More traffic.
Higher conversion rates.
Every digital marketer wants them, but very few know the little hacks that can take their content marketing to the next level.
With today’s consumers ignoring invasive sales messages, digital marketers have to find creative ways to create brand awareness and convert website visitors into buying customers.
There’s also the intense competition in the digital marketing landscape, the rampant use of adblocking software among consumers, and the high cost of website optimization.
Luckily, there are several content marketing tips that can help you win online.
But what exactly are these content marketing tips?
Top Content Marketing Tips to Take Your Campaign to the Next Level
Content marketing isn’t a walk in the park. But there are some tips that you can use to jumpstart your campaign. Here’s what you can do to make your content marketing strategy more effective:
1. Post Impeccable Content
Great content is one of the tools you can use to bypass adblocking software. Consumers simply can’t resist high-quality, valuable content.
As such, you need to make sure that your content is free of spelling and grammar mistakes. To achieve this, you can use content writing/editing tools such as Grammarly and Hemmingway App.
But that’s not enough. Your content needs to be interactive and relatable. So if you’re not good at creating high-quality content, you might want to consider outsourcing.
2. Create Targeted Landing Pages
Optimizing your landing pages using the right keywords can significantly increase your traffic. The trick here is to learn about your target audience and then integrate your findings into creating relevant landing pages. Each landing page should be aimed at a keyword that your consumers would naturally search.
Using templates is one of the easiest ways to create high-quality landing pages. There are several options to choose from in this regard, but Instapage and Unbounce are highly recommended.
3. Outline Your Content Marketing Goals
The main area to apply the content marketing tips in this article is in your content marketing plan, make sure that you clearly outline your goals. These will act as roadmaps that’ll direct your content marketing campaign.
Ask yourself: What I’m trying to achieve by creating and marketing my content? Is it increasing brand awareness or driving sales?
Answering these questions will help you tailor your content to suit your target consumers, hence your goals.
4. Segment Your Audience
One of the steps of creating a killer content marketing plan is segmenting your target market audience. This increases engagement and allows you to make the most of content marketing efforts.
Segmentation simply means classifying your target audience according to buyer personas (or fully-fleshed out profiles of your target consumers). This allows you to create content that speaks to each buyer segment effectively, so you don’t waste your efforts targeting the wrong people.
It’s hard to segment your target audience on your content marketing blog. The best way to go about it is to use an email autoresponder.
5. Use Influencers to Market Your Content
Influencers usually have a large following on social media platforms, and you can use them to get more people to read your content.
When creating a post on a particular topic, identify influencers who might be interested in your article. Mention them in your post, get their quotes or simply include them in your list of people you’ll email or tweet to when your article is ready.
Do your best to make them share your article with their followers.
6. Use Visuals to Increase Engagement
Gone are the days when good articles were enough. Nowadays, you need to include infographics, videos, and original images in your content so your readers can see value in what you post.
Your written content might be great on its own, but visuals complement it and make it more believable and shareable.
7. Offer FREE Value Through Your Posts
Nothing grabs the attention of today’s consumers like the word “Free.”
So while other digital marketers are busy asking for money to provide valuable information, earn future consumer loyalty by sharing it for free. Sure, you’ll miss out on a few bucks, but you’ll build trust and reputation which are worth more in the long run.
8. Use Adaptive Content
Simply put, this means using content that allows meaningful interactions across various platforms. Your content should allow users to access it on both desktops and mobile apps.
This way, a potential customer can read about your product or service on their desktops and proceed to make a purchase through a mobile app without any hassles.
9. Optimize Your Content Headlines
A well-optimized headline can significantly increase traffic to your website. It helps your website rank higher in search engine results, allowing your readers to find your content easily.
One of the easiest ways to optimize your headlines is to make sure that they include keywords and words that are semantically related to them. You can also include numbers in your headlines to make them stand out more.
10. Post Longer, Detailed Content
Longer content tends to attract more attention from both people and Google.
In fact, the top-ranking pages in Google SERPs average at about 1890 words. Partly, this is because long blog posts provide detailed and relevant information, thus establishing authority and credibility. They also allow you to incorporate more keywords so you can optimize your content to rank higher on search engines.
11. Include Social Sharing Columns on Your Website
Since the goal is to get as many people as possible reading your content, you’ll want to make it easy for your readers to share your content to social media platforms with a single click.
To achieve this, you’ll need to include a floating social sharing column with links to all social media platforms. Your readers won’t have to scroll up and down to find it.
You’ll also need to include a call-to-action at the end of your articles to remind your readers to share what they’ve just read.
12. Run A/B Split Tests Regularly
Running A/B split tests allows you to know which calls-to-action, headlines, and content types yield the best results. Once you know what works and what doesn’t, you can make the necessary adjustments to make your content marketing strategy more effective.
13. Use Native Advertising
This is a form of advertising in which the contents of the Ads match the content of the marketing platform they’re published on, in other words, the ad will fit the page.
There’s a common misconception that native ads are deceptive because they “don’t look promotional.” But that’s not necessarily true. This type of advertisement can help you drive sales through your website as long as your content doesn’t come across as a sales pitch.
14. Focus on a Few Social Media Platforms
A common mistake made by newbie content marketers is trying to build a presence on all social media platforms when they don’t have the resources to do so. They end up spreading themselves too thin and lacking a commanding presence on any social network.
When you’re starting out, identify the social media channels your target audience use most and focus your efforts on them. Build a strong reputation there, and then move on to the next one.
15. Recycle Your Best-Performing Headlines With PPC Ads
If you have a PPC campaign in place, you can repurpose your best-performing headlines into ads. If a certain headline strongly resonated with your audience, chances are a variation of it will have the same effect on prospective buyers.
16. Support Your Arguments with Credible Data
In the digital media environment, anyone can make up facts and sell them as the “hard truth.” Your readers know this, and will barely trust any arguments you make if they’re not backed up by data from credible sources.
That’s why it’s important to include and link relevant data and statistics in your content. When you do that, be sure to cite it properly.
17. Embrace Guest Posting
There are two ways to go about guest posting. You can either contribute to a guest post on another website or invite an established blogger to post on your site. Either way, you benefit!
Creating a guest post — preferably on an established site — exposes you to a new audience and builds authority. On the other hand, allowing another blogger to post on your site exposes your readers to something new, and allows you to create content with much less effort.
18. Choose Evergreen Topics
While news-related topics might perform well, they have a short shelf life.
On the other hand, content that offers advice and useful tips remains relevant for a long time after publication, allowing you to make the most of your content creation efforts.
19. Perform Gap Analysis
Performing gap analysis on search engines allows you to identify information gaps and search positions you’re not currently exploiting.
To identify information gaps, find out the search volume of a particular keyword. Look at what your competition has done on that topic, asses the scale of the challenge, and identify the type of content you need to be producing.
With this in mind, you should be able to steer your content production team in the right direction.
20. Syndicate Your Content
In a nutshell, content syndication means distributing some of your content to other blogs for free in return for backlinks to your site. Backlinks lead more people to your site, thus increasing brand exposure. And if you get backlinks from authoritative sites, it builds your reputation as an expert in your niche.
The beauty of it is that you can syndicate a single article to 10 blogs and get 10 backlinks.
21. Pre-Market your Content Before you Post
Pre-selling your content simply means telling your readers what you’ll be posting about in advance. This provides a glimpse of what you’ll be posting without going into details. Think movie trailer, but for your content.
Pre-selling builds anticipation among your audience. When you finally make the post, they’re likely to read and share your article, thus increasing referral traffic.
You can make things even more interesting by giving your readers a behind-the-scenes experience. Tell them what inspired you to post on that particular topic, why the topic is relevant, and how you’ll create the article. This will allow you to connect with your audience on a personal level, which will increase reader engagement and build a loyal following for your site.
Get More from You Campaign Using These Content Marketing Tips
While these content marketing tips will certainly jumpstart your campaign, you can do more by adopting a holistic approach to digital marketing. That is, combining content marketing with inbound marketing.
Successful content marketing requires you to bypass adblocking software and consumers’ tendency to ignore ads. Incorporating inbound marketing into your content marketing strategy allows you to do just that. It allows you to provide the right content to the right consumer at the right moment.
For instance, you’ll be able to target repeat site visitors with pop-ups since they’re more likely to subscribe to your mail list than a first time visitor.
Which of these tips are you most excited to use in your next campaign?
Share with us in the comments below!
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