4 Content Marketing Strategies You Need to Bookmark Right Away
If you are a budding content marketer, you’ve probably heard the saying ‘Content is King”. But knowing that won’t take you anywhere. Let me be brutally honest with you. If you don’t market your content right, your audience will soon get tired of it and abandon your site. Don’t let this happen with proven content marketing strategies that resonate with your targeted audience and build a rapport with them. In this post, I’ve compiled a list of strategies that every budding marketer should know.
Before unveiling the strategies, let’s take a quick look at a few stats to help you understand why content marketing budgets are increasing year after year.
· The MarketingMag has predicted that content marketing will become a $300 billion industry by 2019
· The number of indexed pages on Google has grown from 1 trillion to more than 30 trillion in the last 7 years alone.
· The US enjoyed 28.1 billion U.S. dollars in content marketing revenue in 2016 and it was expected to reach 32.1 billion U.S. dollars in 2017, source Statista
· According to MarketingProfs, the most successful B2B marketers spend around 39% of their marketing budget to content
· An average marketer spends 29% of his total marketing budget on content
From the above, it is clear that content marketing is here to stay, and you should start planning to invest in content. Before you develop a budget for content marketing, you need to know that your budget won’t work alone. You may also need proven content marketing strategies that will help you emerge as a leader in your industry. Without further ado, let’s discuss some actionable strategies that will drive success in 2018 and beyond.
#1 Identify Popular Content and Come Up with Viral Content Ideas
Identifying what your audience is dying to read would be helpful in creating content that will engage your customers and prospects. Having knowledge on the popular content ideas will help you define your content that will be valuable to your target audience. According to Jonah Berger, content that stimulates emotion gets shared by the audience.
Long gone are the days when content was written to appease the search engines. Today, if you want to become a leader in your industry, you need to primary focus on your readers and identify what sort of content is popular within your targeted demographic. The search engines can come later.
You may not necessarily come up with viral content ideas each time, but nailing it once in a while will help you captivate your target audience, increase website’s traffic, and get more clients.
To come up with viral content ideas, you should provide an answer to the following questions:
· Is the idea interesting? Can it be made interesting?
· Will adding videos, infographics, and images to your idea make it stickier?
· How can you find the right influencers of your niche and ask them to share your content?
#2 Kickstart with a Killer Headline and Make Your First Impression Count
What is that one thing, which is common in all great content pieces? They all start with an irresistible headline. Usually, people don’t start reading a blog post or a book because they know the content is good. It is the headline that piques their interest and compels them to dive deeper into the content piece to find out more. Writing compelling headlines will not only increase the probability of your post getting clicked by your audience, but it will also bring more visitors to your site and keep them coming back.
The attention span of netizens is short, and if you want to grab their attention, you must come up with killer headlines. You can also use clickbait titles to arouse your audience’s curiosity, but always remember that clickbait titles will fail if they don’t meet the expectation of your readers.
#3 Leverage the Power of Guest Blog Posting
Guest blog posting is one of the most effective ways to market your content on the internet. It allows you to promote your brand, drive targeted traffic to your site and build up relationships with good authority sites — not to mention its ability to build quality backlinks to your content. When people read your guest post on good authority sites like Forbes or Entrepreneur, it immediately adds legitimacy and credibility to your brand and knowledge. When reaching out for guest blog posting you should aim for building a relationship and driving targeted audience to your site rather than building backlinks to improve your search engine rankings.
How to find websites that accept guest post?
Simply use this trick to find websites that have accepted guest posts before.
· [KEYWORD] + “guest post”
· [KEYWORD] + “write for us”
· [KEYWORD] + “guest article”
· [KEYWORD] + “contributing writer”
Once you find good authority sites that accept guest posts, start pitching your ideas to them. When pitching for a guest post, always make sure that your suggest idea add value to their site. After getting approval for guest post submission, start writing your guest post and provide them with something useful. Don’t forget to add links to internal and external content, as well as on the author bio section.
#4 Measure the Success of Your Content
Once your content gets published on the internet, you need to measure the success of your content to determine whether your post is liked by the audience or not. There are many online tools out there that you could use to track the progress and change your content marketing strategy accordingly if required. For a long-lasting success, content marketers need to do continuous evaluation.
Wrapping Up
I hope you’ve found this post helpful. There are many other content marketing strategies out there. However, as a budding content marketer, you can get started with these proven strategies and take your content marketing efforts to a whole new level. Thanks for your time!
