Want to find the best tips to develop your content marketing strategy?
You’ve come to the right place.
Content marketing is the most effective organic method for driving traffic to your website and spreading brand awareness.
In fact, according to a Content Marketing Institute research report, 86% of B2B marketers say content marketing has helped them drive website traffic:
When executed successfully, content marketing can help you reach huge audiences and promote your products or services without even a coin spent on advertising.
But not all marketers are seeing the results they want with it.
Surprisingly, only 19% of companies think their content marketing strategy is very successful:
What does this mean?
You can lag behind if your content strategy isn’t rock-solid.
But that doesn’t have to be difficult.
In this article, you will discover 6 practical tips to create your content marketing strategy to reach new audiences, drive more traffic to your website, and increase your conversion rate.
Let’s get started.
6 Practical Content Marketing Strategy Tips to Create a Goal-Crushing Strategy
Follow these tips to create a successful content strategy.
1. Set Clear, Measurable Content Marketing Goals
Goal-setting should be the #1 thing in your list of things to do when creating your content marketing strategy.
Why?
Because without setting clear and measurable goals, you won’t know whether your content marketing efforts are paying off.
So before you start creating content, determine what you want to achieve with your strategy.
Some of the most common content marketing goals you can set include:
- Increase website traffic
- Boost brand awareness
- Generate leads
- Reach and attract new audiences
- Increase social shares
- Attract more targeted customers
- Improve conversion rates
In fact, according to the Semrush research mentioned above, 45% of companies say they use content marketing to increase brand awareness and 37% to attract more traffic to their website:
Here’s how you can set concrete content marketing goals:
- Determine your business’s high-level marketing objectives
- Evaluate how content marketing can help you achieve your goals
- Establish content metrics that matter to your business
- Determine how you will measure progress and whether your team could benefit from collaborative goal-setting software
2. Determine Your Target Audience
In other words, identify who you want to reach with your content.
One of the key ingredients for content marketing success is to know your audience.
According to a 2022 Hootsuite digital global overview report, there are 4.95 billion internet users globally:
But not all of these are interested in reading your content.
You need to determine exactly who will find your content useful and practical to them and give them exactly what they want.
Later is a good example of brands that understand their audience. The company creates content to reach users who are interested in its social media planning and scheduling tools.
They create relevant videos, articles, and other resources:
3. Focus on Your Audience
A common mistake most marketers make is to focus only on getting their content to rank higher in the SERPs.
But what’s the point of ranking high on Google for certain keywords when your content isn’t helping your audience solve a problem they are facing?
It won’t bring quality traffic and definitely no conversions.
One of the most effective tips here is to focus on providing valuable content to your audience.
A good rule of thumb is to create content that aligns with your industry and is relevant to your target readers. Content, coupled with good customer service, can help you drive more sales.
For instance, if you sell hair care products, you can create actionable step-by-step tutorials (whether in video or text-based format) that help your audience style their hair effectively and feature your styling products.
Similarly, if you’re a business coach, you can also create awesome content that helps startups manage business expenses and share useful software they can use.
4. Optimise Your Content for Searchability and Discoverability
Your content marketing strategy is incomplete if you don’t have a distribution model. And SEO is one of the best ways to distribute your content.
But why?
SEO is one of the most powerful channels for driving awareness and sales. In fact, it generates more sales than PPC for 70% of brands.
What does this mean?
Optimising your content for SEO is one of the surefire tips to make your content marketing strategy stronger. It can help you rise above your competitors on Google. Similarly, you can create great content YouTube channel trailers and optimise them for YouTube SEO by adding keywords to the description.
Canva leverages SEO to rank at the top of Google’s search results for keywords its potential users use to search on the internet.
For instance, currently, Canva ranks in position #1 on Google for keywords like “brochure”, “YouTube banner”, and “template”:
Once you determine your audience and create audience-focused content that’s optimised for discoverability, Google will rank your website higher in the search engine result pages (SERPs).
The higher your content ranks on Google the more traffic you attract.
Here is how to optimise your content for SEO:
- Research and target keywords with traffic potential
- Create content that aligns with search intent
- Ensure your content covers everything your audiences want to know
- Make your content easy to read and enticing
- Create a compelling title tag and meta description that’s also optimised with keywords searchers are entering in Google
5. Research Your Competitors
According to a HubSpot’s state of marketing survey report, 82% of marketers say they actively use content marketing:
What does this mean?
You’re not the only one using content marketing to attract customers.
But this doesn’t mean you can’t beat your competitors.
Conduct thorough competitor content research using a tool like Semrush to see what your competitors are doing including their strategy, types of content they are publishing, keywords they are targeting, and more. This post by Attrock can help you learn more about Semrush and how you can leverage it to create a solid content strategy.
After that, make your content strategy 10X better than theirs. It’s that simple.
6. Leverage the Right Platforms
Your audiences are everywhere — Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.
But here’s what you need to know.
Each platform has a fair share of strengths, weaknesses, and rules. Besides, audience demographics aren’t the same across all platforms.
To determine the right platform to promote your content, refer to the content marketing goals you set and your target audience.
For instance, if you want to attract professionals to your website, LinkedIn would be the right platform for you.
On the contrary, Instagram is a popular platform for younger users in the age bracket of 18 and 34 years old. That makes it a great fit for B2C brands.
Conclusion
Is your business not seeing the results you had anticipated from your content marketing strategy?
If so, then you’re probably doing some things wrong.
Start using these content marketing strategy tips consistently for a period of not less than 6 months and you will see great results.