Content marketing is potent. It can bring down your marketing costs by six times while getting you high-quality leads by 6 times. However, realizing the power of content is more complex than you think.
But fret not. You have help.
In this post, we bring you the best performing content marketing tactics that can unleash your business’s sales pipeline.
9 content marketing tips that can skyrocket your business in 2021
Content consumption trends change fast. However, if you are always connected with your audience, this will become easier. Following are the top tactics that can bring you results in 2021.
Personalize your content
The secret to creating viral content lies in relevance. In today's attention economy, if you have to stand out with your content marketing efforts, you have to cater to the real-time specific needs of your target audience. But this is easier said than done. You need to be strategic. Here's what you can do.
- Define your audience: Audience insights give you an understanding of the content themes and topics that can resonate with your consumers. Understanding their motivations, aspirations, pain points, and psychographics will help you empathize with them better. An audience persona is a great tool to use here.
- Segmentation: Timing is a critical factor when it comes to conversions. This makes segmentation incredibly important. Segmenting your total traffic according to your audience persona and the buying funnel stage they are in gives you leverage to understand what content would a target audience be interested in. This way, you can personalize the overall content experience for your audience.
Repurpose content
One of the best ways to get the most out of your content marketing efforts is to repurpose your existing content pieces. But there's a catch. Your repurposing efforts should focus on content pieces that performed best with your audience. Also, it should consider your target audience’s content consumption behavior.
There is no point in making an infographic if the dominant of your traffic are podcast listeners. Following are a few ways that you should consider.
- Videos and podcasts: Videos and podcasts are a great way to engage your content marketing efforts. There are topics that are explained better over a video than any other form of content—for instance, a complete guide of a software demonstration. Repurposing your blog pieces into educational videos is an excellent way of integrated marketing. Also, you must add subtitles to videos and transcripts for podcasts to ensure your content is accessible by your users even when they are in an environment that is sound-free.
- Infographics and blogs: A picture says 60X more than words. This makes infographics one of the best content repurpose formats to invest in. However, this can be the opposite too. If you have a successful infographic, turning it into a blog post can extend its power to its users.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Organic search powers almost 35% of the global website traffic. Losing out on SEO optimization means losing money. But creating content for one category of keywords is not enough. You have to even out your content distribution according to your reader's habits. Here's what you can do.
- Awareness and engagement: Keywords that are educational caters to the top of the funnel questions of your target audience. Content pieces that focus on these keywords are great for building trust amongst your readers and audience. Usually, these would be the typical 'how-to' posts.
- Conversion: Conversion-focused keywords are more closer to the sales funnel. These are usually about the product comparisons and pricing, and features of a product. This means optimizing your landing pages for the search engine and conversion is essential here.
Diversify your content format
Investing in one content format might look like the best strategy while you start your content marketing efforts, especially if you have a restricted team. But, if you have to scale with your content efforts and witness massive ROI (return on investment), diversifying your content format is critical.
This makes sure you have the maximum opportunity for interactions and engagement with your potential audience and leverage them to turn into paying customers. Here's what you can do.
- Microblogging: Although the average length of the best performing content pieces in Google is 2000 word count, done right, short content pieces can drive massive traffic. Infact, they can support the overall promotion strategy of the longer blog posts. However, the best place where microblogging shines is social media.
- Evergreen content: The real benefits of content marketing come from evergreen content. En route, your content development efforts in creating content pieces that are not 'newsy.’ Topics that are sustainable and need little effort in updates will perform the best in the long term and bring you maximum ROI (return on investment).
- Content promotion: While content is the most valuable asset in your content marketing efforts, it will turn out to be useless if it reaches the wrong audience. This makes content promotion critical. But to do this right, you need to optimize the content format for the channel of promotion. You can use social media posts to paid ads for promoting your content to an existing and new audience base.
Retarget content
One of the most valuable assets that content marketing brings to your business is that it fosters trust amongst your audience about the credibility of your products and services.
With educational content, you not only gain brand loyalty but turn your customers into brand evangelists. But, turning a first-time visitor into a customer is more challenging than you think. A study says that a consumer needs to see a brand around seven times before becoming a buying consumer. This makes retargeting critical. However, a strategic approach is required here. Here's what you can do.
- Organic traffic: The traffic that comes naturally to your website through search engines and social media channels without any paid promotion is the highest quality marketing and sales leads. This makes retargeting your website traffic in other channels incredibly important. You can do so by setting up a tracker on your website.
- Paid traffic: Paid promotions like Facebook, Instagram, and Linkedin ads are a great way to promote your content. However, you need to ensure that you drop a pixel tracker for all your paid campaigns to see maximum results.
Guest posting
If there is one strategy that boosts content marketing efforts, it is guest posting. Not only do you get a chance to attract a new audience for your products and services, but it creates opportunities for collaborations and builds rapport with other industry competitors. But guest posting without any strategy can do more harm to your brand than good. Instead, here's how you should do it.
- Indirect competitors: Posting engaging content on the blogs of brands that sell products complementary to yours is a significant growth hacking strategy. This not only leverages your specialization but attracts new eyeballs to your brand.
- Industry blogs: Posting on blog sites that your target audience reads frequently is another way to gain credibility. This means you have to start by mapping your audience content consumption behavior. This will ensure your efforts are more effective and confident.
Focus on headlines
Headlines of your content often behave like the hook of your content. Optimizing it for maximum clicks can boost your rankings and traffic both. The best-performing headlines always evoke one core emotion. This can be urgency, delight, or even anxiety. However, you have to ensure that your headline claims are aligned with the content.
Perform a thorough audit of your content
They say, if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. This makes content audit crucial for long-term success. Without understanding what is performing with your audience and what is not, creating content can end up being a waste of time. Here are the core tasks that are involved in a content audit.
- Content update: Updating the high-performing content can be immensely beneficial. Google prefers fresh, authoritative content over dry, old pieces. This means updating your content can give you traffic and a ranking boost in a short span.
- Content kill: Taking down the low-performing content pieces is equally important as creating new, engaging ones. Having too many low-performing content pieces can negatively impact your overall domain score and credibility in the search engines.
Use marketing technology
The content marketing landscape is synonymous to hustle. Keeping up with the pace of content demands is often challenging. This makes marketing technology one of the critical assets in content success. It helps to provide an integrated experience to your consumers. Here's what you should consider investing in.
- Marketing automation tools: Your consumer attention is a scarce resource. This makes an omnichannel brand experience critical. Automation tools precisely alleviate this pain point. Automating operations like social media posting and email triggers are smart ways to make the most out of the time. Buffer and Mailchimp are great tools here to consider.
- Competition analysis tools: Data is the oil of any successful business, and this is applicable even when you create content. If you’ve to stand out, knowing your competitors is critical. This allows you to create a differentiating factor for your brand. SEMrush is an excellent tool for this. From keywords to backlinks, you would know everything; you would know every move of your competitors.
Parting Advice
Content marketing is not a sprint but a marathon. True success only comes through consistency. This means consistently performed; the above tips are sure to create positive impacts on your business. But you still have to consider your unique business landscape. One-size-fits-all does not work in content marketing.
So, which of the above methods do you see bringing you the maximum results for your business?
Author bio
Atreyee Chowdhury works full-time as a Learning Experience Designer and is passionate about writing. She has helped many small and medium-scale businesses achieve their content marketing goals with her carefully crafted content that is both informative and engaging. She lives in Bangalore, India with her husband. She loves to read, experiment with different cuisines, travel, and explore the latest content marketing and L&D trends in her free time. You can reach her on Linkedin or write to her at [email protected].