In the age of digital marketing, content plays a dominant role in making or breaking your business. In a survey, it was found that content marketing generates approximately three times as many leads for your business as traditional marketing. Content marketing is also more cost effective as it costs 62% less than other types of marketing. These figures clearly establish the importance of a robust content marketing strategy for your business, especially if you’re operating on a shoestring budget. Here are the top 10 content marketing tips that we believe would catapult your business to new heights.
1. Create a Buyer Persona, understand your Target Audience
This is the fundamental and one of the most important steps of strategy planning for any kind of marketing campaign. Before you kick-start your planning, make sure that you have a clear vision of your target audience. Understand what your product or service delivers and who would be an ideal customer for your business. Create a buyer persona, which is a semi-fictional detailed representation of your ideal customer. Conduct a market research through online surveys and real data about existing customers to frame a buyer persona including details like customer demographics, behaviour patterns, challenges, motivation and goals. This would give you a good idea of what kind of content you need to create for successful marketing.
2. Keep your content relevant and answer complex questions
Once you’ve created a buyer persona, you will have a better understanding of the issues faced by customers that you can address. To capture the attention of your audience, create content that is specific, concise, relevant and helpful for the consumers. Also, attempt to answer complex questions in your content, which will raise its appeal. When you create value content, you not only drive a lot of referral traffic to your website, but also elevate your brand with subject matter expertise.
3. Avoid copying from other blogs, maintain originality
Publishing original content is a challenge, but it’s worth the hard work. There are a lot of influential solo bloggers on the internet who have established huge, loyal readership. Their secret to success is simple – original and engaging content. So, do not copy from their blogs if you want to establish your own audience. Be creative and come up with unique and authentic content that would attract readers to your site. If indeed you want to take inspiration from popular bloggers, then study their strategy and emulate it.
4. Support your arguments with data
To lend more credibility and impact to your content, back up your arguments with data. In today’s age of fake news, it is difficult to judge which piece of information is trustworthy and what isn’t. Which is why, it’s important to support your claims with appropriate facts, data or statistics along with a link to the original source, wherever possible. Also, adding statistics to your assertions make your arguments more compelling.
5. Optimise all your headlines and content
A great content marketing campaign depends a lot on analytics and research. Before generating any content, make sure that you have done your keyword research thoroughly for SEO. When your headline and content is loaded with strategically placed keywords, it becomes much more search friendly. Also, spend more time on composing headlines that strongly resonate with your readers because catchy headlines are clickbaits. Optimise your content and headlines not only for search engines, but for your readers as well. This will increase your visibility on the internet and drive organic traffic to your website.
6. Make your content easy to share
Implement social sharing options throughout your blog and website for the readers. If your content is engaging enough and resonates with the audience, they would be willing to share it on their social media accounts. This is the easiest and the best way to advertise your brand. Make sure that there is some mechanism for people to share your posts on the social media. Offer a floating social sharing column that moves along when the reader scrolls down, or an option to share the content at the end of the article. Sit back and let people promote your content.
7. Repurpose your content
Producing good content consumes a lot of time and effort. Some content pieces perform strongly while some may not. Pick those posts that serve as valuable, evergreen resource and were well-received by the audience. Repurpose that content from one format to several formats such as video, podcast, infographic or downloadable PDF. This way you can utilise your content in the best way possible by making it available in multiple formats that may be preferred more by a wider audience.
8. Offer value content for free
Everyone loves freebies. It’s a real delight to have access to things that are valuable without paying a single penny. Now, as a marketer, you may wonder how providing free content would benefit you? The fact is that when you offer great content for free, you earn future customer loyalty, trust, exposure and reputation. You are creating a loyal audience for your website that would prefer you over the brands and marketers who charge money to access their content.
9. Use an influencer for better exposure
These days, influencer marketing is extremely popular and why not? Individuals with great audience and reputation can provide an excellent platform to reach out to a massive audience. Find an influencer who would be willing to promote your content. Chances are that you will get significant exposure and earn many more new customers through promotion via an influencer. Just pay attention to a few aspects before paying and collaborating with an influencer, such as its audience, trustworthiness and level of engagement.
10. Be consistent with your posts and updates
To build a strong reputation and engagement with your audience, you need to be consistent with your posts and updates. By consistency, we mean churning out valuable and quality content at regular intervals. It has been observed that 82% of marketers who blog daily, acquire at least one customer everyday through their blogs. You need not be that frequent with your updates, but make sure that your updates are regular enough to keep your audience hooked.
The domain of content marketing is huge and there are many more tips and tricks that can prove to be beneficial for you. However, we are confident that these 10 tips will definitely up your game!
– Swati Sinha