Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract and engage with your target audience – it’s no longer a secret. However, doing it the right way is. You see, while businesses opt for a content strategy, it is targeted to attract traffic.
That is fine. But targeting the right audience is crucial to make it viable over a period of time. Taking a one-size fits all strategy rarely serves anyone and with content, this kind of approach may invite traffic but that is all it will do. To make sure that your digital marketing strategy is ROI-driven, keeping a check on your marketing efforts is essential.
To help you further streamline your marketing game, we are revealing the top 9 content marketing secrets that you should know before spending a fortune on them.
Check it out below!
Top 9 Content Marketing Secrets for Businesses
In the world of digital marketing, content plays a vital role. Reason why almost all businesses today have a content marketing strategy to guide their users through the marketing funnel.
While there are various categories of content that you can leverage to amp up your digital marketing journey – keeping in mind the small details are vital to get it right. The following tips highlight some of the most important aspects of marketing in the evolving landscape of online content.
So that you may as well get your money’s worth through content marketing.
1. Encourage your Audience to Interact with the Content
One of the key factors that determine the success of your content marketing is user engagement. To increase user engagement, encouraging your audience to interact with your content is a good start.
You can do this by asking questions and inviting feedback on your content. Or create polls, quizzes, and surveys to strengthen your relationship with the audience.
2. Don’t Sell, Add Value
Another vital content marketing secret is that your content should not be focused on selling your products or services. Adding value and genuinely informational content is the right way for it. Google’s Search Essentials Guidelines repeatedly stress its importance.
With high-quality blogs, you can create a loyal base of audience that becomes an asset for your brand. To add value, first and foremost choose the right set of keywords that are high in traffic. You can use the below-mentioned tools to make an informed decision.
After deciding on the right set of keywords that align with your company’s target demographic, you can create the content. Make them relevant and informative and a tiny bit entertaining. So as not to bore the crap out of your readers!
3. Clearly Identify Your Audience
You can’t create content for everyone. There is a particular set of audiences that would be interested in your product and services – they are the ones you need to target. Creating a consumer persona is the best way to go. If you want to learn more about consumer personas, check out our blog on brand marketing where we discuss how to create them.
4. Use Multiple Channels to Market
As they say, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. The same applies to content marketing as well. By availing a mix of diverse categories of channels, you can harness the full strengths of content marketing.
A mix and match of different channels like social media content, email marketing content, guest posts, podcasts, and webinars you can reach out to a diverse audience across platforms. A pro tip, since each channel has its own type of audience and characteristics, customising the content for the platform is vital to keep your brand impression en pointe.
Like, posting a series of educational blogs on your Facebook page is a bad idea. They don’t come to Facebook to get educated. So, just tweak your message as per the demands of the channel and you should be good.
5. Define your Content Marketing Goals
Why are you publishing content? To get traffic, you say – that’s too vague. How much traffic are you looking for, what kind of traffic do you want, and where do you want to lead the audience? These are all vital questions you should answer first to set a clear purpose and act accordingly.
One effective strategy to define your goals is to use the SMART framework. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time Bound. It helps evaluate your progress and make tweaks when necessary.
6. Repurpose Old Content
We cannot stress this enough, but just take inspiration from the old content that is performing well on the SERP. You can turn them into engaging videos, infographics, or LinkedIn posts, the options are so many and they are always effective.
While you are at it, we would suggest you to use this opportunity to improve your content by revisiting them. Update their meta tags, change images, and update the figures and data to make them fresh and ready to rock the SERP once again.
Keep the above pointers in mind when you update the old blogs to keep them neat and SEO-friendly.
7. Perform a Content Audit
Now here comes the difficult part, one that all content marketers find daunting – content audit. Because content audit is a labour-intensive practice and needs a specialised skillset and eye for tiny details.
Creating an inventory of the content is the first step. Then analyse each one carefully to identify errors in title, URL, format, date, channel, anchor texts and other shenanigans. Also pay a close attention to the traffic’s dwell time, bounce rate and SEO optimization factors to take stock of your situation.
Or you can partner with us to get access to our specialised skillset on content auditing to get the best minds to work on your project.
8. Remove Outdated Content
Did you know irrelevant and outdated content can actually be harmful? As per the latest helpful content update guidelines, a huge number of outdated, unhelpful content can potentially impact the search engine performance of your website.
So, first, identify your outdated content and start removing it without a doubt. You can create a 301 redirect for the links to redirect the traffic to a different relevant blog. Alternatively, a custom 404 page needs to be created when you are removing a large number of pages.
9. Guide Them Through Marketing Funnel
A common content marketing mistake is that most businesses create content only for the top-of-the-funnel audience. As a result, the audience has nowhere else to go after having gone through the blog. But you need to guide them through the funnel to convert.
Learn more about marketing funnels by checking out our blog on content marketing funnel.
To guide the audience through the marketing funnel, create content for each stage of the buyers’ journey. By optimizing landing pages, email marketing campaigns, and a testimonial page – you can lead them further in the decision-making process.
Clear CTA buttons on product and service pages, pop-up enquiry forms and free trials are some of the proven ways to further guide your audience. It lets you convert them into paying customers.
Takeaway
Having learned the content marketing secrets, you should be able to further enhance your content marketing strategy now. The key to an efficient content marketing strategy is not to skip and overlook the technicalities while thinking about the big picture.
If you need any further assistance or guidance on content marketing reach out to us and scale your content marketing game to the next level!
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Arghish Das
This is a really helpful article! It's got some great tips for content marketing. How do you measure the success of a content marketing campaign? Thanks for sharing your knowledge!