5 Tips for Successful Content Marketing

The internet has become a valuable resource for businesses and consumers alike. With around two million blog posts being published every day it sometimes seems impossible to produce content that reaches anybody. Even the greatest piece of content won’t do any good if it isn’t marketed effectively. Follow these five tips for successful content marketing to improve your content strategy, ensuring the content you produce has a positive impact on your business.

1. Format Your Page for Online Readers

Rather than reading your content completely, those who visit your website will most likely skim the content, pulling out the valuable information. Because of this, it is crucial to format your pages in a way that is easy to comprehend. When formatting your web content, remember to:

• Keep your content organized by using headings and subheadings, these should be informative to your readers.
• Supplement your text with pictures. The visual aspect of content can include photographs, infographics, charts, videos, and more. Make sure the visual content you use is relevant to the story.
• Use lists to effectively communicate to readers. Lists give a sense of order, and makes the content easier to read.
• Stick with short paragraphs. Appeal to the skimmers, make it easier to digest the idea behind your content.

2. Know Your Industry

Before you set out to write content, you must first be knowledgeable about your business and your industry. Know your company’s business model, who the current customers are, and what guidelines there are to producing content.

Once you have a better idea of your industry goals, it’s time to start collecting data. Learning more about your customers and how they interact with your brand will help you develop a better strategy for producing the right content. Data you should review includes:

• Competitor research. Look at the type of content they are producing, and how users respond to this content.
• Keyword research. While your content should be focused on the user experience, each page should have keyword research, giving you a basis to write your content.
• Customer surveys. Surveys will help you gain a better understanding of your clients. There are survey templates available to help guide you in the questions you should be asking.

The more you learn about your company, industry, and customers the easier it will be for you to produce the content that will benefit your business.

3. Focus On the Customer Experience

There are two different sides of content marketing; neither of these can stand alone, both must be implemented into your content strategy for success:

• The SEO side of content looks to create more content. The focus here is primarily on the performance metrics (keyword oriented traffic and search visibility).
• The other side looks more into the customer experience and how content can be written for the customer. This research takes a deeper look at your business’s audience and how your content can be useful and informative.

These focuses for content can not stand alone. Putting forth many pieces of content that are optimized for SEO but aren’t something readers will care about will not lead to conversions. Likewise, producing excellent content that matters to your customers will have no influence if your page can’t be found. Create your content with your customer’s needs in mind first, then work to optimize your page for SEO purposes. Finding the balance between relevancy and SEO optimization will give your content a chance for success.

4. Think from Your Audience’s Perspective

Don’t close yourself off from your audience; it’s imperative that you think from their perspective when producing content. Ask these basic questions before coming up with content ideas:

• What does my audience care about?
• What are the goals and pain points they focus on?
• What topics are useful to my audience?

Too often these questions go unanswered in the content creation process. Put yourself in your reader’s shoes, asking what content you would find useful.

5. Watch How Your Readers Interact

Content isn’t something that can be created, posted, and left alone to fend for itself. As we stated before, content must be optimized for SEO – but that’s not all. Each piece of content should be created with a purpose. In that purpose, it should be easy to share and promote – getting it in front of as many customers and potential customers as possible. Keep an eye on your content and readers by:

• Promoting content on social media channels. This is an easy way for others to read, learn from, and share your work.
• Use Google Analytics to examine if your content is being read, and how it compares to other pieces you have produced. Determine if low interaction is because the content is irrelevant, or it wasn’t promoted as effectively.
• Examine your process and how it is performing. Determine whether your content is seeing success, or whether you need to adjust your strategies.

Don’t forget about the content you’ve already written. Past content is just as important as new content produced. Focus on how old content is being perceived, and how you can market it better.

Follow these five tips to build a more successful content marketing strategy. Update your content marketing strategy to more effectively turn your leads into customers by creating industry content that your audience cares about.