According to a survey, out of the entire world’s population, virtually 5 billion of them are active on the Web and roughly 4 billion of them are active on social media. When you translate these numbers into the content marketing space, that’s a virtually unlimited audience for your brand to engage with while using content to trigger significant growth for your organization. Content marketing is one of the most powerful and commonly used methods to create and enhance brand awareness as well as trigger conversions.
So before we go right into these helpful tips for effective content marketing, let’s briefly discuss what content marketing is all about.
The Concept of Content Marketing
Content marketing is simply a marketing technique that involves the creation, publication, and distribution of relevant and quality content digitally. It’s done to communicate to a target audience about the benefits of a certain product or service to trigger sales. Content marketing is key to sustainable organizational growth in the long run.
In this context, content goes beyond written words. It also incorporates images, podcasts, videos, infographics, eBooks, blog posts, etc.
Notwithstanding the effectiveness of this marketing strategy, several marketers lack the technical expertise needed to execute successful content marketing. This is where we step in. Armed with high-quality content marketing hacks, we will help you develop a successful content marketing strategy.
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The goal of your content should be easily identifiable
The raw volume of the content you can create for your brand or organization may overwhelm you. Content creation is broad and it can range from textual to visual or audio format. Content marketers should ensure that every piece of content they create for their brand or business has an easily identifiable goal. Having views is a good thing because it means your content is getting good exposure and traffic. However, it’s an incomplete content goal.
One hack to creating content with clear goals is by thinking about how your content can reflect your long-term marketing strategy. Then go-ahead to create content that does just that. Another hack is creating content that serves your niche audience.
If you’ve decided to use blog posts for your content marketing strategy, you can’t stop at the publication of your content. Also, decide on how best your content can be of benefit to your niche audience. You’ll also want to utilize analytics to track the performance of your content as per your goals. You’ll want to monitor how well your content is reaching your target audience.
Furthermore, ensure you balance the scales so that your content is not too heavily tailored to serve your target audience, yet it doesn’t tie back to your brand. If it does, you may experience growth in your audience, but that growth won’t reflect in your sales. In summary, don’t create audience-focused content, but create brand-focused content that serves your target audience.
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Identify your niche audience
What is content marketing without a target audience? That’s the whole essence of marketing your brand, its product or service—to draw in a select group of people whose search intent aligns with what you have to offer. Your target audience is those people who are more likely to patronize and engage your brand than others.
Identifying your audience is just as important as creating the right content, but one can’t work without the other. If you can’t identify your audience, you can’t create the ideal content for them. On the flip side, you can’t create content when there’s no audience for it. You don’t need to start interviewing every former and existing customer to identify your audience, even though it may be effective. That will be too strenuous.
What you can do is have a session with your team and build a buyer profile – the ideal person who your product serves best. While building your buyer’s profile, consider the demographic and psychographic factors. This will give you something to work with when creating content.
Brands have varying niche audiences. For instance, manufacturers of motherboards best serve gamers and computer users. In the same way, manufacturers of guitars best serve music enthusiasts.
Naturally, the content for both brands will differ from each other because they are written for different target audiences. The kind of audience you write for will also determine the use of specific industry jargon that only they will understand. This content marketing hack is key to taking your audience through the sales funnel.
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Every buyer goes through a sales funnel
Good content marketing acknowledges that it takes a process to arrive at a purchase decision. As your content attracts new leads and prospective customers to your brand, it should also persuade reluctant leads to make a purchase. It should also inspire customer retention and brand loyalty. A good content marketer should understand the possible reasons why a prospective customer is reluctant to make a purchase.
In this case, a video might be the ideal content format because it will alleviate concerns and help your sales team show customers what they need to know in practical terms.
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Write well-detailed content
In the world of content marketing, the length and depth of content go a long way. In simple terms, content with more detail and depth is usually more effective in marketing than content with less detail and depth. However, this doesn’t mean that you should write long content just because length is an effective element in content marketing. It means your content has to be rich with relevant details that are quite informative.
You can use certain tools to draft and compare Word documents till you pick the ideal one to use. If your content is covering a particular topic, ensure it’s exhaustive on every possible area of knowledge within that topic.
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Track the performance of your content with analytics
Quality content may guarantee an active and engaged audience over time, but it doesn’t guarantee sales. That’s why you have to pay attention to your content performance so that you can know what to tweak or adjust to trigger sales. This is where analytics come in; they help monitor, track and report numbers and metrics.
For instance, you can see the number of site visitors you get weekly as well as the number of site visitors that made a purchase or signed up for newsletters. Analytics help you generate traffic and convert that traffic to conversions.
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Keep your content current
The more current your content is, the more relevant it is. Consistency in the publication of content is key to having up-to-date content. We recommend doing the following:
- Don’t include the year of publication in your URL, instead include the year of publication in your content title. For instance, “6 Fashion Tricks You Should Know In 2022.”
- Configure your content calendar in a way that you can come back to this content the following year and update it by modifying the title, meta description, and the body.
Avoid updating your URL so it won’t mess with your search engine rankings.
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Make your content accessible to new audiences
Initially, you’re creating content for a target audience. At some point, you may have to recycle the content to help you break into new markets or audiences. For example, a video you published on your YouTube channel has generated millions of views in a few months. After seeing the success of that content, you may decide to convert that content topic or idea to an article on your blog. This way, your content will also reach beyond YouTube and will be accessible to people on other platforms.
The process can also work and vice versa. A high-performing article can be repurposed into a video format and published on YouTube. This helps you reach a video-oriented audience.
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Have a unique voice
People should be able to identify your voice in your content after reading a few lines. That’s your brand. It doesn’t matter if you’re using your blog, website, social media page, or YouTube channel to publish content. What matters is achieving consistency in your brand voice across all the platforms you’re using for content marketing.
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Adopt content personalization
Personalizing content on your blog or website cannot be emphasized enough. Brands such as Amazon are known for configuring their site’s content to be more personalized to a certain visitor with each visit to their site. This gives your existing and prospective customers a unique customer experience. This marketing hack works best for website content.
Based on data sources from the analytics report, you’ll get to know the pages certain visitors go to, how much time they spend on each section of your site, and their overall activity on your site. This makes it easy for you to personalize your site’s content according to their personal preferences.
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Content remarketing
Remarketing your content involves using existing content to trigger the re-engagement of those users or site visitors who previously engaged with your content, but didn’t make a purchase decision. Although there are a lot of factors that are beyond your control. It can be those users who came to your page when they didn’t have the funds to finish the buyer’s journey.
Conclusion
Content marketing has evolved quite a lot, but its essence remains the same. Content marketing is not about the brand, but the reader. So when planning your next content marketing campaign, you should know the target audience and try to solve their problems.