Tips To Improve Content Marketing In 2017

Content marketing is the most exciting marketing strategy that businesses use to forge connections in the social world. It is an approach that creates interest and relevance for consumers. Content marketing captivates audience on social media through visual content, writing and interactive/gamified features as means of promotion. Content marketing strategies dwells particularly on showcasing the creativity and expertise of the brand in presenting their content.

When implemented properly, content marketing can convert and remain in the minds of audiences for a much longer time. Businesses have used content marketing to inspire purchases and brand advocacy, amongst other things. It captures the target marketing like no other forms of marketing. A strong content strategy is a discreet approach of selling products but much more effective compared to traditional advertising.

How to be more competitive in content strategies?

According to Curata, 60% of companies will have an executive solely in charge of content marketing strategy by 2016. 76% of marketers will increase investment in content marketing and the top content marketing objectives are driving sales and brand awareness. Every company wants to excel in content marketing and they are investing more resources to attain better content marketing.

As revealed by LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community, there are several challenges for marketers implementing content marketing. These challenges include lack of time, bandwidth to create content, lack of variety, lack of quality control and not being able to develop a consistent marketing strategy.

What are some of the ways to better our content marketing in the new year?

According to trial, testing and error, the most effective approaches to content marketing are elaborated below:

1. Well-defined targets in content marketing

This strategy requires you to define your target customers in your marketing. If you cast the net too wide, it will disperse energy/efforts. Some companies discover their target customers when they start implementing digital marketing and find a different group of customers to what they have planned. Valuable data about highly converting customers should inform your content marketing plans.

By focusing more on your target audience, you can enhance productivity and your content marketing strategy.

2. A deeper contextual understanding of your business

“Understanding” is the main point addressed in this approach. It is difficult to create content without understanding the business and the value it can provide. Pertinent to this, you must have a perfect “know how” about your product, buyers-especially their preferences in making purchases. In this way, you can influence consumers more readily and help move them through the sales funnel. This content marketing strategy requires you to create context such as; dealing with your consumer’s pain points, motivations, discomforts and the customer journey which enables you to provide better value in your content.

3. Clear conversion goals in your content strategy

Upon knowing the context of buyer’s preferences, you should align actions in content marketing with your marketing goals. Conversion means converting your target buyers into paying customers. This is the biggest content marketing metric for businesses and one that should inform your content strategy.This is a performance benchmark that will help you measure the effectiveness/success of your content marketing.

4. Appropriate points of contact

This is an approach that can create a bridge between sales and the content. Businesses can initiate target market conversions by emails, phone calls, text messages or tweets. After discovering your content marketing, consumers can sign up, or easily access your business contact information.

5. A process of content alignment

Aligning all the strategies mentioned above by encouraging the buyer’s journey from unawareness to awareness, urging buyers interest and the final stage of purchase. This strategic framework used in content marketing campaigns can help to drive conversions more readily. Presenting contextual content, piquing the consumer’s interest again through follow up and then guiding them along the sales funnel will help towards goals of conversion.

6.The ability to scale content marketing

Content marketing can be scaled through repurposing, strategic content creation, recycling and user generated content. Creating more content is a big challenge for marketers and inevitably lack of resources is a reason why this is so. In order to create ripples of interest in your content (reshares, viral marketing), the quality of content must be high or stand out in some way. Design a content production schedule that will work for your target consumers. Find out their optimal viewing times and main areas of interest; chances are, you will achieve higher levels of engagement with popular subjects. Marketing analytics will reveal the most shared/viewed content.

7.Measure your content marketing

How could we measure the effectiveness of marketing content? You can measure the efficacy of your content marketing using:

Unique visitor metrics: calculating the number of viewers who visits your website in a specified period of time.

metrics: calculating the number of viewers who visits your website in a specified period of time. Page views : look at the accumulative number of individual pages that your visitors click on during a given period of time. The more viewed pages compared to the number of unique visitors indicates that your audience is finding your marketing content appealing.

marketing content Search engine traffic : the traffic being referred to your site through organic search engines, such as Google or Bing. This is an indication of the effectiveness of your content within a period of time.

Bounce rate: the percentage of visitors who visit your site and then immediately “bounce” or leave before clicking on any other pages. A bounce rate of less than 40 percent is considered good. If it is any higher, it may be an indication that visitors to your site don’t like what they find there.

the Conversion rate : the percentage of visitors to your site who take a specific action that your content encourages them to, such as signing up for your newsletter. Conversion rates vary considerably based on industry, but tend to soar around 2 and 3 percent on average. That said, aim for a conversion rate of approximately 5 percent, or even higher if you are creating specific landing pages for specific audiences.

Inbound links: The number of external links to your site is an indication that other people have found your content important enough to link to it. Essentially, the more high-quality inbound links you have, the higher your content will rank on search engines.

Metrics measurements will help us analyze what we are doing wrong with content marketing and areas of improvement.

8.Increase the budget for content marketing

Increasing the competitiveness, quality and volume of content marketing requires more resources. Sometimes, this can be attained by increasing the marketing budget. With a greater budget, experts in content strategy can be hired to oversee the content schedule/implementation.

9.Patience in content strategy

Content marketing is a marathon. Creating high quality content, promoting it and nurturing relationships with audiences that consume your content will take time. Compromising the quality of content can impact negatively on your brand on other digital marketing efforts.

10.Banish unrealistic expectations

Everyone dreams of their content becoming viral and catapulting them to stratospheric levels of success. Attaining virality is great but not the only goal of great content marketing. Sometimes, achieving virality does not equal high conversions or financial success for the company. There are other myths to banish in content marketing-which you can read about here.

11.Paid promotions can be a good content strategy

Through tracking and trial and error, you can find what social ads work best for your content marketing. Social media platforms such as Facebook. Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram are places where you can get your paid content in front of target demographics.

12.Realistic content publishing schedules

It is good to be ambitious in your content publishing when you can realistically keep up with it! Your consumers would rather have regular content, even once a week than content that is published 3 times a day and then tapers off to once a month. Consistency is key in content marketing.

13.Focus on the few not the many in content marketing

Focus on a few content marketing topics and social media platforms to promote them. You can decide what to focus on through consumer data; find the topics they enjoy the most using analytics and reach them via their preferred social channels. This will concentrate your content marketing efforts in the most productive ways.

14.Risk aversion can be good in content strategy

Stick to tried and tested content marketing methods that yields the highest conversion rates for you. Although it is not terribly exciting, you will achieve a better use of your resources and strengthen relationships with your audience. Consumers don’t like to be shocked or taken out of their comfort zone; nor should you in your content strategy.

15.Long term sustainability in content marketing

Content marketing is a marathon that needs to be sustained with vigor and clever use of resources. This means being able to devise a content strategy that you can implement in the long run. Where needed, adjustments and flexibility in the content strategy is required too.

16.Accepting a longer term ROI for content marketing

Like instant gratification, an advert or Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign can yield short term and fairly predictable results. If you require immediate sales, a carefully set up PPC campaign will help you achieve that. In contrast, content marketing will not get you immediate results, at least not as fast as PPC. You will however, in the long run get a very good ROI (return on investment) for your time and money. Great content marketing can boost your search engine visibility (organic traffic) and help strengthen your brand.

17. Prevent content producer burnout

Tied in with the point about sustainable content marketing, avoiding burn out will improve your content marketing greatly. Delegating work to other marketers or even hiring a content production manager can help to alleviate any hiccups in your content marketing schedule. Many smaller businesses will not be able to hire another full time content manager, so a realistic approach to content marketing is needed. Taking breaks and finding a content production schedule that strikes the right balance between health and business goals will be best.

Soaring high on content marketing is not easy; it requires a lot of effort and tracking the different metrics. Despite the trend towards multi-channel and device/visually driven content marketing, the only key to surpass it all is to be realistic in your ambitions and stick to what works the best.