Content marketing is persuading people through education and information. Just like every other skill you learned, improving your content marketing is an ongoing process. Some of these things can be done a few times a year, but others need to be done on a constant basis
Customers educate themselves on the solutions to their own problems, and further educate themselves on why your solution is the one they need. Basically, you’re marketing to them with content that teaches, helps, informs and inspires. So there’s no better time to improve your content marketing!
Even if you do just a few of these steps in 2022, you’ll see a major difference in the quality of your content marketing, which will lead to increased web traffic, which can only lead to more sales.
This is your company, so make sure you do it right the first time and then reap the benefits that come from it.
Improve your content marketing with a basic strategy
Pick a few themes for your strategy. Pick one theme per week of the month.
Pick a few frequent problems your product or service solves. Dedicate one topic per week for each month. You’ll cover all four topics in a month for blog articles and social media updates.
Write one blog article per week about each theme. Post it to your blog as a way to boost your website’s SEO, but to also show your audience that you’re an expert in this field.
Build your social media audience. Do a search for people who are likely to buy from you and then follow them on Twitter and connect with them on LinkedIn and Instagram. Engage with them in regular conversations, don’t push out sales messages.
Share industry news stories on your social channels. A great way to remind people of their pain points is to share news stories about them. If you sell a device that helps fleet drivers reduce fuel costs, share news stories about gas prices going up. And write blog articles that analyze the issue.
Do NOT build a day-to-day or week-to-week calendar. Some agencies plan out an entire year’s worth of tweets and social updates, plus blog articles, only to have the entire script collapse when something in the industry or company changed. Think guidelines, not schedules.
Incorporate holidays and events. Be sure to take holidays or special events into consideration. Hotels should have themes for Valentine’s Day, conference schedules and so on. Accountants should talk about tax day a month in advance. And retailers should make plans for the major shopping holidays several months in advance.
A few additional things you should keep in mind:
Know your keywords.
Understand your unique value proposition.
Define your audience and create personas.
Think about your searcher’s intent
Very often, people will optimize their sites with Google’s search bots in mind. Give the correct content for bots to crawl and you’ll rank high for your keywords.
The problem is, the bots don’t buy from you. Also, you may not actually care about the keywords you rank for. And eventually, a bot-first strategy will fail because you forgot the people you are targeting.
Think of why people come to you in the first place. Do they have a problem? What kinds of problems? People even ask their phones or Google that question:
Write blog posts and rewrite your web pages to answer those exact questions. You can also do comparisons and reviews of specific products or services, comparing yours to your competition. Or review products that your customers might use, but you would provide for them, such as a heating/AC company reviewing different AC units.
Optimize your App’s ASO
Depending on how you’re doing your ASO, your App may need a tune-up.
Run your App Store page through a few tools to check the overall ASO health of your App page, and then make the necessary updates.
Create INTERESTING content on your website
Think twice before you publish that how-to article or explainer video.
Do a Q&A session with your staff and ask them things like, “What’s your favorite non-business book?” or “When did you first decide to get into this field?
If you really want to interest people, write interesting things about interesting topics.
Write the in-depth, advanced material instead of basic stuff everyone else does.
Have everyone answer the Questionnaire.
Or develop your own questionnaire and ask your staff and partners to answer it.
Post photos and videos to your Google My Business listing
When people do searches for products or services, oftentimes, Google will often show several business listings. One way to make sure your listing appears near the top (which puts your website at the top) is to add photo and video content to your Google My Business (GMB) listing. Also try posting videos of commonly asked questions.
Create a personality and a voice
Most people write in a very serious, business-like tone. It’s rather dry and uninspiring, and it doesn’t convey any emotion or pull people in. But if you adopt a distinct personality and voice for your content marketing, you’re more likely to win people over because you’ll touch them.
Your voice can be serious, proper, fun, friendly, confident, admiring or inspirational. Think about how you normally speak to your friends and customers and then start dictating your writing.
Answer complex questions
If you want your content marketing to stand out, avoid basic information, instead, dive deep into the weeds and esoterica of your field. You can expand on this as search marketers are finding that long content is actually performing better than short content.
Share personal Experiences and vulnerabilities
People buy from people they like and trust. One way to do that is to share stories about yourself that show you in something other than a heroic, gets-it-right-all-the-time light. Share stories where you learned tough lessons and mistakes.
You don’t have to uncover buried secrets that you’ve never told anyone. But it’s okay to share your feelings about certain topics
Measure Your Work
You don’t know what to improve if you don’t know how well you’re doing. So you need to measure everything you do. Even a basic Google Analytics setup can tell you how well your website and blog are performing, and what you should do about it.
Do you receive more web visitors when you publish a blog article? Then publish more articles. Are your how-to articles outperforming your product review articles? Then write more how-to articles.
Similarly, take a look at your Twitter analytics, Instagram analytics (if you have Instagram Business), and even your LinkedIn and Facebook pages’ performance. See what kinds of content are seeing positive engagement from your visitors and fans, and do more of it. The things that are not performing well? Do less of those, or figure out how to make them better.
Focus your skills
Deliberately practicing new skills and techniques you want to improve. This is important for anyone doing content marketing themselves. Whether you’re a professional content producer, or you have to write blog articles and shoot videos as a small part of your job, as you get better, you’ll improve your content marketing too.
Hire a professional
If you were to offload all the stuff from your job that isn’t the stuff your business actually does, how much more money could you make? If you don’t have the time to improve your content marketing skills, but you want to improve your actual content marketing, then hire a professional.
Just like every other skill, improving your content marketing is an ongoing process. Some of these things can be done a few times a year, but others need to be done on a constant basis.
Next Steps:
There are a lot of people out there who are creating interesting content and winning people over by being clever, humorous, and informative. They’re writing interesting copy, taking gorgeous photos, and producing high-quality video and audio content. Your content usually appears in one of three forms: things you read, things you hear and things you see, therefore you might want to use videos, photos, infographics and navigation schemes as 84% of people have decided to buy a product or service after watching a video. Or it could be podcasts, music, presentations or (again) videos. More than half of podcast listeners say they are more likely to consider brands advertised on podcasts.
As mentioned previously, content marketing is an ongoing process, and there is no better time to start the process than now.
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