Content marketing still works for businesses who want to reach new leads and keep current customers engaged. Sixty percent of content marketers produce at least one piece of content each day, which shows that not only do you need content but you need consistent content to keep users engaged.
When it comes to content marketing, though, it’s difficult to know how to market every piece of content you publish. What works for one topic might not work as well for another. Figuring out what the search engines want is next to impossible most days. Fortunately, there are some tips to apply to all your campaigns, and here are nine of them:
1. Repurpose Old Content
Even if you originally created content without a marketing plan in place, you can still utilize the content you already have to draw new leads to your site. There are a number of ways you can repurpose content, such as creating a roundup and including the different articles on that topic or refreshing an old article to make it new and current again.
2. Create a Style Guide
Over time, it’s easy for content to begin to take on different looks. However, if you create a style guide, then your design will remain consistent and you can ensure you keep the quality of your content high. A style guide defines what types of things are included in a piece of content as well as standard mechanics such as font, size of text and even how many images should be included in an article or post.
3. Blog Regularly
Consistency is a key factor in how successful your blog content is. Set a schedule for posts and stick to the schedule. How often you should blog depends on factors such as what your niche is, how many regular readers you have and what their schedules are and how much of a content marketing budget you have to work with.
4. Fill the Gaps
One way to attract new readers, even in a crowded niche area, is to fill in information gaps that others aren’t covering. Not only does this ensure your content remains unique, but it allows you to reach those looking for information no one else offers. Consistently covering topics from a unique angle will draw people to you as word gets out about your unique and helpful content.
5. Speak Up
While you don’t want to offend your readers, you also have to be a bit bold to stand out from the crowd. Take the time to attack an issue from your viewpoint if it pertains to your product, service or blog topic. However, don’t write anything that might completely offend half your marketing base. Instead, speak up but avoid issues such as politics or religion.
For example, let’s say you run a site for avid golfers. You believe that a certain club should only be used for driving, so you boldly state that and list your reasons why. People may disagree and you’ll generate a lot of conversation. However, you likely won’t offend anyone to the point they refuse to visit your site again.
6. Thank Your Readers
A simple thank you only takes a minute to write but goes a long way toward proving the goodwill behind your company. One company sends out thank you cards, which they handwrite, to new customers. Those cards are shared on social media 70 percent of the time, and the company's referrals are up 23 percent. Of course, you should never do something simply to get referrals. The thank yous should be genuine and heartfelt. After all, you won’t have a business for long without customers.
7. Put Quality First
Even though it’s tempting to constantly throw up new content in an attempt to drive traffic to your site by the sheer volume of information there, this method is no longer effective with Google’s current analytics. Instead, focus on creating high-quality content that adds value to a topic.
8. Create Content with Social Media in Mind
Take the time to study the analytics behind your site traffic and pay careful attention to what type of content people share on your social media networks. Once you have data about what people like, you can easily create similar content. This alone may increase the number of social media shares of your content.
Integrate your content into social media by sharing it there yourself and adding buttons on your blog that allow people to easily share content to social media sites with a simple click or two of the mouse.
9. Add Some Long Form Content
It’s tempting to add a lot of short, quick pieces of content, but it’s smart to vary the length. Add some long-form content as well as shorter pieces, videos and infographics. Some experts point toward the Quartz Curve as a way to determine the best length of a piece. They suggest that between 500 and 800 words is not the best length, because it takes a bit of time to read quickly, but is too short to go into much detail.
Instead, have some very short pieces that people can digest quickly and then add in a few longer guides that are well over 1000 words and cover every aspect of a topic and then some. This mix allows your site to capture both traffic that wants a quick read and traffic that wants something more detailed.
More Marketing Tips
These nine marketing tips are a great place to start if you’re trying to learn more about effective content marketing. However, continue to build momentum and drive traffic to your site by improving your content marketing process over time.
Adding regular new content is only one aspect of reaching the readers you want with material they’ll want to read. Study who your target audience is and continue adding focused, high-quality content. Before you know it, you’ll have a site filled with content that drives traffic to you and answers the questions your typical customers have.
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Lexie is a designer and typography enthusiast. She enjoys writing HTML code and creating new styles guides. In her spare time, she works on her design blog, Design Roast.
