Top Content Marketing Tips That Guarantee More Business
Content marketing brings in traffic and engagement across many channels. When done correctly, blogging and social media posts really drive visibility for your business. Plus, it costs you nothing to create content for your business.
Whether you’re just starting a blog for your business or have hundreds of posts you’re looking to get more eyes on, these content marketing tips will help you achieve your goals.
Answer Your Audience With An Expert Content Marketing Strategy
Most of today’s content is produced in real-time. Businesses and marketers are using social media platforms to publish multiple posts and images per day, including live videos. With all these options, how do you know what content will help your business?
Here are a few tips to ensure your content gets as much traffic and engagement as possible, while also converting visitors into paying customers.
1. Identify and Solve Your Audience’s Problems
If your piece of content doesn’t address the needs of your audience, they won’t be drawn in with your headline, much less read and interact with your post. Instead, you’ll need to create audience personas and understand their intent when searching keywords you want to rank for.
What problems do they have? What do they need to solve those problems? What answers can you provide that no one else in your industry or niche can? These are just some of the ways to hone in your content and headlines so your audience sees the answers they’re looking for.
2. Find Content Topics from Social Media & Online Communities
One way to find what your audience is looking for involves market research through social media and online communities with your target audience.
For example, you may go on TikTok if you have a lifestyle blog and search for hashtags related to your keywords. You’ll find hundreds of videos that pertain to those keywords. Then, you can look through comments to see your audience’s thoughts and questions.
3. Link Your Content to the Customer’s Journey
Your content should also have a transactional goal within the customer’s journey. Even if your social post or blog post is just the start of your customer’s journey, you can include CTAs (call-to-action) or product links (if you’re an ecommerce business) in your post so that your readers can explore.
Pro Tip
One way to link to your content is through retargeting ads (also referred to as remarketing). You can set up a tracking pixel on your website to tag visitors and add them to your remarketing list, then show them banner ads on a Google Display Network that link back to your site.
This digital marketing strategy requires minimal budget. If you’re not sure how to set up these campaigns, it may be best to work with an advertising agency.
4. Draw Them In with an Eye-Catching Headline
Your headline should directly answer the query asked in Google as it relates to the main keyword. What is your audience looking for and how can you solve their problem? For example, people searching “how does content marketing work” or “what is content marketing” will be looking for content marketing tips or a guide to content marketing.
You should implement that focus in your headline. A tool like RankMath actually scores your headline by looking for a number, positive modifier, and main keyword. These scores are determined from research on what audiences click on the most.
If you’re having trouble coming up with a good headline, there are a few headline formulas out there that can help you brainstorm. However, it’s best to first identify your audience’s intent when searching a keyword and check out the competition. Then, craft a headline that outdoes your competition while also satisfying the audience’s query.
5. Format Your Content for Scanning and Readability
Writing is just one part of your blog post. You also want to create a readable, exciting post that draws the eye down. The headline is the top of the post, followed by your intro, which should capture their attention and direct them to “read on” and learn more.
Your subheads are quick ways to tell the story down the page, leading the reader further into your explanation by providing more tips and specialist knowledge they won’t find on other blog posts.
In addition, you’ll want to keep your paragraphs short. Break up blocks of text with quotes, bulleted lists, images, charts, or other graphics to expand upon your topic.
6. Always Place CTA at the Bottom
It’s important that your post is tied to a goal, especially if you’re trying to make sales and turn visitors into long-term customers. One way to do this is to add a call-to-action (CTA) at the bottom of your post.
While you may traditionally think that CTAs only belong on a landing page, that couldn’t be further from the truth. This can be a link to a product or sell page, encouraging people to take the next step down the sales funnel. CTAs increase conversion rates and heighten a visitors sense of urgency. For more help, check out Hubspot’s list of best practices.
7. Link to Relevant Content
Throughout your blog, it’s essential to include internal links. Ideally, you want two to three internal links for other relevant pages or even products that could help the reader. The links should always use relevant or LSI keywords to further enhance your search engine rankings.
Engaging, successful content provides external links as well. These are helpful, relevant links to sites with high domain authority, such as .edu and .gov websites with lots of verified, trusted, and high-quality content. Some news sources are also worthy, so long as it is evergreen content. Interviews, videos, and other high ranking websites may also work well for your external linking strategy.
Pro Tip
To produce great content for your site, answer pain points or complex questions and link out to similar types of content that you’ve published on related topics. Not only is this great for your site’s readability, but also your SEO rankings on the SERPs and organic traffic. Another strategy is through link building outreach, asking other sites to create a backlink to your content.
One way to find these questions is by using a marketing tool called AnswerthePublic.com. This free tool shows you all kinds of questions related to a keyword that you provide. The questions are sourced from all searches, so you can see which questions are most popular for your audience.
By answering these questions, you also prepare your pieces of content to be used as a featured snippet in Google. Currently, this feature is changing as Google makes swift updates to its algorithm. However, if questions similar to the ones you feature in your blog are asked in a query, it’s likely that your page will still show up as a featured snippet.
8. Promote Your Content on All Channels
Lastly, always share your content on as many channels as possible (use an editorial calendar – even a template can help). Be sure to also use relevant hashtags and even tag influencers if you know they’ll appreciate the content.
The best channels for promoting content to increase social shares still include Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. However, there are some rising content channels like TikTok that may work for your niche if you find an audience.
Even if your primary target audience isn’t currently on these channels, it’s worth it to set up a profile and share as much content as you can with relevant hashtags and keywords in your captions. You never know when a new audience for your product might appear.
Along with social media, make sure you send email subscribers recent content, either in single email sends when you’re publishing content or a bi-weekly/monthly newsletter. Be sure to segment your audiences into email lists within your email marketing platform. This helps to ensure you’re receiving high engagement and little-to-no unsubscribes from your audience.
Pro Tip
Infographics are great ways to get across vital information that can get people to click through to the site.
Video is another great way to promote your content as well. Since videos play automatically and can be cut into several segments, you can constantly share videos across all platforms and get views from several audiences. Videos are also shared the most and tend to get the most engagement on social media.
Tools like Animoto can quickly help you turn a blog post into a video. Sometimes the best way to expand upon current content is to take behind-the-scenes video or create a tutorial using your phone.
If looking for professional video content, you may want to engage an agency with a content creation and video production team to help you achieve your idea.
Elevate Your Content Marketing Strategy
It’s extremely important that businesses hone their content and make it readable and informative for their visitors.
Depending on the scenario, your audience may be looking for entertainment, products or tutorials. It’s up to you to know what your audience is looking for and optimize your content so that it gives answers as perfectly as possible.
Pairing that knowledge with consistent new content on your website, you can create a successful content marketing campaign that will bring people to your site. Not only will you increase your business’ brand awareness, but loyalty and conversion as well from both new and returning customers.
From a small business to large, we are able to provide you help with your content marketing efforts. Our team of content marketers and strategists are here for you. We can help with the creation, optimization, and push of your website’s content to increase the metrics that matter most to your business.
