You’re putting in the effort—your team diligently updates your business’ social media and company blog, and your newsletter is engaging and typo-free. So why aren’t you getting the engagement you need to lift your business above the rest?
You may be in need of a little content marketing advice! 90% of marketers plan to continue investing in content marketing, proving its value as a successful strategy. Here are four content marketing tips to help you improve.
1. Know Your Audience
You may be optimizing your content for search engines, but you’re creating for real people—you need to cater to them first! Identify your target audience as specifically as you can. You may have a demographic in mind, but you can also use analytics tools (more info here) to find out who is already engaging with your content.
After you know who you’re creating content for, you need to find out as much as you can about them. One way to do this is through feedback forms. Ask your customers directly what kind of content they want and where they prefer to get it.
2. Focus Your Efforts
Once you know your audience, you can build your content marketing plan around them. To focus your efforts, you need to decide what content channels to focus on. Do you get the best engagement on social media, or do long-form blog posts get the most hits and shares?
Make sure you consider questions like these:
- What network (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) gets the most engagement?
- What content type (videos, text posts, images, emails) is most effective?
- What content length (280 characters or 2000 words) is right for your audience and goals?
3. Establish Your Calendar
It’s called a content marketing strategy for a reason; you need to think through every action. One of the worst mistakes you can make is irregularity, while a regular schedule of quality content can keep customers coming back for more.
Remember, you need two schedules for your content marketing ideas. The first is your basic upload and posting schedule—it includes when and where you put your content. The second schedule should be more specific; match topics and post types to relevant dates like holidays or seasons.
4. Measure Your Results
This is the moment of truth—were your methods effective? Your content distribution tools should come with analytics that can help you answer this question. Return to your goals and see if the numbers line up; look at hits, engagement, and ultimately conversion.
Whether you got the results you were looking for or your strategy missed the mark, the next step is the same: make improvements! Your content marketing strategy will always be changing to match trends or to become more efficient. Lean into the topics, styles, and methods that work and adjust or update the content that doesn’t.
Use These Content Marketing Tips Today
The right content marketing strategy can take your business from stagnant to stellar. Follow these simple content marketing tips now to perfect your strategy and watch your business grow.
For more articles like this, check out the Marketing page on this site! There, you’ll find posts on everything you need to know about designing the perfect content marketing campaign.