Blogs are probably the main thing that comes to mind when you think about creating content. But content marketing involves so much more than blog posts. It encompasses all of your web pages, social media posts, newsletters, emails, videos, and more.
To ensure that you reach the right audience and serve them the right content, you need to have an effective content marketing strategy. Our online marketing experts offer a few tips on how to improve your content marketing efforts below.
Five Ways to Improve Your Content Marketing
1: Put Together a Clear Plan
Just like every other aspect of running a successful business, you must have a clear action plan when it comes to content. The first step is to set some attainable content marketing goals that align with your business goals, such as spreading brand awareness or creating brand loyalty.
Next, you should put together a content calendar that tells you when and where to post. Organizing your strategy will help you produce content efficiently and consistently. Just make sure to prioritize quality over quantity. Posting every day won’t be as effective as posting once a week if the quality of your content isn’t engaging enough.
2: Know Your Target Audience
You can’t just post whatever you want, wherever you want, and hope that someone bites. If you want to meet goals like increasing web traffic or converting more customers, you need to tailor your content to fit your target audience.
Before you write anything, you need to know what type of content people are looking for, and where they go to look for it. Put yourself in your ideal customer’s shoes and think about the common questions and problems they have.
You should also consider the type of tone to use in your content—would your target market respond better to a voice that’s fun and conversational, or a tone that’s more subdued and professional?
However, determining what and how to write for your audience isn’t enough. You also need to research which platforms your audience uses the most to ensure that your tailored content is reaching its target. Comparing how many followers you have on each platform, and analyzing data from the Demographics section on Google Analytics can help you find out which platform your audience prefers.
3: Write Optimized Content
Content geared toward search engine optimization (SEO) helps direct more traffic to your website by boosting your ranking in search engine results. It’s what makes your blog posts and other web pages show up when someone googles a specific topic, like “dog boarding in Denver.”
SEO involves researching keywords that are relevant to your audience, then creating content that focuses on those keywords. However, you must also avoid using the same keyword too many times—this is called keyword stuffing, and it is a practice that Google actually penalizes.
Aim for creating relevant, engaging content by using one main keyword and several variations a few times throughout the piece. Best practice is to include the keyword in the page title and in one or two headings, as well as in the URL.
4: Don’t Be Afraid to Experiment
There are many ways to keep your content interesting to your audience. Try experimenting with different types of content on different platforms to see which style performs best. For example, if you find that your audience responds most to videos or infographics, you can start to include more of them in your social media and blog posts.
5: Track Your Results
Finally, don’t forget to measure your content marketing efforts to find out if your content is on track for meeting your goals, and look for new ways to improve your strategy. There are many free tools, like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, that can help you measure and improve your SEO efforts and website performance.
For instance, you can learn what topics or formats people prefer by checking out which blog posts perform best on google or where the bulk of your website traffic comes from. Facebook also offers free analytics for business pages, and shows you which posts get the most engagement.
Effective Content Marketing Services
Don’t have the time to put together a strong content marketing strategy? Not seeing the results you want from your current plan? The expert team at New Wine Digital can help. We’ll help you develop an effective content marketing strategy and show you the results, so you can see for yourself how our methods are working. Call us at 480-516-1819 today to schedule a consultation.
Images used under creative commons license – commercial use (11/17/2022). Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash