
- Podcasts
- Interactive content, including eBooks, lookbooks, and quizzes
- Webinars
- Case studies
- White papers
Determine which of these content types will be most beneficial to your target audiences and for your marketing needs, and don’t be afraid to branch out.
7. Make the Readability of Your Content a Priority
Today there are numerous benefits for making the readability of your content a priority.
Readability is the ease with which consumers can comprehend your content.
You can accomplish optimal readability by avoiding complicated words, long sentences, and long paragraphs. Write clearly and pay attention to your formatting.
The readability of your content can directly impact your SEO simply by keeping readers on your page longer.
In addition, with the rise in voice search, you want your text to be as clear as possible so you can easily be found. Google will factor this into your rankings.
There are beneficial online tools to help you create and analyze your text for readability, including Yoast SEO, SEMrush, and Grammarly.
8. Let Analytics Inform and Guide You on How to Improve Content
Almost as important as producing good content is knowing how to track and analyze its results in reaching the right audiences.
While you may think your content is perfect, analytics can tell you differently.
If viewers are not converting or choose to move on swiftly from your webpage content, it’s time to let analytics inform and guide you.
Without utilizing analytics, your content may be sitting out there with little traffic or effect. In other words, it’s not doing anything for your brand.
When you use analytics to analyze your content’s performance, you can determine what is and isn’t working and identify what needs improving.
The information you discover from analytics also helps you adjust, refine, or re-do parts of your strategy.
To accomplish this, you can use Google Analytics, social media analytics, and paid tools online.
9. Develop a Content Calendar
To keep your marketing team on track and organized, consider creating a content calendar.
The main purpose of this type of calendar is to keep everyone involved and informed and also make sure your content is consistent.
It’s all up to you and the team to determine how detailed or complex the calendar will be, but consider including the following:
- Project timelines
- Keywords (primary, secondary, etc.)
- Due dates
- Distribution channels (social media, blogs)
- Team members and their assignments
- Other content details
To further enhance your strategy, consider also creating a content matrix to discover where the gaps lie in your content offerings.
10. Get Creative in Repurposing Content
Not every bit of content you put out there needs to be completely new. Instead, consider how you can repurpose your content for different channels.
By creatively repurposing content, you can share your message in different ways.
For example, why not repurpose a popular blog post into an infographic, downloadable resource (guide, checklist), or a short webinar?
Maybe you have a successful podcast. If so, turn an episode into a blog post or infographic. You can also capture quotes from the episode and create social media posts with them.
Essentially, repurposing your content not only gets your message out in a variety of ways, but it also saves you valuable time and effort.
11. Utilize Multiple Distribution Methods
Once you have your content, it’s time to consider the multiple distribution methods and channels you have available.
There are numerous ways today to promote your content and numerous digital marketing channels on which to do so.
First, consider your owned channels, such as your website, email list, and social platform accounts.
Next, consider any earned channels like guest blogging or influencer partnerships. Finally, you may want to consider paid channels to promote your content.
Wrap Up: Content Marketing Tips Can Improve Results
Content marketing continues to serve as one of the most essential elements to finding, informing, educating, and converting customers online today.
Creating the best content you can takes work, and with these content marketing tips, you can drastically improve the results without wasting valuable time and resources.
Ensure your content fits the needs of your target audience along their buyer’s journey, keep your strategy organized with a content calendar, find creative and helpful ways to repurpose content, choose multiple distribution methods, and track performance to help you adjust when needed. Then, watch as your results improve.
Not sure where to start? No problem! WriterAccess is the perfect platform to help you streamline your content production, combining the efficiency of AI with the creativity of human writers.
Why not give WriterAccess a try today? Sign up now and get 14 days of free access to our network of expert writers. Discover for yourself what great content can do for your business!
