Marketing Insights

September 4, 2016 By Cheryl Joy

With over 5,04,00,000 search results on Google that take about 0.53 seconds to load up, there’s more than a ‘little’ information out there about Content Marketing.

Content Marketing is not easy. Well, that’s not true. Good content marketing is not easy.

But if you put your shiniest and smartest thinking hats on, you’d realise that it isn’t that tough. Instead of looking at content marketing as an unmovable mountain in the distance, we decided to break it down into a bunch of little things. What’s even better? We realised that EpicBeat could achieve a lot of those little things.

Here are 16 ways to bolster your content marketing strategy with EpicBeat. Get your notepads ready.

Find out what to write about

There are many topics that are popular across channels on a daily basis. But all trending topics might not make sense for your industry. Using EpicBeat is a great way of finding topics that are relevant to your industry.

Using the right search query gets you the most shared content within your industry. Browse through topics, dig into articles that catch your attention and fine tune your search by using the many available filters.

Choose a format that works for your industry

It all begins with the right search query. Once you’ve sorted that out, everything is incremental from that point on. If you’re uncertain about what format to choose for your topic, EpicBeat’s content insights tab is a great place to quell those doubts and finalise on a format.

An additional level of perfection comes from identifying a top content type. This adds direction to the kind of content you should build on your blog or website.

Find top performing content for a theme

One of the first things I do once I’ve decided on a topic is to browse through existing content on it. I used to rely on Google to do this earlier, but over time I’ve realized that a lot of pretty great content gets buried in something as vast as Google. There’s just so much out there! Often, articles with amazing advice never make it beyond the third or fourth page of search results. EpicBeat to the rescue.

Using the many sort and filter options can bring you top performing content most suited to your specific need. You find valuable information that’s indexed a lot better than a generic Google search. It’s kind of like going to a library to get information versus hunting for it in a bunch of places.

Devise your curation strategy

The amount of quality content you need to create to stay relevant in the eyes of your audience is crazy. It can get pretty hectic, especially if you’re running a small business and have limited resources at your disposal. Curation is a great strategy to maintain consistency and quality on your blog. Most content experts believe in the 80-20 rule. I believe that the ratio of curated or created content depends on many factors that are unique to you. What remains is the need to build a logical and useful curation strategy.

Once you’ve found a list of top shared or top performing content for your industry using EpicBeat, pick few content pieces that appeal to you. Find a good way to tie them together and curate them on your site along with your own take on the topic. You’ve just created great, useful content without spending too much time!

Build your social sharing calendar

6000 tweets get posted on Twitter each second. Getting noticed amidst all that noise is not an easy feat. But sharing relevant content on social media is an integral part of your content strategy.

How does EpicBeat help? Consider EpicBeat to be your daily digest of great content for a topic. Our recently launched ‘Saved Search’ feature comes as an added advantage here.

Alerts take it a step further. Once you’ve set up a perfect search query that captures the kind of content you like to share on social, set up an alert for it. This ensures that you get all that great content delivered piping hot, right to your inbox.

Figure out when to post

The content insights tab in EpicBeat is a treasure trove in itself. We’ve often had customers confess that it’s their favorite part about the tool. What makes it remarkable is that it captures a set of insights that you would otherwise have to deduce manually. Popular time to post is a feature that shows you what days suit which content format the best.

Track content performance

Curiosity is a great thing to have in content marketing. Unless you know how your content is performing, and maybe even how your competitor’s content is doing ?, you can’t define the direction for your future content strategy.A quick way of doing this is by searching for your domain on EpicBeat. It gives you a glimpse of how your content has performed over the selected time-frame.

We recently launched a tracking tool- EpicTrack that makes this whole process a LOT easier. What’s better is that it even gives you some great analytics to simplify the process. Find out more about EpicTrack, here.

Fine tune your channel specific strategy

“Should I post on all social networks or should I focus on a select few?”

This is a question we’re all a bit too familiar with. The answer however, depends on a number of variables such as available resources, target audience, what you set out to achieve etc. But using EpicBeat can give some direction to your decision. Searching for your topic on EpicBeat shows you which social channels are getting maximum engagement for that topic.

Facebook and Pinterest were the top destinations among the social channels when I searched for content related to “Fitness”. However, a search for “IoT” showed that LinkedIn was the clear winner. Formulating a channel specific strategy requires some level of drilling into the data, but this itself is a great place to start!

Figure out your content tone

Long live, long-form. Neil Patel and a volley of content experts have been heralding the return of long-form content. Did it ever even leave?

Knowing the tone and structure your content should have is another guiding factor for content creation. Text Analysis tucked under EpicBeat’s Content Insights tab is a great place to go to for guidance on what sentiment, tone or word counts work best for a topic. What you’d find there is a neat comparison of number of content pieces created under each category stacked against the engagement received. Don’t just go with the flow, go with what’s actually working.

Identify top websites to go to for inspiration

Who is reigning as the undisputed king of content for your industry? More importantly, what can you learn from them? EpicBeat divides top website performers by content hubs and other domains. That’s only fair because some domains are content destinations in themselves and this distinction helps in drawing a fair line between the two.

This works out well for us because it neatly categorizes both kinds of sites and brings you the top performers from both sections.

Find out what works for your target geography

A range of filters lie in patient anticipation for you to go discover them. A super cool one that’s not so easy to come by but immensely relevant? The option to sort content by country/ countries!

Go forth, find your target audience, choose your relevant countries and be inspired.

Identify authors to reach out to

You can find top authors by browsing through the results of your content search. But if you’re trying to identify a set of authors to reach out to, random browsing just isn’t good enough. What EpicBeat does is that it categorizes top authors for the selected topic and places them in a rich list that shows you the average engagement received by their posts and allows you to access all their content pieces with one quick click.

Build your network

A great online presence starts with a strong community of advocates. Getting you closer to this goal is EpicBeat’s Community feature that serves as a guide on how to build your network, with an additional focus on Twitter. The tabs make it pretty easy to understand- sections like ideal number of followers, what kind of influencer personas to focus on and a whole lot more. What are personas you ask? Your answer is coming right up.

Identify influencers to collaborate with

We’re slowly gliding into influencer marketing territory. No content strategy is complete without an understanding of the influencers in the space. These are the rule makers, the ones with the Midas touch of virality. When they speak, you better listen. The advantage with EpicBeat is that influencers are categorized by channel so you can focus on the influencers that are calling the shots on the channels that matter to you.

Understand influencer behaviour

Tracking influencer activity on social becomes a whole lot easier once you’ve made a list of the influencers you want to target. EpicBeat gives you an additional level of analysis for Twitter by showing you influencer activity on the channel. Twitter influencers are further categorized into personas based on their behaviour on the site. Aspects like how often they tweet, their interaction levels, what they tweet about etc. are captured to categorize them into specific personas.

You can read more about influencer personas here.

Devise a channel specific influencer strategy

EpicBeat’s influencer download feature is great place to start if you’re building out a larger influencer marketing strategy across channels. Pick the channels that you’re interested in and download entire lists of influencers.

Your Twitter influencer downloads even contain their twitter handles, making it easy for you to organize all the information in one place. We’re soon adding this feature for other channels as well so stay tuned for that update!

There’s a lot more you can do with EpicBeat. But if you’re looking for a head start, this is it. We’ll be bringing you many more in-depth case studies on how EpicBeat can rock your marketing strategy, so watch this space for more. Head over to EpicBeat and get started, right away.