These days, there is a good deal of advice out there about content marketing that it is hard to distinguish between excellent and mediocre information.
According to this, Wikipedia article estimated that by 2013, the use of content marketing had jumped across corporations from 60% a year before, to 93% as part of their overall marketing strategy.
The same article mentions that although 70% of organisations are creating more content, only 21% of marketers think they are successful at tracking return on investment.
According to this article, 60% of B2B content marketers struggle to create engaging content and measure the effectiveness of their current strategies. Source: https://neilpatel.com/what-is-content-marketing/
Another impressive stats by MarketingProfs says among those who thought their content marketing efforts were most successful, 59% had a documented strategy compared with 18% for the least successful marketers.
The MarketingProfs article notes that In B2C Content Marketing 2018: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends-North America report by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, merely 38% of respondents’ organisations reported having a documented content marketing strategy.
This article is an excellent reminder that both evergreen and trending content are worthy of your attention. But it’s better to focus 70% of your efforts building content on the evergreen subjects, while 30% goes to trending topics. You should figure out which 20% of the content you’re creating generates 80% of your overall results.
These are my pick on the best content marketing advice that you have ever heard. These are actionable content marketing tips that will help to improve your content marketing efforts.
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Your Content Marketing Must Focus on Answering Questions Your Audience Are Asking
In the past, creating relevant content for SEO revolved around creating little content based on particular keywords that you wanted to rank high in search engine results pages. This article says that when looking for opportunities to create content people want to read, marketers often turn to keyword volume. However, search engines have advanced a lot since then.
For example, concerning Google, its Hummingbird algorithm update shifted the focus from specific keywords or key phrases to giving high rankings to relevant content that focused on providing in-depth and well-researched answers to questions posed by its users. So change your content ideas to shift from keyword focus to topic focus.
Therefore, your content marketing must focus on providing accurate and in-depth answers to questions your target audience is asking. By so doing you will improve your brand awareness with your target audience. By so doing you will improve your brand awareness with your target audience and have a focused strategy and wonderful content experience.
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With Content Marketing You Must Take a Mobile-first Approach to Content Creation
Today, up to 50% of B2B search queries are on smartphones*, and we expect this figure to rise. Therefore, you need to have a mobile-first approach to creating content and brand awareness.
Having a mobile-first approach to content marketing not only involves creating bite-sized content for users on the go. However, it also means creating better content that addresses the needs of your users at each stage of the customer journey.
Some experts say that Google favours long-form content (1,500 words and above) over short-form content. This favouritism does not mean that all your content marketing efforts should focus on long-form content over short-form content. Instead, strive to understand your audience’s mobile habits.
For instance, what percentage of traffic on your website is from smartphones or tablets? When they visit your site, what content are they viewing? How long do they stay? What topics seems to grab their attention?
Use data from your analytics software in your content marketing plan and content strategy to provide solutions to the above questions. Then use the answers you derive from your analytics to create awesome content that is of value for your users on mobile regardless of whether it is long-form or short-form.
Build Relationships That Earn High-quality SEO Links
Every brand must have its own content marketing plan, content marketing mission statement and content marketing strategy. Focusing on on-page SEO techniques alone can only get you so far. Instead, strive to build relationships with other influencers in your niche on social media.
Follow these influencers on social media. Engage with their content that resonates with you. This will help you create better content too. When fitting, reach out to them to create and nurture mutually profitable long-term relationships.
When doing so, the important part is to make sure you are open about your content production, your core message and what you are bringing to the table and how it will benefit the other party. The relationships you build have to help all parties concerned.
These are the relationships that will earn you relevant links to your awesome content. These links will translate to higher rankings on search engines.
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Repurpose Your Best Evergreen Content
Creating great content takes time and effort. Doing so with consistency can, over time, become challenging and expensive. Moreover, it’s difficult to come up with fresh content all the time.
Therefore, there is nothing wrong with repurposing your best evergreen content. Repurpose existing content on your blog into infographics, videos, podcasts, slide presentation, webinars, guides, white papers, and so on.
Repurposing your best evergreen content will ensure that you have quality content available in various formats for your audience to consume at every stage of their customer journey.
Content remarketing or repurposing content helps to satisfy the needs of your audience for content in their preferred format.
Repurposing content is one of the best ways to keep breathing new life to any past generated content. This will ensure that you keep getting as many social shares as possible and maintain your brand voice on social media.
Create room in your content calendar for a content schedule that favours repurposing evergreen content as an optimization strategy.
For example, not everyone enjoys reading. Some people love consuming content in the form of infographics. Some prefer content in PDF format. Some people like content in video or audio format.
So, when creating your content, create content to repurpose it. This advice goes for creating any great piece meant for offline and online purposes.
You can repurpose your flyer into an online 6 seconds video clip. You can also repurpose your brochure into an online slide presentation.
Promote Your Content like Hell
After spending your time and resources creating content, you would shoot yourself in the foot if you do not spend quality time promoting your content to your target market. High quality content needs constant promotion efforts.
A tonne of content is published daily on the internet, and the algorithms of search engines and social media platforms are being trained to highlight and rank only the best piece of content that is not from a content mill. The data in this article shows that 1.3% of the articles published are responsible for 50% of social media shares.
Therefore, as a good content marketer or content strategist, you need to spend some time and money to promote your high quality content to ensure that it reaches your right audience in the right place and at the right time.
There is no reason to create content if nobody consumes the content. So, promote your content both online and offline.
Do not shy away from spending money to promote your content on social media. These days social media is a pay to play affair, and there is nothing you can do about it.
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Closing Thoughts
Above are some of the best advice you can start implementing today. When creating any content whether for social media or any digital content, blog post, video content or any visual content be sure to use your style guide so that you can have exclusive content that reflects well on your brand image. It will also ensure that you have consistent content throughout all your marketing channels.
Improve your writing skills and grammar. Whether or not we agree, there is always room to improve our writing skills and grammar. Superb writing skills and grammar are vital ingredients in creating great content.
Excellent writing skills and grammar are not as easy as it sounds. Even some leading publications and publishing firms are not free from making mistakes as seen in this article.
I too cringe whenever my readers notify me of errors in my content or when I review some of my past posts and see grammatical mistakes that I missed. That’s why it’s always helpful to have an additional pair of eyes to go through your content before you publish.
When you use excellent writing skills to create your content, and it is free from grammatical errors, it helps make your content more trustworthy to your audience.
Creating great content is vital to your online marketing efforts. It helps to improve the user experience with your brand. It’s also vital to your content mapping, link building, video marketing, search rankings and email marketing efforts.
Use this article to modify your content marketing goals and craft an actionable content marketing guide to help you improve your content marketing campaign and your digital marketing.
Did I miss out any great advice on content marketing? What are your best content marketing tips? Let me know.
Related Article(s)
- How to Create Engaging and Relevant Content for Your Target Audience
- How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy from Scratch?
- Five Ways to Generate Great Content
- Is Content Marketing Becoming the New SEO?
- Content Marketing Tactics To Increase Your Audience Engagement
- Why You Must Be Thinking about Content Marketing
- Reasons Why Video is Good for Your Content Marketing
Sources
Google Internal Data, March 2017
“Mobile Marketing and the New B2B Buyer,” The Boston Consulting Group, in partnership with Google, Oct. 2017.
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