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Content Marketing Tips: 6 Best Practices You Should Follow

Content Marketing Tips: 6 Best Practices You Should Follow

Content marketing ain’t rocket science, but it takes a lot of patience, creativity and an analytical outlook. Leverage content marketing strategies for not to miss out on lot of leads.

Although not all pieces of content online are out to sell you something, blog posts, images, and videos are useful in stimulating interest in a brand, as well as its products and services. You should know how to maximize various types of content to increase sales and boost profits for your company.

Having a solid content marketing strategy is crucial in your customer acquisition efforts. The primary thing you should do is to become familiar with your target audience. Determine their likes and dislikes so that you can customize content according to their preferences, which helps you capture their attention better.

Here are other content marketing practices that you should follow:

1. Be Purposeful About Each Piece Of Content

A lot of marketers fall into the trap of trying to win everybody at the same time with a singular piece of content. This couldn’t be more wrong. 

The secret to digital marketing is to know your customer demographics. More than identifying their age, gender, and socioeconomic status, you must dig deeper and understand them more intimately, such as pinpointing where they’re at in the sales funnel, which is one of the important content marketing factors you should know.

Afterward, you can use the information that you gleaned from your consumer research to create content specifically for each of your buyer groups. For instance, if you sell kitchenware, most of your customers may be mothers. This category can still be divided into full-time homemakers or those who juggle their careers and cooking for their families.

Then, you can assign content for each of these subgroups. This strategy makes it easier for you to craft a blog post or infographic about solutions to their everyday problems while promoting your products and services. Being specific about your target for each content can help you fill up your publishing calendar as well.

2. Stay Consistent With Your Style And Tone

Consistency with the style and tone may be challenging for businesses that have a dedicated marketing team, whether outsourced or in-house. Nonetheless, this aspect plays a significant role in grabbing and retaining the attention of your target audience.

One of the ways to go around this problem is to find people who have similar content creation styles. With this, training won’t be as difficult since they merely have to tweak their tone a bit to match your brand’s voice.

3. Take Advantage Of Analytics To Measure Quality

Analytics tools help you quantify the effectiveness of your content. You always desire to know whether an article or video you published played a significant role in converting potential customers into paying buyers. Otherwise, you’d be releasing content for naught.

These are some factors that you should monitor to determine the success and effectiveness of your content:

  • Exposure - This aspect helps you identify the reach of your content. It looks at social shares, traffic, and brand mentions, among others. The data you get from this metric can show you additional target audience opportunities.
  • Engagement - Engagement serves as proof that people like your content. It measures clickthrough rates, time on page, scroll depth, as well as the likes and shares it garnered on social media. You should also check the bounce rate, which is the percentage of web users that leave your site without exploring additional pages from the time they clicked your link on search engines.
  • SEO - Your content also plays a role in your ranking. That’s why you have to track search engine optimization (SEO) variables, such as keywords and links.
  • Conversion - This factor looks at the money that you earned through a single piece of content or the entire campaign. It assesses your leads, sales, and subscriptions.

4. Do Your Own Research

With millions of content being published daily, you need a way to set your brand apart from the crowd. It can be challenging to keep coming up with fresh content, especially when nothing is really original anymore these days.

An excellent approach to solving this problem is by conducting your own research and publishing your findings on your website. Going back to the kitchenware business example, the process can be as simple as gathering surveys on what equipment or tool they use the most in their kitchens.

The information that you accumulate from this survey can be stretched into several pieces of content. You can create an infographic that provides an overview of your findings. You can also publish a video to offer additional insights on the possible implications of that data.

Conducting your own research doesn’t have to entail investing in expensive tools. Often, all it takes is listening intently to what your consumers are saying.

5. Write Compelling Headlines For PPC Ads

Pay-per-click (PPC) ads can give your content a boost. To maximize the potential reach of your article, you should make sure that you create headlines that will capture your target audience’s attention. Of course, be careful about sensationalizing the titles since your reputation would suffer more when they find out that it’s only clickbait, and there’s no substance to the blog post. 

When trying to come up with compelling headlines, try to find different angles on a single idea. You can even ask for other perspectives from your team. Sometimes, a fresh pair of eyes can provide valuable insights that you might have overlooked since you’ve become too familiar with the concept.

6. Update Your Content

Some types of content can be refreshed to keep up with the times. For instance, if you’re running a recipe blog, you can update your content by talking about the top food trends of the year. You can also reuse previous recipes by collating them into a single article, such as publishing breakfast ideas for busy professionals.

Conclusion

Content marketing is an effective tool to stimulate interest in your brand, as well as products and services. This way, you increase the chances of converting web visitors into paying customers.

The first thing you need to do is to identify your target audience and get to know them more intimately. With this, you can craft personalized content that can engage potential customers.

Sam Makad is a business consultant. He helps small & medium enterprises to grow their businesses and overall ROI. You can follow Sam on Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin.

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