5 Awesome Ways to Pump Up Your Content Marketing Efforts

Content marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies that can provide great returns on investment. This article describes some of the best ways to pump up your existing content marketing efforts.

Whether it is blogs, white papers, or articles, content marketing gets your marketing messages across. In 2016, by all means, was the year of long-form content as far as SEO best practices are concerned. While content marketing continues to take exciting new directions, it remains a challenging road to ride on. Here are 5 awesome ways to pump up your content marketing efforts.

 

1- Determine Specific Goals

It is very important to be specific on your content marketing goals. As you try to understand the direction of your content strategy, ask yourself a few questions:

• How well do you understand your target audience?
• What is it that you already know about them, and what do you not know?
• What type of content formats does the audience engage with most?
• How does that correlate with the type of content you generally put out?
• How do you go about creating brand-relevant content that provides real value to the audience?
• How do you visualize the combined effect of all content-oriented platforms; Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and others?
• What does the typical path look like for customer purchases?

As you outline the answers to these questions, you should be looking to take all that information and tie it into trackable, concrete goals.

 

2- Reinforce The 3 C’s of Content

It is important to remember that successful strategy around content is focused on getting the 3C’s right:

• Custom Voice
• Compelling Content
• Creative Edge

These are the borderlines of the story that you are going to tell with your content.

Content marketing is not just about cranking out content at a frenetic pace. It is all about putting out content that you know has a high degree of relevance to the target audience. Ultimately, it comes down to understanding at a deep level, the story you are planning to tell and why your audience should listen.

So, a great starting point would be your existing customer base. What kind of feedback have you got back from them? What are the reports related to website traffic telling you? What type of content will continue to build your customer’s relationship with your brand?

 

3- Understand Distribution

Content distribution is equally critical as content creation. This demands a deep knowledge of content distribution platforms.

If you take Facebook, for instance, you will need to understand the difference between sponsored posts and free posts, post-promotion techniques available, Facebook analytics and the functionality of Facebook pages at a minimum. Moreover, you need to answer questions like:

• Are your content posts search engine optimized?
• Are you tracking the reach of your content via reports and adjusting your content strategy accordingly?
• If it’s Twitter you are considering, do you understand the advanced tools that you will need to use, retweet and reply ratios, analytics and Page authority?
• If it’s Instagram you are talking about, do you have a deep understanding of the manner in which your content will be impacted by the Newsfeed algorithm?

 

4- Know Your Metrics

One of the critical elements of content marketing is to understand and firm up the metrics by which you are going to measure performance. Some of the metrics that are used for Twitter include retweet ratios, reply ratios, page authority and follower count. You need to define similarly important metrics for other platforms like blogging websites, Facebook and Instagram. For instance, Facebook can give you numbers for people reached, number of likes and number of shares at a basic level. Is that enough? What kind of additional metrics can you define that can add value to your marketing efforts? Some of the common metrics include:

• Unique visitors, page views, and unique page views to understand the consumption of content.
• Location of the visitors, source/medium and the percentage of mobile visitors.
• Open rates and clicks acquired through the email marketing campaign that promoted the content.
• Average time on page and new vs returning visitors.
• Amount of likes/shares and comments received across social media.

When you are executing your content marketing strategy, you need to be firmly focused on measuring and tracking these metrics.

 

5- Provide White Papers

There are various types of content that one can put out – blogs, articles, white papers and videos being among the most common. Having said that, whatever be the industry you are operating in, there is nothing quite like a quality white paper to bring cheer to a customer. Customers are looking for high-quality insights. High quality, deep insights come from experts primarily through white papers. That explains why customers love good white papers so much.  

While the relevance of content marketing is beyond doubt, it takes a little bit more considered effort to ensure that your content marketing efforts are channelized in the right manner. Once that is done, exceptional results follow on this channel.