Some Top Tips To Help Make Your Content Marketing Efforts More Effective

Effective Content Marketing Tips
Content marketing is all the rage right now, and with good reason. It gives businesses the opportunity to set themselves apart by doing something creative and wholly different from their competitors, while effectively growing their audience and standing within their industry. As many content marketing horror stories have shown up though, it’s very easy for things to go horribly wrong.

That’s why we’ve put together a list of some top tips for making your content marketing strategy much more effective and ensuring you create work that in equal parts builds your brand and delights your audience.

Prioritize People

People should always be the focus of your content. Across numerous industries, businesses that put people at the center of the content will see improved engagement.

The presence of people should play a significant role in your content marketing material. If you run an eCommerce store, for example, create demonstration content that shows people using your products and explains how they fit into their everyday lives. If you’re looking to promote software or a service, put emphasis on the communication between people, and set your content within the spaces it would be practically used. How this is executed obviously depends on the medium you’re working within, we’re not simply talking about showing people’s faces in your content. Visuals should look to use that as a factor yes, but written content can also benefit from quotes from genuine customers.

Advertisements featuring people are instantly more appealing to the average customer. Even if you’re promoting something quite technical, people want to be able to relate to the content and see themselves within. Some of the best pieces of content a business can produce to make their marketing more effective feature behind the scenes look at the business. Consumers love to get a peek behind the curtain and see how the business they’re shopping from or working with operates, and what they look like. Answering questions from customers or profiling team members are just two types of content that have been shown to be popular and can be produced as blogs or video content.

Look to feature genuine faces wherever possible. It won’t feel like a distraction to your audience or new audiences.

Research Your Audience

There’s no point diving into content creation without doing extensive research first. Without it, you’re feeling around in the dark for a strategy, and most likely dooming your content to becoming a high cost/low engagement failure.

There are numerous factors you need to research before you can get started on your content. You need to first look at the content you’ve produced in the past and see what did well. Whether this was on-site or off-site content you can apply the same stringent tests. Did the content get a lot of engagement? Did people just read and watch, or did they feel compelled to share and interact with the content? Away from social media, did the content actually lead to anything in terms of engagement or sales? At what point did they stop engaging with the content? And did they simply leave your website or page afterward?

Researching these metrics can have a huge impact on the look, feel, and focus on your future content. There’s no point producing long-form videos if your audience isn’t interested in watching them and you don’t already have the substantial reach across social channels to gain viewers. You don’t even have to just limit yourself to analytics metrics, you can survey your audience to see what kind of content they’d want to see and if there is anything they’d like to learn more about.

You should always remember that your audience is the ones consuming your content, not you and your team. As much as you may want to strive ahead with a piece of content, it may be the antithesis of what your audience wants at the time.

Focus On Quality Over Quantity

Like most things in life, quality rules over quantity when it comes to content marketing.

You’ll never see tangible business improvement and create a thirst for your content if you are clogging your channels with a number of low-quality pieces every week. Eventually, the audience will get tired of them, if the sheer number available doesn’t put them off in the first place.

Focusing on quality over quantity is important for a number of reasons. First of all, it helps you gain traction by word of mouth, as people tell their friends and colleagues about the quality of your blog. Secondly, Google prioritizes quality content within its ranking, helping you to improve visibility amongst new audiences. It does this by focusing on promoting content that shows expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, so look to achieve that over a content churn-factory. Other blogs will also feel inclined to link back to a quality piece of work that is both informative and well-sourced.

Good quality content receives wider coverage from better outlets and individuals. This leads to a greater spread across social media, particularly within knowledgable circles. This means your content can boost your audience and subscribers counts, while also gaining you endorsements from recognized industry names who are more likely to stumble upon your content.

You should look to focus on producing one piece of long-form content per month, be that an extensive blog, an entertaining video, or an informative infographic with a unique design. This will do much more for the perception of your business and metrics than lots of smaller pieces of content, which can confuse your marketing message and dilute the effectiveness of your strategy.

Make Content Actionable

All marketing content needs to have a purpose to truly say it has succeeded. If your content isn’t actionable it doesn’t matter how authoritative and entertaining it is, it’s not going to produce any tangible results.

Don’t necessarily build your content around actionable points, but make sure to always include them and put an emphasis on them. There’s a reason YouTubers always make a point to ask their audience to like, share, and subscribe because a simple recounting of these points at the end of every video helps to drill home these actionable points and ensure the community contributes to improving reach.

This isn’t the only form of actionable points within content though. You should look to make content that tells people exactly what to do next. If you’re trying to sell products, your content should guide them to somewhere to shop, be that through a link in the body copy, or featuring a discount code in your podcast that creates a sense of urgency. The content should show what you’re selling as a solution to a direct problem they may be having, much in the same way that a demonstration makes someone more inclined to buy.

All marketing content should ultimately lead to a sale or inquiry to be considered truly successful. If your content is just sitting up on these platforms or your website leaving people curious, but with no clear direction, then it is essentially pointless.

EXTRA TIPS:

A content calendar can organize your marketing strategy, offering a more holistic view of the overview of your content and allow for quick changes during peak periods.

Aiming to become a thought leader can give your content an extra level of authority and earn brilliant collaboration opportunities. This is achieved by producing quality, informative content.

Playing to your strengths is vital for producing content that feels natural and encourages people to come back for more. If you’re a writer, write. If you have recording equipment, create a podcast. If you’ve got charisma, jump in front of the camera. Build your marketing around content that shows off your best traits, business, and personality-wise.

These are just a few ways your marketing content can become much more effective, as well as entertaining. You need to think of your content in two ways. In one sense it must engross the audience and draw them in, while in another it should act as the first step in a customer journey. Finding this balance is possibly the most important step to creating great marketing content.

AUTHOR_NAMEAbout the Author:
Rodney Laws is an ecommerce expert with over a decade of experience in building online businesses. He’s worked with the biggest platforms in the world, making him the perfect person to offer advice on which platforms to build your website with. Check out his reviews on EcommercePlatforms.io and you’ll find practical tips that you can use to build the best online store for your business. Connect with him on Twitter.
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