Content marketing has proven to be an invaluable element of digital marketing – which, in turn, has become highly relevant; especially over the last two years, when more and more people have been resorting to e-commerce over physical commerce.
If you’re looking to marketing your product or service, creating content for your target audience is more or less a pre-requisite. Whether a business provides IT support services London businesses use, or perhaps online tutorials for consumers around the world, a strong content strategy will help them connect with audiences.
Below are some useful tips for anyone looking to develop a strong content marketing strategy.
1. Target the buyer’s journey
Content is a great way to introduce audiences to your brand, but perhaps you’ve found that you have lots of followers / readers on your platforms, but not a very good conversion rate. The problem might be that you aren’t creating content that targets other stages of the buyer’s journey.
You should be create content that attracts visitors, content to convince visitors to purchase, and content to engage past customers (who will hopefully become brand advocates).
At every stage, your content should be informative, educational, and provide additional value alongside your product or service.
2. Use analytics to see what works (and what doesn’t)
High quality content is all very well, provided it is helping generate leads, or convert leads into customers. If not, it’s just a waste of time.
Your content strategy should incorporate a system for continual improvement. In other words, keep track of what is working and what isn’t working; based on that, you can then re-allocate efforts and resources. You can do this by reviewing analytics to see the performance of your content.
For instance, you might have a YouTube account where you publish tutorial videos, and review videos. By looking at the analytics on YouTube, you might find that your tutorial videos have better engagement than your review videos. This shows you what your audience is interested in, and so you can refine your future content strategy.
For example, say you wrote an in-depth article that got lots of engagement; you could always lift some (or all) of that content and turn it into a YouTube video, or a podcast episode using a recording app.
3. Re-use great content
There is a specific strategy known as ‘historical optimization’. This is where you essentially refresh and republish certain pieces of content at varying intervals. For example, say you wrote an evergreen article; you can easily republish this to your platforms once a year – just remember to update any information where necessary.
If you have a piece of content that is high value, had great engagement, and will always be relevant, it would be foolish not to re-use it.
The key to this strategy is ensuring the content is high-quality and has continued relevance. It doesn’t make sense to republish content that was specific to a past event; but educational and informative content can continue to reach new consumers. A good idea is to create a schedule for reviewing your best-performing content, see how it might have gone out-of-date since it was first published, tweak the content to make sure it conveys the most up-to-date information on the topic, and the re-publish.
4. Repurpose topics and subjects
When you’ve put a lot of heart, soul, and effort into a topic, it seems a shame to only use it in a single piece of content. You can take advantage of the research you’ve already done on a topic, and apply it to a different format. For example, say you wrote an in-depth article that got lots of engagement; you could always lift some (or all) of that content and turn it into a YouTube video, or a podcast episode.
There will be parts of your target audience that prefer one format over another, so repurposing content for multiple platforms means you’re getting more impact per topic. Repurposing high quality content will also beef up your strategy and help you avoid putting out thin or filler content.
5. Leverage different content formats
While written content is arguably key to Search Engine Optimization and content strategies, do not underestimate the importance of other formats. Video content is becoming bigger and bigger among businesses; the most popular social media platforms favour visual content over written content. Therefore, it’s important to include these formats in your strategy, as well as written content.
With YouTube being not only the largest and furthest reaching platform for video sharing, but also completely free, it is a no-brainer that you should be leveraging video.
