ephas
26 October 2021
Content marketing focuses on creating and publishing relevant and valuable content to a targeted audience, resulting in an action from the user. Content marketing is a marketing strategy that is critical for the sustainable, long-term growth of a business. Many marketers often do not know how effectively to formulate and implement a content marketing strategy.
Here are 8 great content marketing tips to help you execute a content marketing strategy successfully.
Know your audience
The objective of content marketing is to attract the right audience. Your content must reach out to those who are most likely to buy products from you. For this, you must know your audience first.
Though it will be helpful to interview everyone who’s ever done business with you, it is a strenuous task that is impractical. Here, creating a buyer persona helps. It refers to the profile of your ideal customer for your products. A buyer persona document is created based on your intended audience’s demographic and psychographic information.
A clear understanding of your audience helps you craft relevant content that engages them well through the buyer’s journey.
Understand your buyers’ journey
Your content must delight the customer and engage them at all the stages of the buyer’s journey. Initial stage content should attract visitors, then convince them. At later stages, the content should aim for customer action and retention and go after instilling long-term brand loyalty.
Adopt the pillar-cluster model
The pillar-cluster model helps you organise your content to offer a better reading experience to your audience, which also improves Search Engine Optimisation. Here, a pillar page focuses on an umbrella topic, and there are cluster pages that cover the topic details. Then internal linking is used to connect the pillar page and the cluster pages to inform Google that they all are related.
Set measurable goals
Like any other marketing strategy, or any strategy for that matter, content marketing strategy also requires concrete goals. Before you begin, you must be clear about what you want to accomplish.
Here are some examples of content marketing goals:
- Increase traffic
- Generate sign-ups
- Boost social media shares
- Increase conversion
- Increase the number of first-time visitors
- Increase the number of targeted visitors
Track your performance using analytics
Content quality is important but it is of little value if it doesn’t lead to conversion. Here comes the analytics to help you gauge what content is working and what is not and throw light on what could work better.
Such analytics enables you to monitor, track, analyse, and generate reports with key metrics for content performance measurement. Analytics give you in numbers the information about traffic, conversion rates, etc., to help you allocate your time and efforts wisely on creating content about which your users are interested.
Render consistent and up-to-date content
Incorporate SEO tactics to make sure that your content is up-to-date for search engines. Following tips help you achieve that:
- When optimising your content, do not use the year in the URL. Effective URLs rarely change.
- Let the title of your content have the year in it.
- Use your editorial calendar for scheduling content revisits to update the title tag and meta description. Updating the content itself is even better. This approach keeps the content up to date.
- Where possible, URLs should not be updated when implementing an optimisation strategy. This fact avoids unnecessary redirects.
Publishing consistent content improves your search engine rankings and will also earn the trust of your audience.
Personalise your content
Personalising your content is important for the success of your content marketing efforts. You can control which users see which content by personalising your content based on the pages a user has visited, spent time on, navigation activity, etc.
Personalisation can be done based on the device and the buyer’s persona. Things like reorder buttons, popups with call-to-action all help the personalisation process.
Content mapping helps content strategists identify which content matches which buyer persona at what stages of the buyer journey. Personalisation software is available to show certain content, trigger certain user actions, and send personalised emails.
Creative content marketing services providers offer professional assistance to craft content that leads to conversion.
Use specific keywords
If you do not incorporate keyword-targeting in your content marketing strategy, you will most likely lose out to your competitors who are doing it. It is wise to include target-specific keywords in your content.
A couple more tips that could help
- Your content should answer complex queries your customers may have. It should solve their problems. Writing original and in-depth content helps achieve readers’ trust and enhances authenticity.
- A content marketer must be open to various content formats and should not only focus on readable text. For example, an explainer video will help your customers understand your product’s features and functionalities better.
Content marketing helps businesses reach their audience and make them brand loyalists with authentic content.
