7 Essential Tips for a Successful Content Marketing Strategy

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Digital marketing is gaining traction nowadays. Although the conventional form of marketing still works, marketers are moving their strategies online – all because everyone is spending most of their time on the internet. According to the Pew Research Center, 81 percent of Americans are online every day. Moreover, 72 percent of marketers claim that content marketing increases engagement, according to CMI.

Any Digital Marketing Agency would tell you how much revenue you’re losing if you’re not amping up your content marketing strategy. To create a robust marketing plan, you’d have to consult SEO experts. But lucky for you, we’ve rounded up seven tips that can make your content marketing strategy a success.

1. CREATE A METHODICAL CONTENT MARKETING PLAN

As with any other things, planning everything before the actual execution will make for a seamless outcome. And for an esoteric advertising channel like content marketing, you need to really sit down and jot everything down on paper, digital notepad, tools, content calendar, and whatnot.

This is because content marketing has many facets. It’s recommended to start with one channel before moving on to the next. If you start with blogging and the content proves to be evergreen, then you can move onto the next channel. Here are the most common types of content marketing you should be delving into:

  • Blogging
  • Infographics
  • Ebooks
  • Video
  • Whitepapers
  • Slideshare presentations
  • Courses
  • Podcasts
  • Webinars
  • Social media posts
  • Courses
  • Email

Although it’s better to tap into these different content marketing types, dipping your toes into unknown waters will make your efforts futile. That said, you have to learn the ropes of each type first, then execute.

Whenever you create content, you need to have content marketing strategy that meets your business goals. Most often, this is to generate new leads. The Hub and Spoke content marketing strategy works great for this.

Hub and Spoke Model

2. DETERMINE YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

Imagine yourself selling a very cheap yet luxurious comb to bald people. Even if you give the comb as a freebie, bald people will never be interested to take it. Another example is selling your chicken and pork dishes to vegans. No matter how affordable and delicious your food is, vegans will never step foot in your restaurant.

And this is why knowing who your target market is extremely crucial to sell your products and services. And with the dawn of technology and the internet, there are many ways to define your target audience. Here are a few tips:

  • Check your current customer base. Aside from your audience’s demographics, you also have to figure out your audience’s psychographics. Determine their age range, interests, common characteristics, behavior, and more.
  • Stalk your competition. Another way to define your target audience is to check your competition and see what kind of audience they have as well. Because most likely, their audience is also your audience. Go into their social media pages and you’ll find gold in the comments section.
  • Scrutinize your products or services. Another simple way to determine your target audience is to analyze your products or services. First, know the features and benefits. Once you jot down your benefits, you can then think of whom and what type of people can benefit from your products or services.
  • Online surveys. If time and resources permit, you can always directly find out who your audiences are online. Send out online surveys and ask questions about your products or services to see who is most likely interested and go from there.

Defining your target market leads you one step closer to engaging with them efficiently. This will also help you guide which social networks or online advertising avenues you can tap into.

3. KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE’S PAIN POINTS

This is another crucial step before getting down to the nitty-gritty of content marketing. If you know your audience’s pain points, you’ll determine how to present your offerings the right way. No matter how unique your value proposition is, if you don’t hit the right spots, then your effort will be futile.

Pro Tip: Instead of dwelling on your product’s or service’s features, try to focus on the benefits. When selling a laptop, people would prefer to hear “fast and uninterrupted work” instead of “2.3 GHz Intel Core i5,” for the nontechnical users at least.

4. DO KEYWORD RESEARCH

Content marketing will never work without keyword research. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the lifeblood of content marketing. For your blogs, videos, eBooks, whitepapers to rank, you have to integrate the right keywords.

To do keyword research, you can take the following steps:

  • Stalk your competitors and check what keywords they’re ranking for already. To do this, you can log into Semrush and input their website URL. This app will show the top keywords they’re ranking for. From there, you can grab ideas and use other tools.
  • After you have an idea of what the competitive keywords are, try to find the long-tail version of those keywords. Long-tail keywords are less competitive keywords. You can do this by using tools such as HubSpot, Answer the Public, SEMrush, KWFinder, and more.

5. MARKET YOUR CONTENT ON DIFFERENT CHANNELS

Although Facebook proves to be the biggest and one of the most effective social networks of any marketing strategy, there are still millions of people who aren’t on Facebook. And half of this number might be your audience. So a pro tip would be not to put all your eggs in one basket.

Always diversify how you market your content. Check which social networks your audience is lurking and post varied content on different networks. If none of your audiences are on social media platforms, you can always go for landing pages or paid ads for your content.

6. REPURPOSE YOUR CONTENT

Once you’ve started distributing your content, know which content is evergreen. From there, you can repurpose them into a different media to tap into other audiences as well. For instance, if your blog has gone viral, you can repurpose it and turn it into a video.

Better yet, if you have viral blogs, repurpose it and transform it into excellent infographics. People are visual creatures, so infographics is an attention-grabbing content type.

7. POST VALUABLE AND RELEVANT CONTENT REGULARLY

Consistency is key in content marketing. That said; always give your audience something to look forward to. This is one of the ways you can become a credible source. Moreover, give your audience something valuable so they’ll consider your online channels as their go-to source of information.

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