Content has become one of the best ways to stand out in business. It allows you to engage with customers, promote your brand, and establish your company as an authority.
Most marketers also believe content marketing is one of the best ways to grow a business. Reports show that 96% of decision-makers say content marketing has helped their organizations.
But you can’t just throw marketing up online and expect to see results. Follow the 10 content marketing tips below to create engaging content and put it online where people want to read.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
Your content marketing efforts won’t have the most impact if you don’t define who it’s supposed to target. With all the people on the internet, it’s tempting to create content that appeals to a general audience. The problem is that most people may not be interested in what you offer.
Start by creating an audience persona.
- What are your customer demographics?
- What are your customers interested in?
- Do your customers have specific problems you can solve?
- Do your customers look for anything in particular when shopping?
You may not have one audience persona to think about. Create as many as you can to define each of your audience types. Doing this will help you create marketing content down the line.
2. Determine Your Goals
Goals are another essential thing to have when starting a content marketing campaign. You may get a lot of interest in your business, but unless you have a plan for what to do with that attention, you won’t be able to see the most benefits of content marketing.
There are many ways content marketing can help your business grow:
- Increase sales of your products
- Grow your email list
- Land consultancy jobs
- Grow video channels
- Make affiliate sales and ad revenue
Each of those will require a different type of content and method for creating it. Decide on your goals to make sure you start off on the right foot and avoid wasting time and money on marketing efforts that don’t produce results.
3. Pick the Right Content Type
You aren’t limited to a specific type of content when you start content marketing. There are many mediums to get your name out there, including text, images, and video.
Look at each option to see which content type your audience engages with the most.
For instance, take a company that offers a B2B product for business owners. This content may not be the best fit for video and images. It makes more sense to create informational blog content to inform your customers.
On the other hand, you may not be able to get people to pay attention to text content if your audience is younger and spends time on TikTok. You’ll need engaging video content for that situation.
4. Find the Right Platform
It may seem tempting to take a wide approach when starting content marketing. Instead of narrowing your focus, you throw as much content as possible on every platform.
You may see some results in doing this, but you must also consider how effective this tactic is. Are you doing things the right way and targeting platforms that have your target audience?
Before you start content marketing, ensure the platform you advertise on will get results. You know your audience demographics, so make sure they frequent the websites you’re considering targeting.
Take Facebook, for instance. It has a general demographic that can reach a lot of people. But if you want to target a younger audience, you may need to look elsewhere for results.
5. Identify Content Ideas
You don’t want to start content marketing without a clear idea about what to create. You may understand a lot about your industry, but what you know may not be the information people are interested in learning.
Do research to determine the information people seek online. This information can be solutions to problems, entertainment, product recommendations, and other topics.
Once you have that information, you can align those subjects with your marketing goals. Product sales, for instance, is a great goal to align with informational content. Help people understand how to solve problems and recommend your products as a solution.
There is a lot of competition, so you may not do well in already-established areas. Look for areas where you can fit in the industry and compete for lower-competition content.
6. Consider Your Brand Voice
It’s tempting to go overboard when creating content and be too creative. It’s fine to add some flare to your content marketing campaigns. But at the same time, you want your content to represent your brand.
Keep your brand guidelines in mind when creating content for the web. Use the same color schemes, images, and formats as the rest of your brand materials.
If you don’t have brand guidelines, this is the perfect time to create them. Think of what you want people to think of when they think of your brand. Look at established brands to see how they go about doing this.
Once you have your guidelines, apply them across all your marketing materials.
7. Create a Content Roadmap
It’s possible to get great results by creating content on the fly. This is especially true if you’re in an industry that constantly changes. You can keep your audience up with those changes to build your brand.
But many situations don’t call for that approach. Most situations require brands to create a content roadmap and follow it.
Start by taking the content ideas you developed in the above tip. Once you have your ideas, see if there is a way to structure an output pipeline that helps your content flow together and gives your audience something to look forward to.
If there isn’t a logical order, look at the quick wins available and start with those. A quick initial win will show you what content marketing can offer an encourage your company to keep going.
8. Repurpose What You Can
In many cases, you create content in one format usable in other forms. Take blog posts, for instance. You may be able to take that content and repurpose it into a script to post on video platforms.
Once you exhaust your ideas for one content type, think about how you can use that content elsewhere. Much of this is content you can use on different platforms.
Doing this will significantly decrease your cost of producing content. It’s less time you have to spend coming up with ideas and researching facts to go along with them.
9. Collaborate With Experts
Establishing your brand’s authority with content is already a good thing. You’re putting yourself up as an industry leader when you offer information that helps people.
But you can increase your brand’s authority even more when you work with other experts. Collaboration with trusted people will give your brand even more credibility and help your brand stand out even more.
Network with other people in your field to find potential candidates. Do this at networking events, online, and in whatever other way you can. Your goal is to create win-win relationships where both parties can benefit from the relationship.
Depending on the deal you strike, your expert partners can even promote your products to their followers to help even more. For instance, Help a Reporter Out (HARO) puts you in touch with reporters who need expert advice. In return, you can get a link to your website in the reporting.
10. Gather Data About Your Results
You’ll need a lot of data to create compelling content marketing campaigns. Just knowing about your customers and what they want to see will get you far. But if you want the best results, you need more information.
This information will come as you continue producing content. You’ll learn which content types get the most traction and produce the most sales.
Gather as much of this data as possible when publishing. Use it to inform your future marketing campaigns and adapt your current ones based on what you learn.
Use These Content Marketing Tips for Success
With how many companies compete on the internet, it’s harder than ever to get attention online. You may have great products and offer great support, but if you can’t attract the attention of your customers, you won’t be able to sell your products online.
But you can give yourself a leg up with the right content marketing strategy. You’ll know what content people want to see and how to distribute it to get the most eyeballs. Use the content marketing tips above to streamline your marketing efforts and create a successful content marketing strategy.
Do you plan to ramp up other marketing activities after nailing your content marketing strategy? Read more information on the blog to learn more about marketing your business.
