With over 500 million blogs over the internet, content marketing has grown exponentially! But like all great marketing channels, content marketing has become a saturated space and is less effective today than it was 10 years ago.
So, should this space be abandoned altogether? Well, if you decide so, just remember that not only will you miss out on a lot of leads but you will also be swallowed up by your competition that knows how to leverage content marketing well.
In this post, we are going to provide you with 30 effective and actionable tips to not only get the most out of your content marketing but also how to level up your performance.
Coupled with insider tips, we will prove to you that not only content marketing works, but also that it continues to be one of the strongest strategies to drive conversions.
- Check for Grammatical Errors
Nothing dips your credibility as badly as grammatical errors. They will not only make you look silly to your potential customers but you may also see a drop in rankings. Google wants to deliver authoritative results and nothing is more of a damper on that thought than misspellings and grammatical errors.
You can use spellchecks in Word, Google, WordPress or practically any writing software. But what if you’re not a writer? Try a content writing service like EssayGeeks. If you are a decent writer, but just need a little push in the correct direction, you can use Grammarly.
2) Write Relevant and Actionable Content
In order to be a great marketer, you need to understand your customer well. You should know your customer’s problems and pain points like the back of your hand.
And to truly develop a piece of content that is relevant and useful to your customer, make sure that it is actionable. Give them the specific steps and tools they need. Help them replicate the steps. Make sure that every advice you offer to the customer is actionable, like the ones in this article.
3) Develop Content Marketing Goals
A surprising statistic from a study by CoSchedule showed that 26% of marketers don’t have a marketing goal. Of those that do, only about half are meeting their goals fairly often.
Noah Kaga of AppSumo asks, in reference to having one company goal, before completing any task, “Is this task going to get us closer to our company goal?” If the answer is no, don’t do it.
Always ponder upon what you are trying to accomplish by creating and promoting your content with your company’s goal in mind. Is your goal brand awareness? More sales? From there, pick a topic and plan out the content.
4) Offer FREE Value through Your Content
The one word today’s customers most want to hear is ‘Free’. While other marketers and brands keep on asking for money in return, you can offer free tools and high-quality information to build your brand.
There is a definite ROI on free value. Neil Patel offering an entire tool for free is proof enough of this. The tool we are referring to here is Ubersuggest, a keyword research tool.
Consider offering your own content like in-depth, downloadable guide for free or building your own useful tool. Another example is ClickFlow, a tool that lets you test the effectiveness of each page (or groups of pages) to increase your organic traffic without the hassle of building links or writing more content.
5) Use Content to Drive Leads into Your Sales Funnel
From pulling customers into that initial stage (TOFU) to getting them to buy your product, content marketing is absolutely crucial to driving sales.
Start by creating content that raises awareness, maybe through a video, blog post or infographic. Capture the reader’s attention to move them into the next stage (MOFU). This can be done by asking for an email address before providing access to gated content. Be aware of how your prospect is feeling at each stage in your marketing funnel and adjust your content to reflect that.
6) Keep in Mind that Longer Content Performs Better
Longer content is more eye-grabbing. By contributing to higher rankings, it also works on increasing conversion rates.
A study showed that when they A/B tested landing pages, the longer ones not only performed better, but also had more qualified leads.
But why does long form content work better?
Usually, a blog post of around 2,500 words will:
- Capture attention
- Offer more relevant information
- Incorporate more keywords and SEO optimization
- Develop authority of the website that published it
7) Understand Your Target Audience (and Buyer Persona)
Any marketing campaign needs to be directed towards a specific target audience. Its wishful thinking to want every single person in the world to be your ideal customer because that’s rarely the case. It is imperative to understand whom you’re creating content for – and figure that out before trying to sell anything.
Failing to understand your target buyer, or buyer persona, is a costly mistake that will result in wasted energy, time and money.
8) Gain Authority Links with Guest Posting
Guest posting is an amazing way to spread your reach and familiarise people with your brand. Think about it, if one of your friends introduced you to their friend, you are no longer complete strangers.
Guest posting lets you tap into the host blog’s whole new network and promote your brand. If they have a strong and loyal following, you should get a pretty good ROI and be able to bring a lot of new eyes to your post for cheap.
9) Optimize all Your Headlines
David Ogilvy once said: “On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
But if you don’t get people to click through your headlines, you will never be able to convert them into your customers.
Click-through rate (CTR) is a direct ranking factor. If Google notices that people aren’t clicking through, you will begin to see a drop in rankings. While it is good to include your main keyword in the title, don’t over optimize either.
10) Offer Exclusive Content to Your Email List
Offering an ROI of 4400%, email is one of the most powerful marketing channels that you should be leveraging, primarily because the people on your list are already your fan.
If you aren’t offering great and exclusive content to your subscribers, you could lose them because of the failure to make them feel special. By not giving them the best of the best information, you could drive them to opt out.
If you want to take it a step further, try segmenting your emails. According to a study conducted by the Campaign Institute, that segmented campaigns produced a 760% increase in revenue. That added level of personalization goes a long way.
11) Maintain a Content Calendar
Content marketing without consistency will bring fewer results. It is just like a fitness schedule that is not performed on a regular basis.
In order to build your reputation, you should create and share qualitative content consistently, and the best way to organize this intimidating task is through a editorial calendar. If you have a small budget, you can do this with a simple Excel Sheets spreadsheet. Other tools available are:
- CoSchedule– editorial calendar
- WordPress– editorial calendar
- Asana– project management and editorial calendar
- Trello– project management tool
- MeetEdgar– social media post scheduler
- Buffer– social media automation tool
12) Make Social Sharing on Your Blog Easy
One of the easiest hacks to implement, adding visually attractive and well-placed social sharing buttons will serve as an easy, time-saving way to encourage people to share your article if they like it.
On the Single Grain blog, each post has a floating social sharing column that follows you as you scroll down, so it’s always right there:
Another good idea is adding a Call-to-Action option at the end of an article, urging readers to share your content on social media.
Also, try including Tweetable quotes when possible, and make them worth quoting.
13) Go Omni Channel
Use the Content Sprout Method and take advantage of one great piece of content to make others like it. Instead of creating a million different pieces, convert one medium of content into another: like turn your video into a blog post, or a podcast. Maybe compile the statistics or steps into an infographic.
This works well because it takes into account the individual preferences of readers when it comes to the content medium. So, if one person doesn’t enjoy reading particularly, they can easily watch a video of the same.
14) Know What Form of Content Each Social Platform Is Best For
Each kind of social media channel varies slightly in their preferred form of content. For example, YouTube is obviously the best place for video content, Twitter is great for a one-sentence teaser and a link back to your blog, Instagram and Pinterest are great for visual content, etc.
15) Post to Medium
This is a tactic that is often overlooked, but it is an amazing way to get more traffic to your site. Medium is free to post on and provides a wealth of information on a variety of topics.
To optimize for the highest CTR to your website, only post the first several paragraphs of your article and make the reader click to your website to read the rest.
If you want to really take it to the next level, make sure that you optimize your dated posts. Refresh your old ideas, images/screenshots and stats (and, of course, all links) to make it more relevant to the current year.
16) Update Old Content
Speaking of optimizing your older posts, it is extremely important to keep updating your content. In this fast paced world, a year or two is all it takes for your content to become outdated. Or it might be ranking for keywords that you were not initially targeting.
Rather than going through the hassle of writing an entirely new post, a better idea is to just update it. That way you don’t lose any SEO juice on the original URL.
Updating older, well-performing content involves:
- Performing some research to see what has changed on the topic
- Rewriting parts of the article to reflect these updates
- Citing new, authoritative sources
- Making sure that all the links are working and updated
- Replacing any obviously outdated images
- Refreshing the intro and conclusion
How to find out which blog posts to update?
This can be done by conducting a thorough content audit on an annual basis to discover any insights into your blog and content marketing strategy.
17) Your Content + Influencer’s Quote = Positive Results
Approach an influencer whom you believe would be interested in and also represent your content, brand’s values or ideas. Influencer Marketing is positioned to become a $5-10 billion industry in the future.
Any companies or brands that are already aware of this have begun investing in influencer marketing campaigns and have generated up to a 520% return on investment!
Following are some more juicy stats on the subject:
- On average, businesses generate $6.50 for every $1 invested in influencer marketing.
- 81% of marketers who have used influencer marketing judged it to be effective.
- 51% of marketers believe they get better customers from influencer marketing.
Another easy tactic is to get an opinion on the same matter that your content discusses. Publish some quality articles with some quotes from known influencers in your space, and you’ll reap amazing benefits.
18) Use an Influencer for Better Content Exposure
Another option is to get an influencer to promote your content to their audience. But before committing to this, make sure that you do some proper research. Analyse the influencer’s audience, engagement and their trustworthiness. This could be the difference between good and bad influencer marketing.
YouTube influencers are probably the most popular, but that’s not your only option. The main types of influencers include:
- Celebrity Influencers
- Authority Influencers
- Social Media “Sensations”
- Micro-Influencers
- Bloggers
Because 44.44% of influencers feel that brands aren’t providing them with fair compensation, stand out from the competition by treating your influencers well and reap the benefits of a mutually beneficial arrangement. Remember, influencers can make or break your reputation.
19) Pay a Lot of Attention to Your Keyword Research
Keyword research is super important because the better you rank for specific keywords, the better you’ll perform in the SERPs.
Choosing the right keywords can attract the right audience, which could propel your content marketing strategy into the largest driver of new customers for your business.
To quote Ann Smarty:
“What are people who are interested in your niche looking for? What questions do they have? What do they like? What do they read? Keywords offer a lot of insight into these factors, giving you a glimpse into the common searches that your audience is performing. The goal is to see what they want and then provide it.”
20) Educate Instead of Trying to Sell
Your content should have a clear purpose. Bring the prospect from uninterested, to interested and to finally a customer.
The best way to do this is to first educate your prospect before pitching a sale.
One very good example of this is Ramit Sethi’s company, I Will Teach You To Be Rich: He does not offer any of his courses online, so even if you wanted to buy his courses, you can’t. First, he warms you up in an email sequence and provides a ton of valuable information for you up front – no strings attached. It’s only after a period of time that he will offer you the course. And it works. In one day alone he made $400,000!
21) Pay Attention to the Analytics
The success of your content marketing campaign can be checked through analytics. The statistics will help you optimize and eventually scale your efforts.
Analytics are needed to see where people are dropping odd in the sales funnel.
More often than not, you’ll find patterns and “winning” content. This will help you judge what works and what doesn’t.
22) Leverage Data to Optimize Your Content
To deliver the best possible products or services, every company tries to create a buyer persona through data collected. Doing this will boost your sales because you won’t just be pushing your products at everyone, you’ll be able to target specific people with specific offers, making it more probable that you will get the sale.
Do the same with your content: use the information your target audience shares with you to better satisfy their needs and problems.
23) Produce Both Evergreen and Trending Content
Both evergreen and trending content are worthy of your attention, but as a rule of thumb focus 70% of your efforts on the evergreen subjects and 30% on trending topics.
Make no mistake – if there’s a hot topic in your space, write about it. The point is to ensure that you’re not churning out the same content that everyone else is by providing your own unique angle, statistics or research that your company has gathered, or writing truly 10x content about it.
The advantage of evergreen topics is that you will be able to keep updating it every year and get a lot more mileage out of it with a lot less work.
24) Use Conversational and Simple Language
Most people don’t get excited about reading a textbook, but they do get excited about having a conversation with a friend. Hence, you should write with a conversational tone, not a monotone.
This will help you create a unique voice for your brand too. If you’re a funky startup, you can “chat” with your readers and use casual jargon. If you’re an accounting firm, you’ll want to sound professional, but you can make the topic more palatable with cool examples and easy-to-understand language.
25) Engage with Your Prospects as Much as Possible
This is like a friendship. The more you talk, the stronger the relationship becomes. Your content is a great tool that can serve you well in this regard.
While writing articles, for example, or when recording videos, address your audience directly. Use the second person (“you,” “your”) and ask them a lot of questions. Encourage them to deliver their answers in the comments, through an email, or on your brand’s Facebook page (and be sure to respond quickly!). Frequently interact with them. \
Make it less obvious that you are asking for comments. For example, on YouTube don’t say the words “leave a comment below”. Instead make it more natural by saying something like “let me know what you think of…”
26) Offer Strong Calls-to-Action (CTAs)
People generally don’t do stuff unless you ask them too. So next time you want to them to like your social media page, ask them for a page like.
When you need more subscribers, create a strong call-to-action that encourages sign-ups. The trick to an effective CTA button is to inform the user why it’s in their interest.
Here are a couple factors that will change the CTR of your CTA:
- Location
- Color
- Copy
- Value Prop
Whenever in doubt about some element of the content, test it! The numbers never lie. Here are a couple of things you can and should be A/B tested:
- Headlines/Title Tags
- Various Opt-ins and CTAs
- Content Formats
- Image Types
- Content Length
Google offers a free A/B testing software, or you can use other paid tools, like Crazy Egg. Make sure to give ample time to the A/B test, and don’t change too many things at once.
28) Understand Which Traffic Channels Are Worth It
Your content may not be worth posting everywhere.
Some traffic channels will be hard to leverage, so it’s much wiser to focus your energy on the platforms that bring increased results.
To get an idea of which channel is best for you take a look at the channels your competitors are using. If they are investing money in them, there must be some benefit to those channels.
You need to test, test and test again. Figure out which channels work best for your brand/product and then double down on them.
29) Use the 80/20 Rule to Optimize Your Content Marketing
Pareto’s Principle states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
In the context of content marketing, you should figure out which 20% of the content you’re creating generates 80% of your overall results.
You can test mediums, post formats or topic clusters through this method. Then the 80% of your work should be promoting that 10x content found.
30) Keep Up with the Marketplace
The digital environment changes every day and the speed of this progress is phenomenal. Hence, online marketers fall behind very easily. They remain stuck on something that used to work. As technology and techniques advance, the marketplace will inevitably fluctuate.
As a content marketer, you need to pay attention to what’s going on and be one step ahead of your audience. Figure out the latest rules, trends, disasters, technologies and topics.
Takeaway
Content Marketing done right inevitably works. That’s why so many people depend on it. The key to ensure that it continues to work is by leveraging new and innovative tactics like setting clearer content marketing goals and A/B testing various content and so on. Separating yourself from the usual humdrum of the content mill and into a customer-focused strategy is how you will make content marketing work best for your business!