7 Effective Content Marketing Tips For 2023
So what is content marketing and why you should use it
“ Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
As defined by the Content Marketing Institute, an authoritative resource on all matters relating to this subject.
“Content marketing is one of the best ways to advertise and promote your business, helping it to grow and be successful. For this you will need to produce quality, relevant and reliable information to circulate and share, if not you will be just another company filling the internet with mediocre information that will be of little interest to your target audience or your business”.
Your content should also be SEO and search engine friendly to help prospective customers find all the products and services you offer, drive traffic to your website and achieve your goals.
1) Is content marketing for you?
Before you even start to think about content marketing ask yourself a few questions, why are doing it, what are your desired results, is it right for your business and do you have the time or budget to see it through.
All quite important questions as you may waste a lot of time, energy and money without any real results being achieved.
In reality, many businesses these days require a content marketing strategy to compete in today’s marketplace. Around 75% of companies are producing content to add value to their brand without trying to sell their products or services. They do it to entice, engage new prospects and encourage them to convert into new customers.
2) Know who your target market is
It is a common mistake to just throw out content on the web in the hope that some will stick and produce your desired results. This approach is wrong and is a waste of time and money.
If you are an established business you will know your typical profile, but if you are a new company then research is a must. Otherwise, you will be creating content without having any assurance that your content is valuable and relevant to your target audience.
Without spending fortunes on market research there are lots of free market research tools you could also talk to your sales, customer, and product team to gather useful information and customer profiles. Ultimately you need to learn about the interests and preferences of your audience so you can effectively target them with the appropriate content.
3) Produce unique relevant and high-quality content
Throughout our articles, you will read repeatedly the importance of producing high-quality relevant content, and for very good reason. Millions of new articles are being uploaded to the internet each and every day, so you need to create high-quality, unique and relevant content to stand out in the crowd.
Here some top tips when planning your content marketing.
1) Marketing is futile and impossible without high-quality content
2) Write for your target audience
3) Leave out the marketing jargon and write clearly
4) Speak your mind
5) Make it relevant to your business
6) Produce evergreen content
7) Create great headlines
8) Convey your brand’s image and voice
9) Solve complex issues when possible
10) Not all content has to tell a story
11) It is fine to share content more than once
4) Distributing your content
It would be impossible to be active on every channel so with a little research you will find which ones are best suited to your business goals.
Don’t be tempted to open accounts on numerous channels without giving some thought to exactly what you want to achieve and the time you will need to dedicate to each one to make it a success. Even if you have a healthy content marketing budget you should still consider your options before deciding which channel will give you the best ROI ( return on investment)
According to Adweek the best time to post on Pinterest is Saturdays between 8 and 11 am whilst on Facebook the best days are Thursdays and Fridays.
You can see now that by using the information that is readily available on the internet to help you plan your content marketing calendar, you have a much better chance of success.
5) Always think about SEO
In an ideal world, you would purely write for your target audience and not worry about the SEO, however, the competition is fierce out there so you need to think about including relevant keywords that you trying to rank for.
Use important tools such as the Google Keyword planner will help you research for the most profitable keywords relating to your business.
6) Use content marketing tools
The growth in content marketing tools in the past few years has been huge. There are platforms and tools to help you manage and analyse every aspect of your content management campaigns.
The top tools in each category include:
Website analytics – Google Analytics, Web Trends and Woopra
Social media analytics – Curalate, Visible and Crowd Booster
Web analytics – Alexa, Quantcast and Compete
SEO analytics – Moz, Sem Rush and Raven Tools
Email marketing – Mailchimp, RapidMai and Emma
Social Media Management – Hootsuite and Buffer
Social Media – Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linkedin and Pinterest
7) Learn from your data
Even the smallest business should be able to track and measure their content marketing efforts, if not how will you know which content is producing the best results.
