As the world is becoming increasingly digital with people spending more and more time online, you now have the most powerful marketing tool available at your fingertips: the internet. With a successful content marketing strategy in place, your business can passively reach potential customers and convert them into leads. According to a recent report by Semrush, although 97% of the respondents surveyed included content marketing in their overall marketing strategy, less than 20% believed they were very successful. To deliver strong results, you must have clear goals and an effective strategy. Here are 5 tips to utilize for a content marketing strategy that delivers results.
Purpose
Have a purpose for every single piece of content you create. The purpose should be clear, measurable, and tied to a business objective. Take the time to plan upfront how your content can serve your overall marketing strategy and business goals.
What might a purpose-driven content strategy look like?
One example would be to rank in a top position on Google for a specific search term aligned with your business niche. For this goal, you’d likely create an Pillar Page based on your core business offerings along with supporting blogs that dive into more detail on subtopics. You can see how the type of content you would create for this purpose would be very different than if your goal was to increase brand awareness and engagement on social media.
Audience
Before you can write for your audience, you must first understand them. To “understand” is different than to “know”. To understand your audience, you learn about their motivations, needs, behaviors, pain points, and goals. This allows you to create meaningful content that will resonate. Every piece of content you create and every topic you select should be focused on what your audience wants to learn.
This is precisely what makes content marketing so effective; it is designed to elicit a response from the target audience. Where traditional marketing is one-sided and offers no engagement, content marketing builds a relationship with your customers. Brand messaging pillars are a great place to start to create an authentic relationship with your audience.
Consistency
Great results in content marketing come no different than most endeavors; consistency is key. It’s important to produce high-quality content on a regular basis and, when done correctly, it will build authority in your industry, increase the exposure of your business, and generate sales. Not only will consistency help establish trust with your audience, but it will also help you rank better across SERP and social media algorithms.
Unique Angle
With the plethora of information online, ensuring that you are providing value and not adding to the “noise” is one of the most important tips on this list. While competitor research is highly valuable and ranking for specific keywords often requires tackling topics that are likely already covered, finding a unique angle and providing information that isn’t readily available is key. Not only will this help you build authority but also make your content more interesting for your audience. This will be more of an art than a science, but this link will take you to some useful tips for formulating good content ideas.
Results
There is a maxim in some business circles, “What gets measured gets done.” Regular measurement and reporting will not only keep you focused but also informs your decisions to improve your results. It’s important to regularly monitor your progress against your goals. This goes hand in hand with having a purpose for each piece of content you create. It can feel rewarding to look at the volume of content that you’ve published and feel like you’ve accomplished something, but the real measurement is whether the content is actually generating results. The use of analytics to track performance metrics is absolutely essential, including social media.
Want a content marketing strategy that delivers results?
If you aren’t seeing the results you want from your content marketing, Bora can help. Our team of marketers and writers has years of experience creating successful content for our clients, and we can do the same for you. Contact us today to see how we can maximize your content marketing strategy.