5 Things No One Tells You About Content Marketing
The following is a list of 5 content marketing tips to help you reach your target audience and boost conversions.
Content, content, content.
Content marketing is one of the most popular buzzwords in marketing today.
You’ve probably read a decent number of posts about how “content is king” at least a dozen times.
It is because content does more than just filling up your web pages, it is one of the most effective marketing methods of growing audience engagement, improving your brand awareness, and driving sales.
How can you be positive that you’re keeping up with the times?
You actively write blog posts.
You’re an active user of social media.
You’re creating content, but it’s not getting you very far.
Despite your best efforts, you can’t seem to actually experience the benefits of a successful content marketing strategy.
You know what? It could be because you ignore the most valuable aspects and assets of content marketing. Because creating content isn’t enough to really market your business.
A great way to remain updated in this era of digital marketing is to keep an eye on digital marketing and content marketing trends because today, the bar for successful content is significantly higher than it used to be.
The following is a list of 5 valuable content marketing tips to help you reach your target audience and boost conversions that no one talks about.
Let’s find out what nobody tells you about content marketing.
1. The key isn’t just writing new content
Our job, as marketers, isn’t to create more content.
It has never been about that.
As more and more businesses have started understanding the importance of content marketing, more and more businesses are creating content. As a result, as the supply increases, the competition for getting that content found online increases as well.
If you want to really well, you have to do 2 things:
- You have to update your old content
- Kill off your irrelevant content
We all know, as the time passes, some of our best work gets outdated with older information, strategies, tips, and examples. If you don’t update your old content over time your rankings will decrease. This is where historical optimization comes into play.
Historical optimization is the practice of repurposing old blog content and making it fresh. By editing top-performing content that was previously written and published, you can update the ideas and information presented in order to add relevancy to today.
As a digital marketing specialist, I have taken the concept of historical optimization to heart. Last year I reviewed some of our top-performing blog posts and optimized them retroactively by adding more value. As a result of historical optimization, me and my team have been able to generate way more value from content we’ve published in the past. In fact, we began to notice a natural spike in organic traffic between June and October 2019 by an average of 117%.
Additionally, sometimes, content on your personal or business website becomes so irrelevant or out of date, and you need delete it.
I mean, come on! Who would like to read a blog post about the best social media tips used by the Vine App Video pros?
No one!
This is why cleaning up old content should be part of your content maintenance activities.
So, make sure to include these strategies in your overall marketing plan as it’s a way to deliver even more value to the people reading your content.
2. Your marketing strategy starts with your audience
Focusing on leads, traffic to your site, conversions, and sales is a good but looking at your audience is where it all begins.
As obvious as it sounds, let me ask you this — have you done your homework on your audience before starting your marketing campaign? Do you know who you ultimately want to engage with it?
You should start with defining your “who.”
To get your audience to pay attention, you need to find your audience, create content just for them and discuss things that concern them because content marketing is all about knowing how your ideal customers think.
Ask yourself:
- What they think about
- Why it matters to them
- What their goals are
To help you do this, it’s essential to create your buyer personas. Buyer persona development, when done correctly, helps content marketers craft more effective messaging for your marketing efforts and deliver a real competitive advantage to their business.
What you are creating has to be valuable, useful, compelling and, yes, different. It’s also because successful content marketing requires giving away value without expecting an instant return and without a well-defined buyer persona, you might not know exactly why a blog post of yours is outperforming others based on the number of clicks it gets.
When your audience feels like you’re helping them, they’ll be more inclined to engage with your content.
An interesting tip on social media marketing can stand you out from the crowd and will make the difference in your business growth. An outstanding blog post about content marketing strategies can make a huge difference in your traffic for your website’s blog.
With buyer personas, you have the foundation set for targeting your marketing efforts that will resonate with your customer’s specific challenges and ultimately you can understand where you’ll need to spend the most time as you begin to put your content marketing plans into action.
3. The ultimate debate in content marketing: Quality vs. quantity
When it comes to uploading content, quality beats quantity any day.
However, if you’re just posting once a month and don’t prioritize fresh content, you’re deemed by visitors and search engines like Google as “dead.”
You might not realize it but taking care of your website is like taking care of your garden. Every piece of content you post is similar to watering your garden so that your website will stay healthy and grow.
Uploading blogs on a regular basis will help generate results in any business goal you set out to achieve and keep your website when it comes to your search engine ranking, as search engines favor websites whose content is up-to-date and relevant. The reason behind this is because you create more valuable inbound link opportunities and indexing potential.
So, the idea is quite simple.
When you create more blogs, you’ll drive more traffic to your website.
Content consistency establishes your credibility, competency and authority, builds your trust, and strengthens your reputation.
Moreover, the more the content you share with your esteemed audience the stronger the bond gets, making your business and your marketing strategy unbreakable.
However, it’s easier said than done.
Many companies might be challenged to provide frequent high-quality content to customers and end up with posting low-quality content which has an adverse effect on the Search engine optimization (SEO) of your website.
You always want to think back to your target audience.
Focus on creating content that your audience will want to engage with and while doing that you should also take actions to clean up low quality content on your website to keep your website SEO friendly.
4. Don’t confuse your content with sales pitches
Even though I mentioned above I need to touch upon this one more time from another aspect.
We all know that many digital marketers forget the essential part of the equation while creating content: the people.
A customer journey is a story about understanding your visitors, how they behave while they visit your website and brand, and what you can do to improve their journey, so they come back.
The last thing you want to do is lose your visitors at the beginning of their journey.
This means your content needs to be entertaining, engaging, or funny enough to stand out from the piles of other blog posts already on the web. The right content is what will separate you from everyone else in your market area.
Instead, if you put a sales pitch on your blog post where people engage with your website for the first time while seeking information, they might run away immediately.
This is why your content shouldn’t sell.
Nobody welcomes a sales pitch.
Everyone you reach probably will understand right away that you are trying to sell them something, and they will quickly move on.
Sure, the whole purpose of marketing is create brand awareness and drive sales and content marketing is nothing but using the content to reach out the world and sell something.
But you can’t start out a relationship with a potential lead with a sales pitch.
You don’t have to be promotional throughout your content marketing efforts. Prospective buyers see right through this trick.
Content should especially be designed for the sole purpose of educating and providing valuable information your visitors. After all, a visitor is curious and has come to your website to find answers, not to buy something.
When your buyers understand you’re not trying to force a sale at any cost, you gain their trust and respect, and this is what brings in sales.
5. Data is your best friend: Using data to analyze your marketing campaigns makes the difference
When people think content, they often think creative.
But in reality, great content marketing is a mix of both creativity and data.
Successful content marketers, some of whom came up in complementary professions like journalism, pay so much attention to the content creation process that they miss the opportunity of leveraging the data.
Content marketers should track marketing metrics and use their insights to constantly improve their campaigns.
The data-driven approach allows you to not only analyze your activity, but also forecast the behavior of your audience. Data can tell you everything you need to know to target your audience members and engage them with the right kind of content. Data can help identify target audiences, trending topics on social media and preferences of potential customers. Data can inform you as to whether the content is actually resonating with people and help guide you through the creative process itself
For instance, I use data to understand the sources that drive the most leads and highest engagement, and that information helps me and my team optimize our marketing strategy.
The fact that I can link visitor’s interactions with our website, blog, emails, and social accounts together saves me time and helps me see the bigger picture of our marketing strategy.
A right data-driven approach to a content strategy can help marketers avoid wasting time and resources by trying to connect with the wrong audiences in the wrong places.
Content marketing isn’t that easy, but the right tools and approach you have can help you work smarter and drive greater results.
So, be sure to incorporate data-driven approach into your content strategy.
Conclusion
So, there you have it! 5 things no one will tell you about content marketing.
With increasing competition, content marketing will grow at a faster pace. And, it’s going to be harder and harder to buy attention. You have to earn it.
And you can’t earn it by creating a content that is easily ignored.
Keep these five tips in mind the next time you create content.
