Content Marketing is the most cost-effective way to reach your target audience and increase your visibility. It helps you build brand readership by providing useful, engaging, and relevant content that brings value to your audience.
Search Engine Optimization and social media marketing are important for marketing a business, but content marketing can help you build a long-lasting relationship with your target audience, making it more important. This article dives into 10 content marketing tips that will skyrocket your business.
#1 Identify Your Readers
You should always write your content with your reader in mind. This is one of the most fundamental pieces of advice you will ever hear about writing blog posts or articles for any purpose. Identify your content’s audience or who you want it to speak to, and create imaginary reader profiles from them. Write down every relevant detail about that person: where they live, what they do for work, how old they are, and their interests. Give this reader a name and pretend he’s sitting right across from you as you write. Make your tone conversational and speak directly to him in the second person (you). It’s challenging to convey authenticity if you don’t know who your audience is! Find out who they are before you get started so that every word flows naturally.
#2 Define Your Goals And Be Realistic
The first step to creating a content marketing strategy is defining your goals. If you don’t know what you want to achieve, it will be hard to measure whether or not your strategy works. I recommend listing out at least three goals with the areas of focus being:
- Audience – You need to identify who you want to target and how you will target them.
- Competition – You should also identify similar businesses in your niche to compare yourself with competitors.
- Diversification – Look at ways to diversify your content so that it covers as many bases as possible, e.g., blogging, social media posts, email marketing etc.
It’s very easy to fall into the trap of competing with other businesses when planning your content strategy. Don’t forget—your goal is to provide valuable information for your audience, not just compete with the competition!
#3 Use Testimonials Wisely And Sparingly
When’s the last time you read an email from a customer that made you do a little dance inside? It’s probably been a while, but I’m betting it was in the last year. Why? Because the quality of customer testimonials has risen to new levels. Whether it’s because companies are more eager to get their product or service out there—and therefore writing more increasingly convincing reviews—or because they’re becoming more sensitive to how customers might feel about reading positive feedback, the fact is that customers are now writing more testimonials than ever before.
A great way to make your content stand out and convert is by including testimonials or use cases provided by your customers.
#4 Increase the relevancy
Keywords. If you’re writing a blog post, you should include keywords to help your search engine optimization (SEO). But don’t just stuff your keywords into the post willy-nilly—your content also needs to make sense. Have a keyword strategy for each piece of content you create, and only use relevant keywords that fit into the flow of the copy naturally.
Relevant content. Don’t just produce any old blog post because it’s something to do on a Tuesday afternoon—make sure that the subject is relevant to your target audience, especially if they’re taking time out of their busy day to read what you have to say. Sometimes, this means doing research or using surveys and polls to find out what information they want, then giving it to them in an easily digestible format that’s also easy on the eyes.
Hyperlinks. When publishing content online, make sure there are hyperlinks where appropriate so that readers can easily click through for additional information (and, more importantly: so search engines can find more of your content). Keep in mind: if other sites link back to yours, this helps improve your SEO! Make sure the links work correctly, and go ahead and test them yourself before releasing it into cyberspace.
Images are key! Images are great for breaking up text into easy-to-digest chunks of information—after all, research shows that humans process images 60k times faster than text. We’re not saying bullet points aren’t crucial; we’re sometimes saying we need pie charts or meme gifs instead of graphs or tables because they keep our readers engaged while making our point come across crystal clear (and who doesn’t love pie?!).
#5 Create Urgency
Create urgency to get customers to buy now. Urgency is an essential factor in motivating people to make a buying decision. Urgency can be created by offering time-limited offers, making a product scarce, making your content time-sensitive, or adding an element of exclusivity.
#6 Add A Personal Touch To Your Content
In an effort to drive as much engagement as possible, you should put a human face behind your content. This is probably the most overlooked aspect of content marketing and why so many marketers fail at it.
You must write in the first person, with you talking about your own experiences. Tell a story. Share your personality and make yourself relatable. If you do this, you’ll attract followers who have similar interests and will stick around for more helpful advice from someone they relate to.
#7 Create Relevant, Useful Resources
Your content should be relevant to your target audience. It is the only way to keep people engaged, interested, and coming back for more.
If you want to get the most out of your content marketing strategy, it’s important to create a useful and relevant resource for your target audience. If your blog articles are full of fluff, they will not get much traffic or engagement.
The key here is to create a resource that is useful and relevant to your business and provides value to your readers. A great example would be creating an ebook that contains all the information you need on a particular topic related to your industry or niche.
#8 Make Your Content Easily Accessible
It’s vitally important for your content to be easily digestible. You want to shape your content so that it is easy for readers to quickly get the information they need from your piece and find and access that piece in the first place. To do so, you should consider both how and where users will consume your content.
For example, suppose you publish a research study on mobile app usage statistics but only make it available as a PDF file. In that case, you are neglecting users that may prefer consuming shorter-form content (e.g., Twitter) or have no means to access PDF files (e.g., smartphone users who do not have an app to read them).
This is why the best practice is to provide multiple ways for accessing content.
#9 Get To The Point Quickly And Engage Your Readers
- Keep it simple
- Avoid jargon and acronyms
- Ask yourself what would be interesting to your reader
- Use short, concise sentences
- Use bullet points
- Use short paragraphs
- Use statistics and examples
- Avoid the passive voice by using the active voice wherever possible.
10 Keep SEO in Mind, But Don’t Overdo It
Given that, it’s impossible to have a conversation about content marketing without mentioning SEO. After all, your content won’t get the search visibility it deserves if you don’t account for SEO. But remember: Google rewards high-quality content, so don’t make the mistake of stuffing your site with keywords just to improve your rankings.
Here are some common SEO mistakes to avoid:
- Using irrelevant keywords in an attempt to bring more traffic to your site;
- Going overboard with on-page and off-page optimizations;
- Publishing low-quality content that includes too many keywords;
- Optimizing only your homepage and neglecting other pages on your site;
- Using images and videos without optimizing their alt tags and descriptions;
Bonus Tip: Close With a Call to Action
You’re writing great content, you’re building an audience, and you’ve got people interested. What should you do next? How do you want your readers to respond to your content? What action do you want them to take?
Before you start creating content, think about how you can make it easy for them to take action. If your goal is simply brand awareness and driving traffic, that’s okay. Make sure it’s clear in the CTA what kind of response you are looking for and what happens after they click.
