From Good to Great: 7 Content Marketing Tips For Success

Marketing today is impossible without great content. An effective content marketing strategy can make all the difference in engaging and retaining customers in a meaningful way. So what is content marketing? Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. Instead of pitching products or services, a strategic content-driven approach provides relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to either help them solve issues in their work or personal lives. It is important to note that content should be integrated into your marketing process and not treated as something separate. Let’s take a look at some useful content marketing tips that will set you up for success.

Define Your Content Marketing Strategy

Clearly defining and documenting your content strategy is crucial for success. In fact, 80% of companies that succeed with content marketing have a detailed documented strategy and 52% of unsuccessful businesses do not. Having a documented strategy can help align your content efforts with your business goals, all of which can be used to monitor performance. Some essential criteria that should be included in your content marketing strategy include:

• Defining your target audience
• Setting content goals
• Deciding what types of content will be used
• Choosing your distribution channels
• Listing your resources such as team, budget etc.
• Creating a content calendar

Know Your Audience

The target audience should always be kept at the core of your content to be successful. However the first step in making meaning content directed towards your target audience, is establishing who the target audience is. Research has shown that 47% of marketers view audience research as one of the leading factors contributing to success in content marketing. The most effective way to identify your target audience is through research. Obtaining data such as demographics, psychographics, challenges, and buying behavior are all essential to understanding the target audience. You can obtain this information by using analytic tools like Google Analytics, social media analytics, and CRM analytics. Customer research using both qualitative and quantitative methods are great for audience insights as well. Conducting surveys and interviews are both great ways to obtain deeper insights. Finally, secondary research, such as industry research reports can lead to obtaining meaningful insights.

Identify Relevant Topics

Understanding who your audience is is only half the battle, next you will need to address topics that resonate with their wants and needs. This will help you capture the audience's interest and guide them through your marketing funnel.One way to find relevant topics that pertain to your audience is by focusing on questions or problems that they are trying to solve. These questions and problems can then be answered through your content. For example, you could gather internal data establishing what persistent common complaints are for your products or services among the target audience, and use that data to create meaningful content that not only addresses the issues, but offers content that educates the audience or proposes meaningful solutions to the complaints. However, if you are a company that is just starting out you can focus on keyword research to find and analyze what the most relevant searches your audience is conducting surrounding the industry. You can focus on keywords with low competition and a high-search volume to maximize your visibility to the audience. There are a number of topic research tools online that can be utilized to easily find these relevant topics. Some will offer content ideas along with the relevant topics, making it easier to plan a direction for the type of content you are wanting to make.

Focus on Readability

One important factor to consider when making content is to ensure that it is to the point and easy to read. The current state of the digital age has trained people to quickly skim through the overwhelming amount of information that is consistently presented to them on a moment's notice, whether it's scrolling through social media, blogs, or websites. This makes it especially important to ensure your content can deliver value quickly and efficiently. Some ways to improve readability within your content include:

• Keep sentences and paragraphs short and to the point
• Use active voice
• Avoid big walls of text
• Incorporate headings and subheadings
• Use bulleted or numbered lists
• Include visuals
• Avoid jargon

Selecting Content Distribution Channels

Not only will you have to plan your content distribution, but you must pick the right channels to reach your target audience. There are three main types of distribution channels to consider, Owned Media, Paid Media, and Earned Media.

• Owned Media consists of channels that you control, such as websites, blogs, emails, and social media. These channels are more sustainable and cost-effective to manage in the long run.
• Paid Media consists of channels like social media ads, search ads, and sponsored content. These channels can give you quick results, but you will have to keep spending money to run them.
• Earned Media are channels that belong to third parties such as online publications, niche blogs, review sites, and social media influencers. This is essentially free media coverage, however keep in mind that this type of coverage you will have no control over.

Audience research that was conducted will tell you what type of channels they prefer, and these should be the channels that you use. Research has shown that social media both organic and paid, email marketing, and organic searches are the most used content promotion channels. However, there is not a one size fits all approach to this, it is important to experiment with what works best for your business and based on what your audience prefers.

Repurpose What Works

Analytics will show what type of content excels and resonates with customers the most. This type of high-performing content should be repurposed once it is identified. Repurposing the content into different formats such as infographics, videos, podcasts, interactive quizzes are all great ways to reach more people on more platforms. The groundwork for this will have already been laid, but finding new and interesting ways to repurpose the highly engaged content will provide you with a greater chance to retain audience engagement with new and interesting content. One of the easiest ways to repurpose content is by turning what's written into a video or podcast or vice versa. Podcasts for example, can provide an opportunity to expand upon the interesting content by providing more fleshed out, deeper analysis on the perceived hot topic.

Update and Republish Underperforming Content

Finding the content that has underperformed is essential to learn for the future. Identifying elements of the content that did not resonate with the target audience can provide useful knowledge on what to avoid. However, this content should not be thrown away, instead it can present an opportunity to revive the content with either new information or a restructure that can improve readability or make it more interesting and relevant to your audience.

Measuring Content Marketing Performance

In order to measure your goals you have to understand what is working and what is not. This will allow you to focus on what's working and allocate resources accordingly. You will measure success by monitoring content marketing metrics. The metrics you should focus on tracking include:

• Website traffic
• Engagement
• Leads
• Conversion rate
• Cost per lead
• ROI

These are just a few essential tips that will guarantee to put you on track to implement success in content marketing. The M.S. Integrated Marketing Communications program offers a Content Marketing course that explores the role of content in the evolving modern integrated marking communications landscape. This course will teach students how to establish a content marketing plan and the steps necessary to achieve implementation. For more information on this course, you can visit the course page here. Additionally, the program offers a Podcast Production and Promotion course that will provide students the necessary skills to record, edit, and publish a professional podcast. As well as how to design a distribution and promotion plan. For more information on this course, you can visit the course page here.

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