Digital marketing is thriving, wouldn’t you agree? Gone are the days when a bunch of men in dapper suits at Madison Avenue (Mad Men reference!) came up with catchy slogans to sell you stuff. TV advertising, corporate communications, billboard, and other traditional marketing methods aren't as effective anymore as they used to be. In this digital age of endless options and well-informed consumers, content marketing is pretty much the only type of marketing that drives steady and high-quality results. So here are 22 content marketing tips to get your brand off to an amazing start.
11 Content Related Tips
Let's talk about how we can produce the best quality content.
1. Be Original
Good content marketing is all about value, and value always comes with originality. No matter the niche, nobody wants to read an article that is nothing but a jumbled-up re-writing of something that already exists. Always strive to be as original as possible in your content. Provide new and updated insights. Give something new for your readers to think about. Having a consistent stream of original content is how you will establish yourself as an expert in your niche. That is how you build credibility and trust among your audience. If you must include unoriginal content, try to find a way to present them in a new and insightful way.
2. Perfect Grammar and Flow
Good grammar matters—it has always been, and it will always be. Ultimately, content marketing is all about communicating something specific as clearly as possible. Therefore, no matter which language you write in, all your content should be edited and proofread to perfection before you publish. Sure, you may think that your readers do not care about perfect grammar. However, content with bad grammar, punctuation, or spelling mistakes never inspires the kind of confidence and authority you need from your readers. If that’s not enough, bad grammar in your blog posts can have a direct negative impact on your SEO. If you are writing your own content, invest time in improving your grammar. Or, you can always invest in a qualified editor to take care of that for you.
3. Always Provide a Solution
The core of every successful business is that they provide a clear-cut solution to an existing problem. When it comes to content marketing, each and every one of your articles or pieces of content should be created with that core idea in mind. Your content could be informative or entertaining, or seemingly appear nothing but fun and frivolous at a glance. However, ultimately, they should always give the viewer a solution or point them towards a solution, which could be a specific product or a service offered by your brand. The trick is to never overtly sell your products and services in your content. They should simply inspire or encourage your audience to solve the problem they have. What you sell is simply there to accelerate or improve upon their solution.
4. Go In-Depth
Whenever you create a piece of content, especially something like an article or an informative video, make sure you put the time and effort into really going in-depth. There is only so much value that you can give in a short 500-word blog or a 5-minute video unless it leads to a more in-depth piece of content that you have already created. Even when it comes to SEO, properly formatted long-form content often performs better than shorter content. Connecting this tip to one before, when you strive to give a high-quality solution to a problem that your reader has, you need to explore every possible aspect of that solution. Remember, however, that long content does not mean fluff. If it is a blog post, every sentence should be intentional and provide value to the reader.
5. Be Visual
As inherently visual beings, we are automatically attracted to content that is highly visual. With smartphones and the never-ending influx of bright digital screens, the world around us is becoming more and more visual every day. There are billions of images and visual content being shared per day across many digital platforms. To state the obvious, visual content gets more engagement from online audiences than merely text content. Therefore, make sure you include a generous portion of visual content into your content marketing strategy. Use visual imagery as well as persuasive words to tell your story in a lasting and memorable way.
6. Personalize
As we discussed in a previous blog post as well, your content marketing ROI depends largely on how well you have understood your audience. As a content marketer, you need to have a detailed and intimate understanding of who your audience is, what their interests are, what attracts them, what retains them, and what exactly do they expect to gain from consuming the kind of content that you create. Personalize your content as much as possible. You should, ideally, personalize them to the degree that your viewer or the reader feels that you are speaking directly to them as if a friend or an expert that they personally know would. This is why it is tricky to recreate the kind of content that has worked for another brand. It may have worked for their audience, but maybe not yours.
7. Think Outside of the Frame
When you publish content online, you are automatically competing with quite possibly millions of similar pieces of content. Therefore, you need to always try and think of different and more innovative ways to get your message across. If you do not think outside of the box, there is always the chance of you blending into the background, or getting lost in the massive waves of new content that you have to compete with. Your target should always be to give your readers value and solutions that they cannot find anywhere else. It does not matter how small your solution is; what matters is that it is perfectly curated for your audience and presented in a way that delights them.
8. Give Them What They Ask For
Any kind of ego and superiority you have as an expert in the field should be left behind when you sit down to create content. Audiences these days are incredibly informed in more ways than one. You are not there to lecture them or show them that you know more than them. You are there to simply give them what they ask for, with added insight and value. As you get more and more familiar with your particular audience, you will gain more understanding of what they want and need. Start with what you know well, and then go from there to find the perfect balance between exploring your creative abilities and what the audience demands from you.
9. Experiment with the Formats and Formatting
This is also a more specific extension of thinking beyond the frame. There are no set rules to written and multimedia content anymore. Be innovative with your content formatting. Include images, short videos such as Tik Toks, longer and more informative videos, infographics, and more to get your message to the audience as attractively as possible. Ask questions. Make the photos more interactive. Add charts and graphs that will tell a thousand words in one small image. You are fighting for their attention whilst there are millions of others like you fighting for the same thing. Therefore, use everything in your toolbox.
10. Be Driven By Data
Years before the internet, the traditional marketers had the unfair benefit that their audiences were not always informed about the product or the service they were selling. Therefore, as long as they present them with catchy words and attractive images, audiences would buy them. Modern consumers cannot be persuaded that way. They would read over 100 online reviews from independent and verified buyers to understand the product or the service well. Therefore, you need to always be truthful and strengthen your content marketing with strong data and statistics. Make sure your data comes from credible sources. There is something irresistible about percentages and data, especially in informative content. 87% of the readers tend to read more when there is a percentage statistic in a blog post—just kidding! That’s not a real statistic. But you were intrigued, weren’t you? Now, do it with proper sources and data when you create your content.
11. Tell a Cohesive Story
Storytelling. Storytelling. Storytelling. Just like “location in real estate, good storytelling is everything when it comes to content marketing. When a person buys a product or a service that you sell, they are buying into the story of your brand, rather than that specific product. That is why people camp outside of Apple stores to buy the newest iPhone. It is not just about the phone, it is about the story. So, use your content marketing strategy to tell the best story possible. You can read more about good storytelling in content marketing here.
11 Marketing Related Tips
Now that we have content, let's talk about how to get traffic to your content.
1. Success Loves Speed (Get on With the Trends Fast!)
Social media and digital marketing trends come and go in waves. They are fleeting, but also quite powerful. It may take one funny tweet about an interesting event to make your brand go viral. Therefore, your entire content marketing team should be prepared and trained in good rapid response tactics. A meme or a hashtag that gains millions of impressions today may disappear tomorrow. So, you need to get on with the trends as fast as possible, while keeping your content high quality and fresh. It is not an easy task, but your consistent hard work will surely pay off in more ways than you can imagine.
2. Have Clear and Measurable Goals
Imagine running a marathon without having an exact idea about where the endpoint is. Two things can happen. You could be running and running until exhaustion without even knowing when or how to stop. Also, even if you do win, you will not get the sense of euphoria of winning because you just had no idea that you won even if you did. That is pretty much the same as running your content marketing campaigns without a clear set of goals. Do not put your effort and money into content marketing campaigns without measurable goals with a clear timeline attached to them.
3. Repurpose and Re-market Whenever Possible
Let’s face it. Creating high-quality content is never an easy task no matter the format. Whether you are producing a video or writing an informative blog post, there is a lot of research, creative power, and hard work that goes into it. Therefore, do not be afraid to repurpose or re-market that content whenever it is possible. It will increase the efficiency of your strategy, and even help you reach new audiences. Use your blog posts to find catchy snippets of content that you can Tweet or post on Facebook. Use your detailed video productions to create Tik Toks or Instagram Reels. You get the idea.
4. Be Laser-focused on the Stages of Buyer’s Journey
One of the biggest advantages you have as a digital marketer using a solid content marketing strategy is that you are able to watch your leads go through the buyer’s journey. You can pinpoint the exact time they started getting interested in your brand. You can see them engaging with you, building a sense of trust, making a purchase, and eventually becoming a loyal returning customer. Traditional marketers never had this power, so make sure you utilize that power to the best of your ability. Create personalized content that appeals to each stage of the buyer’s journey.
5. The Pillar-Cluster Content Model
As a content marketer, your aim is to provide valuable content to your audience, and also to keep them on your website or the dedicated platform long enough for them to build a lasting sense of trust and confidence in your brand. The Pillar-Cluster content model allows you to do just that. It simply means that you create a piece of focused pillar content, surrounded by a cluster of related content that the reader will also be interested in that is inter-linked within the pillar article. That way, if the reader wishes to get a broader idea about the topic, they can simply click on a link to visit the cluster pages.
6. High Authority Links
When you are closely associated with people or things with power, you are automatically assumed to have power — a tale as old as time! The same concept applies to SEO ranking and high authority backlinks. The more you can get backlinks from high-ranking websites, the better. Therefore, make sure you always include a good game plan to land high authority backlinks in your content marketing strategy. Some of the common ways to achieve this include guest posting, connecting reputed journalists with sources, links swaps, and also PR outreach.
7. Diversify Distribution Channels
With more and more innovative social media platforms and other channels of marketing popping up every day, finding what platforms you should use can be overwhelming at times. The exact channels you should use, of course, depend on your particular niche and the audience demographics. However, it is always wiser to have more than one channel that resonates with your audience to distribute your content. If you are a beginner, do not be afraid to experiment on different channels to see which one performs the best. Meet your audience where they are, without expecting them to put extra effort into finding you.
8. Make Use of Your Analytic Reports
Many natural content creators who produce outstanding content often falter when it comes to using content analytics to track the performance of their content. The numbers and graphs that come in analytics reports can be scary to even look at if you are not familiar with them. However, these analytics help you understand what works, what does not work, and what you can do to improve the performance of your content. Therefore, take time to make yourself familiar with content analytics. They will help you constantly refine your content and improve your strategy.
9. Optimize Everything
Optimization of your content involves doing the needed formatting and metadata tweaks so search engines and your audience can find you easily. SEO, particularly, is a dynamic process and you need to be constantly up-to-date with the industry trends in order to keep up with new optimization strategies. Rest assured, however, you will never regret the extra time you spend to properly optimize your content. It will always improve the user experience, and get you more visibility online organically without having to spend money in order to boost the reach of the content.
10. Build Your Email List
Email Marketing is dead — NOT! Look, email marketing will always be alive as long as email is alive. What’s dead is the scammy email marketing campaigns that used to fill our inboxes in the early 2010s or so. However, high-quality email marketing campaigns that truly provide value to subscribers continue to outperform other content marketing methods when it comes to both engagement and ROI. Therefore, make sure you continue to build your email list organically, and leverage it in your content marketing strategy.
11. Keep Old Content up to Date
Last but not least, make sure you keep all your content up to date by improving them with new stats and information. Every year, take time to update your metadata and even the content itself in all of your blog posts. A handy trick is to include the year in the title of your content (like in this article!), but not in the URL, so you can later update the blog post without having to change a high-performing URL. So, there you go. 22 practical and effective tips to give a turbo-boost to your content marketing campaign. Good luck!
