Con­tent mar­ket­ing is con­sid­ered one of the most impor­tant forms of mar­ket­ing when it comes to dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing. In fact, every mar­keter, blog­ger, and busi­ness own­er should know at least the basics of con­tent marketing.

Today, I will share with you 10 Con­tent Mar­ket­ing Tips that you need to fol­low for cre­at­ing an effec­tive con­tent mar­ket­ing strategy.

Content Marketing Tips to follow:

Here are ten Con­tent Mar­ket­ing tips you should use in the con­tent mar­ket­ing strategy.

#1 Write High-Quality Content

Per­haps the most impor­tant part of a good con­tent strat­e­gy is the con­tent itself and pre­cise­ly it’s qual­i­ty. Writ­ing high-qual­i­ty con­tent is cru­cial even if you can’t man­age to write a lot of it in a short peri­od of time

Every­thing you cre­ate (not just writ­ten arti­cles but also images, videos, pod­casts, and so on) should be rel­e­vant to your audi­ence. You want them to be gen­uine­ly inter­est­ed in the things you make. Oth­er­wise, you will quick­ly real­ize that nobody is enjoy­ing the con­tent you put out, so it fails to attract an audience.

At the same time, your con­tent has to be action­able which means it should not only cov­er a top­ic your audi­ence is inter­est­ed in but also bring up cer­tain issues with­in that top­ic. You could say these are the “pain points” of your audience.

You should also try to make your arti­cles longer and your videos just right (depend­ing on your audi­ence). Longer texts tend to be appre­ci­at­ed by search engines more than short­er ones. Make both trend­ing and ever­green con­tent to have a bal­ance between the two.

Cosched­ule has list­ed out its Top Per­form­ing Blog Posts and all those blog posts were greater than 2000 words.

In addi­tion to that, you need to be proac­tive by opti­miz­ing your head­lines and adding a call to action at the end of your arti­cles, videos, or what­ev­er con­tent you cre­ate. Good head­lines can improve your click-through rate while CTAs can increase your con­ver­sion rate.

#2 Set Goals for Yourself

Set­ting goals for your­self in terms of con­tent mar­ket­ing will make you more moti­vat­ed and allow you to track your per­for­mance. You need to have cer­tain pri­or­i­ties that you will stay ded­i­cat­ed to through­out your campaign.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly, many mar­keters often ignore or over­look this part of devel­op­ing their con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy and don’t both­er set­ting goals at all. This is exact­ly why so many dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cam­paigns ulti­mate­ly fail.

To pre­vent such a sit­u­a­tion from hap­pen­ing, sit down and make a list of what your aims are. Do you want to improve brand aware­ness? Or maybe you want to increase con­ver­sions? Or do you want to sim­ply attract more read­ers and get more page views? Think of this carefully.

Through­out your cam­paign, you should also track your content’s per­for­mance and ana­lyze the per­for­mance data you col­lect. Based on how many com­ments your arti­cles got or how many likes your videos have, you will need to decide whether or not you want to be cre­at­ing con­tent about par­tic­u­lar top­ics and in par­tic­u­lar forms.

You could also try A/B test­ing before you actu­al­ly start mar­ket­ing. Many ele­ments of your con­tent such as head­lines, email sub­ject lines, and so on can be first test­ed and used only after you are cer­tain that they will be effec­tive (though this is not mandatory).

#3 Use Content to Sell (and Not)

Con­tent mar­ket­ing is all about pro­mot­ing your web­site or blog, but you could also use it to sell your prod­ucts or ser­vices. Dri­ving leads to your sales fun­nel through this chan­nel will be con­sid­er­ably easy once you fol­low the first and sec­ond tips and make your con­tent action­able while using CTAs.

On the oth­er hand, you don’t want to sound too pro­mo­tion­al because that can dri­ve your audi­ence away quite quick­ly. Try to focus on edu­cat­ing your audi­ence and inform­ing them on the top­ics they are inter­est­ed in. You might also decide to enter­tain your audi­ence (for exam­ple, with the help of fun­ny videos).

Always use a con­ver­sa­tion­al and friend­ly tone and don’t assume that your audi­ence is stu­pid. Explain com­pli­cat­ed con­cepts and infor­ma­tion they prob­a­bly don’t know, but don’t describe gen­er­al con­cepts or small details that are well-known or implied – your audi­ence knows about them already.

The aim here is to find a bal­ance between being a sales­per­son and being a friend­ly teacher or enter­tain­er. Once you find that bal­ance, you will be able to cre­ate high-qual­i­ty con­tent which will be engag­ing and stim­u­lat­ing for your read­ers, view­ers, or listeners.

#4 Offer Value for Free

Some­times it is okay to offer some­thing valu­able for free. You are not always sup­posed to try and sell some­thing to your tar­get audi­ence. Instead, try to loosen up a lit­tle and think of some­thing you could offer to your audi­ence that will valu­able for them but also free of charge. The only thing you could ask for in return could be newslet­ter subscription.

For exam­ple, you just cre­at­ed an e‑book about a sub­ject you have been writ­ing about for a long time now. Instead of try­ing to sell it, offer it for free to any­one who sub­scribes to your email list. If you don’t write e‑books, change it to some­thing else (e.g. check­list, video tuto­r­i­al, etc.)

You could also offer exclu­sive con­tent for those who sub­scribe to your newslet­ter. You could be pub­lish­ing an arti­cle about dif­fer­ent types of soaps but send­ing out an addi­tion­al tuto­r­i­al on how to make your own soap to your email subscribers.

If you are not too keen on giv­ing out free val­ue reg­u­lar­ly, you could do it once in a while with the help of give­aways. For instance, after reach­ing a cer­tain mile­stone such as one thou­sand fol­low­ers on Insta­gram, you could host a give­away with your prod­uct or ser­vice as the prize. Such a tac­tic can also help you get more fol­low­ers faster.

#4 Offer Value for Free

#5 Reach Foreign Markets

One of the biggest advan­tages of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing is that you can reach for­eign audi­ences way eas­i­er than you would with tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing. This is why tak­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ty to go glob­al might be the best deci­sion you will ever make.

To start reach­ing read­ers in dif­fer­ent regions, you will need to trans­late your exist­ing con­tent and the new con­tent you pro­duce into the lan­guages spo­ken in these regions you want to tar­get. You can use a trans­la­tion ser­vice like The Word Point for this because most auto­mat­ic trans­la­tors like Google Trans­la­tor will prob­a­bly give you gibberish.

Like­wise, think of updat­ing your old con­tent to give it anoth­er chance to shine. Some arti­cles that per­formed well before can be updat­ed and pub­lished again with a high like­li­hood that they will per­form well. You could also trans­late them for your inter­na­tion­al read­ers to make them even more useful.

#6 Know Who You Are Writing For

Know­ing and under­stand­ing your tar­get audi­ence will help you achieve a vari­ety of goals all at once. You will start cre­at­ing bet­ter con­tent, become an expert in your niche, improve your online rep­u­ta­tion with the con­tent you cre­ate, and meet and con­nect with oth­er influ­en­tial fig­ures in your industry.

You must not only have buy­er per­sonas built for every seg­ment of your tar­get audi­ence but also know what you are deal­ing with when using dif­fer­ent plat­forms. For exam­ple, one group of your read­ers might be spend­ing their time on Insta­gram while anoth­er one will be on Face­book. These two plat­forms require slight­ly dif­fer­ent con­tent and a dif­fer­ent tactic.

Always pay a lot of atten­tion to your key­word research because it will be the foun­da­tion and which you build your cam­paign. The key­words (and the hash­tags) you use will deter­mine the kinds of peo­ple that will dis­cov­er your content.

After fig­ur­ing out which chan­nel is best for what, elim­i­nate the ones that don’t work for you. Obvi­ous­ly, you will want to keep your main ones such as your blog or web­site, but not every­one needs to have an account on every social media plat­form, for example.

Get your pri­or­i­ties straight, set­tle down with sev­er­al chan­nels, and start putting all of your effort into them. Focus on the most effec­tive parts because that’s where you will get most of the engage­ment from.

#7 Get Additional Exposure

Get­ting addi­tion­al expo­sure is always great because it helps you increase brand aware­ness and attract more read­ers. Try these things to help you get more exposure:

  • Make it easy for your audi­ence to share your con­tent by adding social media shar­ing but­tons onto your web­site or blog. This way, you will make it eas­i­er for your read­ers or view­ers to take action.
  • Coor­di­nate your activ­i­ty on var­i­ous chan­nels and make sure that they are all a part of your con­tent mar­ket­ing cam­paign. You want the con­tent you cre­ate to be high­light­ed on every plat­form you use so that more peo­ple get to know about it.
  • Start post­ing to Medi­um or a sim­i­lar web­site. It is not exact­ly a social media plat­form, but you could say that it is quite sim­i­lar. This chan­nel is often under­es­ti­mat­ed but it can actu­al­ly bring a lot of traf­fic to your blog or website.

#8 Benefit from User-Generated Content

User-gen­er­at­ed con­tent or UGC can make your life much eas­i­er because you won’t have to cre­ate the con­tent you want to share. By hunt­ing down UGC about your blog or web­site such as reviews or feed­back, you can not only improve your rep­u­ta­tion but also grow as an author­i­ty fig­ure in your niche.

You could also con­sid­er influ­encer mar­ket­ing or sim­ply col­lab­o­rat­ing with influ­encers. They already have a cer­tain rep­u­ta­tion and author­i­ty over a par­tic­u­lar group of peo­ple that could be then par­tial­ly trans­ferred to you sim­ply by the influ­encers say­ing a few good words about you. You get expo­sure, poten­tial cus­tomers, and a rep­u­ta­tion boost.

When work­ing with UGC, you should also keep in mind that it is not always nec­es­sary to repub­lish this con­tent or share it on your plat­form. Instead, you can sim­ply respond to it and start a con­ver­sa­tion with your past cus­tomer or prospect. Social inter­ac­tions online will be quite ben­e­fi­cial for you.

#9 Create a Posting Schedule

A post­ing sched­ule is anoth­er thing that could make your life much eas­i­er as a con­tent mar­keter. Just like set­ting goals for your­self, it will help you stay moti­vat­ed and focused on what is impor­tant for you rather than diverg­ing from your main aim. It will also ensure that you post con­sis­tent­ly and regularly.

When cre­at­ing a post­ing sched­ule, think of how often you want to be post­ing, at what time of the day you will be post­ing, and which chan­nels you will be using. It is also a good idea to cre­ate a set of guide­lines for your­self about some con­tent stan­dards that will ensure that you have con­tent in a cer­tain for­mat that meets par­tic­u­lar qual­i­ty minimums.

A post­ing sched­ule could also lat­er act as a cal­en­dar for you. Not only will you see the upcom­ing arti­cles or videos that should be pub­lished but you will also be able to go back and check what was post­ed on which day and then check how well it performed.

#10 Build Your Link Profile

Last but not least, you need to work on build­ing your link pro­file, and con­tent mar­ket­ing can help you with it. Hav­ing many inter­nal and exter­nal links to and from your web­site or blog will make search engines rank your site high­er in search results and you will even­tu­al­ly get way more traf­fic, more read­ers, and more conversions.

When writ­ing arti­cles, include links to the sources where you took some data from as well as to use­ful resources about the con­cepts you are writ­ing about. Always link to some pages of your own too to have inter­nal links and nev­er direct your read­ers away from your website.

At the same time, you want to have oth­er web­sites link­ing back to you. You can’t force any­one to do it, of course, but you could adopt some tac­tics that would lead to oth­ers link­ing to you. Hav­ing high-qual­i­ty con­tent on dif­fer­ent top­ics will prompt oth­er web­sites to link to these arti­cles of yours (as well as videos, pod­casts, info­graph­ics, and so on).

You could also con­sid­er guest post­ing for get­ting back­links, but you have to remem­ber that not every web­site will allow you to link back to your site or blog, so you need to find out this infor­ma­tion beforehand.

Final Thoughts

All in all, con­tent mar­ket­ing can become fair­ly easy once you prac­tice enough and get used to the dif­fer­ent tech­niques used in it. Use the tips from this arti­cle to opti­mize your con­tent mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy and make it more effective.

SOURCE: Online­Rock­er­sHub