6 Tips for Content Marketing Success
Many marketing professionals want to create great content and know they need to create great content to succeed. However, content marketing success eludes them. No matter what they seem to write or publish, their content languishes unread. Without engagement, no one links to them, and website rankings flounder. Sales teams struggle to generate leads without the steady flow of new prospects. Without great content, business slows to a crawl.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If you can refresh your content marketing goals, then you can add new life to your marketing strategy and boost your social media, email, and paid campaigns in the process. Discover the following six tips for content marketing success.
Develop a Promotion Strategy for Every Content Piece
Image via Flickr by FindYourSearch
Often content isn’t the problem. Many marketers say they have blogs on their websites and update them regularly, but no one reads them. How are people supposed to read your blog content if they can’t find the page or have no idea when you publish?
Content marketers who want readers need to make an effort to promote their content. Along with featuring material on your website, develop a promotional plan for each piece you create. For example, a few ways you can drive traffic include the following:
- Share your blog content on social media (and pay to boost it).
- Include article links in your email newsletters.
- Reach out to influencers whom you linked to and ask them to share your content.
If each published piece comes with set dates for social and email promotion, along with a list of influencers to reach out to, then the odds of generating traffic and buzz around your content increase.
Write for Value, Not Word Count
Content marketers seem to be obsessed with how word count affects their rankings. They insist on creating long-form articles and targeting specific word counts in hopes of impressing Google and its users. However, no magic word count exists.
One of the main reasons long-form articles have taken off in popularity is because they thoroughly cover ideas and provide in-depth resources for readers to use. It doesn’t matter if you write 1,000 words or 10,000 words if everything you say isn’t useful or engaging to readers.
If you struggle to look beyond word count, consider creating outlines for your content before you write. This planning will make you want to thoroughly explore your ideas instead of counting down until you can end.
Find Easy Keywords to Target for Better Rankings
You can use multiple keyword research tools to learn about which words and phrases are most in demand for your industry. That’s the easy part. The hard part is developing a realistic keyword strategy to boost your organic rankings and traffic.
Instead of looking for the most popular keywords — and therefore the hardest to target — find out which keywords have traffic levels that you are already ranking well for and keywords that have lower levels of competition. Long-tail keywords tend to be best for this strategy. You can target niche concepts that are highly relevant to your brand instead of overall industry-wide terms.
Optimizing for the phrase “local content agency in Tampa” is easier than targeting for the word “SEO.” Results will come faster, and you will have a better chance of generating leads.
Make Sure Each Content Piece Ties Back to a Buyer Persona
Target demographic-specific traits used to identify groups of people. More marketers are starting to use personas — two or three in-depth personalities that explain customer behavior and buying styles.
For example, a company may sort personas by business size or employee level for its B2B prospects. Meanwhile, a B2C company could sort personas by loyalty and spending habits. This classification provides more insight than basic gender and age demographics.
Hubspot has a great buyer persona tool that marketers can use to flesh out exactly who they want to talk to and approach with their content. By answering a few questions about their lifestyle and problems, you can clearly understand your audience. From this point, you won’t have a reason not to tie your content back to a persona every time you start writing.
Create Content for All Levels of the Sales Funnel
If you’re serious about turning traffic into leads and leads into customers, then you need to create content with the sales funnel in mind. As you develop your buyer personas, understand their questions and concerns throughout the buying process. For example, a car manufacturer may follow three stages:
- Top Funnel: basic features and reasons why the make and model is the best choice to make. At this point, the buyer needs to be introduced to the car.
- Mid-Funnel: financing options and safety awards. At this point, the buyer is considering the car and comparing it to others.
- Bottom Funnel: colors and specific features that buyers can upgrade to. At this point, the customer is about to buy and this content will push the individual to make the decision.
Each industry and buyer persona approaches your brand differently. By mapping out buying stages, you can create content that answers concerns instead of writing with hopes that someone reads it.
Don’t Give Up on Your Content Creation Plan
If you wanted immediate results for your marketing, you would invest primarily in promoted social media and search engine posts. Content marketing and SEO take time, since developing great content and honing an audience of engaged readers takes time.
Try to develop a content plan that extends at least six months before you start looking for results. This planning will give you a high-level view of traffic and ranking improvements that you can’t see when you take an article-by-article approach. The long-term goal will also motivate you to keep going even if you still have content issues to work through.
If you’re still not seeing the results you want, contact CopyPress. We can evaluate your current marketing strategy and develop a plan for content marketing success. We’ve been there before, and we have seen the struggles you’re working through. We can help you crawl out of your content rut and work toward improvement.
CopyPress writer
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