Elements of Content Marketing.

6 Effective Content Marketing Tips

Great content comes in all kinds of formats, including blogs, pictures and videos. The question is, how can you get the right people on the internet to see them? The simple answer: a curated content marketing strategy. Your content marketing efforts are useless without a planned approach to content creation and search engine optimization.

In this blog, we’ll cover tips for content marketing to help you build brand awareness, increase your address lists and bring in more customers.

What Is Content Marketing?

Before we get into any tips, you gotta know what content marketing is. Thankfully, it’s exactly what it sounds like: a strategy for creating and utilizing content for your target audience. Content marketing doesn’t always directly promote your brand; it shows potential customers that you know your sh*t.

1. Determine Your Target Audience

You might be asking, “what is good content?” Well, that depends. The best content for Julia could make Gary roll his eyes.

So, use content that finds the right audience. But first, get to know who your target audience is, as well as your buyer persona. This is a sort of imaginary representation of who you are trying to reach after you’ve researched the market.

Some questions to ask:

      • How old are they?
      • What traits make up their personalities?
      • How do they communicate?
      • What social media do they use?
      • What do they do for a living, and what are their hobbies?
      • How do they take their coffee? (Are they Team Dunkin’ or Team Starbucks?)

With a target audience nailed down, you can better communicate with both potential customers and new customers, using different types of content to convey messages to them (on the platforms they’re already using).

2. Get Organized With A Calendar

If there’s something we can stress repeatedly, it’s to stay organized. That’s whether you’re making a business plan or mapping out a content marketing campaign. For any brand, a detailed content calendar will come in handy to deliver concise, consistent content. This is when each piece of content is planned out on a calendar in advance. Most people plan for a quarter in advance. That way, you plan far enough out that you’re prepared but not so far that your content is stale and out-of-touch. What’s hot now probably won’t be six months from now.

A marketing team plans new content, whether publishing blogs when promoting and releasing podcasts or scheduling social media posts. Calendars should be updated regularly and in real-time.

In comparison, an editorial calendar looks at content, but not as close as a content calendar.

This is done by looking at long-term plans and goals you want to achieve along the way with content, while a content calendar breaks down when (and where) you’re publishing content.

3. Write Good Content

If you want to meet your business goals, plan for the right content. There’s no one template for good content. So, where do high-quality content ideas come from? Answer: just about anywhere. While some can come to you like a creativity bug, other topics can be discovered using hard data.

Draw people in with a solution to a problem. Use keyword research to determine what people are searching for right now in real time. Utilizing the right keywords will not only ensure you have content on the problems your audience is looking to solve, but also rank higher on the SERPs for SEO. (BTW, SERP = Search Engine Results Page)

Can’t fit in all your content creation in-house? Keep from going stagnant by inviting an influencer or someone in your market to do a guest post. This will provide fresh content and engage followers and subscribers — often picking from already established audiences.

Whether it’s on your own page or a guest post, any copywriting on your great content pieces should make it obvious that your brand is the expert on that topic.

4. Repurpose Best-Performing Content

When you’re planning out your content calendar, make it easier by repurposing content. If you have a Facebook post that performed well, build on that topic and write a blog. Turn an infographic into a series of social media posts.

Repurposing content is a great outreach tool. By posting to another platform, your brand will reach a wider audience — with content you already know is great. It also boosts your online presence, in turn, raising brand awareness. A way to monitor how content is performing is by measuring metrics and conversion rates (traffic to a landing page or how many people saw and interacted with a LinkedIn post).

On social media, it’s a good idea to reshare a post from a different angle. For blogs, update the content to reflect new information. Evergreen content, which stays relevant for an extended period, is always great to add to your content calendar.

5. Use Those Links

We can’t stress it enough: SEO is important. Link building is an important tactic to build your search engine ranking. This is done by using links to other credible websites and incorporating them into your content.

In a blog, link back throughout your website where it’s appropriate. Then, include links from other websites. Links to a great infographic that supplements what you’re writing about in your blog or linking to another blogger’s site for a recipe help the internet see your website as a trustworthy source. Plus, Google Analytics takes links into account when deciding where you land on the SERPs.

When adding links, make sure they’re actually helpful to the reader. Don’t spam your own content with links on every other word. No one wants to read a website page with entirely blue, underlined text.

6. Email Marketing

Another form of digital marketing is email marketing. This tactic is used to let people know about new eCommerce products, services or discounts through an email list. Email marketing campaigns are great for informing subscribers of new products or information about your industry.

You stay close to your target audience on a regular basis, right in their inbox.

There are four popular kinds of marketing emails.

      • Newsletters – Let subscribers learn something new.
      • Acquisition – Gain new email subscribers.
      • Retention – Personalize the email or include a call to action, inviting a subscriber to use your brand.
      • Promotional – Offer a discount.

Who Handles Content Marketing?

Lift Marketing! Whether you’re a beginner in your field or you just need some tips for content marketing (and then actually doing it), Lift Marketing is here to help. Starting with pinpointing the target audience to creating a content calendar and building a successful content marketing strategy, contact Lift Marketing and reach your marketing goals.