Content is a big part of many businesses that operate online fully or even partially. The better content you can provide for your audience and the public in general, the more benefit it’s likely to provide for your business in terms of traffic, brand awareness, and sales.
Every business can find a use for a content marketing strategy, especially as the internet is such a powerful tool for showcasing your company. By having a strong content marketing strategy in place, you’re able to help reach the audience you need. Not only that but you can help provide them with the knowledge they need to hopefully convert into a lead.
So how can you better your current strategy? Like anything in business, there’s always room for improvement, so here are the top ten tips to boost your online content marketing strategy.
1. Know your audience
Regardless of whether you’re working on an online or offline marketing strategy, it’s essential to know your audience. It’s not just a case of who you think they are but looking at the data available to you in order to get an accurate and detailed breakdown of who they are.
Your audience can vary depending on the type of business you run. You may have an idea of who your ideal customers are but when you look at your data, it might be different. Content marketing requires you to write blog posts, articles, and engaging graphics on social media in order to engage with your ideal demographic.
However, how effective will your content marketing be if you don’t know who you’re writing or creating the content for? There are lots of different ways that you can find information on your audience whether that’s checking the analytics on your website and social media handles to sourcing data from your email marketing and previous sales history.
Data is powerful and it’s something that your content marketing strategy will benefit from, the more you utilize the data that’s available.
2. Look at what your competitors are doing
Even though you shouldn’t spend too much of your time and energy on assessing your competition, there are advantages to be found in looking at what your competitors are doing.
According to review42, content marketing is estimated to become a “$300 billion industry.” So it’s safe to say that a lot of your competitors are likely to have their own content marketing strategy in place.
It’s all about how you attract your customers with content and it’s possible that those you’re up against within the industry, are succeeding where you’re failing. Think about the angles they’re approaching from in order to help drive a call to action with their audience. What is it that triggers the audience to engage more in the content they provide?
Take a look at how the readers are responding and what seems to do better than other content. Find a way to better your content whether it be piggybacking off their success or finding the sweet spot in their failures.
Although it’s important to stay in your own lane and focus on providing your own content, there’s no harm done in side-eyeing the competition.
3. Set measurable goals
When setting objectives or goals for any business, it’s important to know what the intentions are behind them. What is it that you’re actually hoping to achieve through this particular content marketing?
With your online marketing strategy, aim to set measurable goals. Perhaps you’re wanting to attract more first-time visitors to your page? Maybe you’re looking to boost site and social media platform traffic?
Essentially, you want to create goals that are directly benefiting your business. For some, it might not necessarily be about traffic but creating convincing content that will convert leads into sales. By providing measurable goals for the business, you’re able to see just how effective your content efforts are over time.
Goals are always influential to pushing your business forward, rather than not setting any goals and risk it remaining stagnant. Again, it’s all about finding the metrics that will ultimately benefit your business.
4. Create content that provides value and education
With so much content online being churned out every second of every day, it can be hard to grab even a moment in the spotlight. Whilst many will aim to create viral-worthy content, the foundations of what content marketing should provide are both value and education to the reader.
For example, if your business provides regular blog posts through the website blog page, every post should have a purpose. Ask yourself, is the content something the audience wants? What will they get out of the content?
Most content will often fall into two categories, useful or entertaining. The useful content is likely going to provide that educational element for the reader to learn something new that they didn’t understand or know about before.
The entertaining content provides value that your audience will appreciate. Whilst it may not be particularly educational, it’s still engaging enough that they won’t click off and browse elsewhere. If you’re able to retain their attention for long enough, then chances are, you’ve created the right type of content needed for your audience.
5. Always be consistent
Success is very rarely generated overnight and when it comes to a lot of content marketing, it’s not always going to hit the nail on the head every time. Creating a successful content marketing strategy can take time for any online business and there are bound to be mistakes and failures made along the way.
However, with that being said, in order to provide a boost to your marketing strategy, you must be willing to be consistent. Consistency in the quality levels of your content and the type of content you create. Consistency in how regularly you post and when you post it.
For many modern-day online businesses, the challenge in creating content is actually keeping it up. It takes a lot of skill, time, and effort - something that not every business has readily available. If you’re struggling to be consistent in your content marketing, then there are a few tips on how to improve it below:
● Create your content in bulk so that you have it ready and available to schedule ahead of time.
● Outsource content services to help lighten the workload and to help free up more time as a result.
● Aim for quality over quantity to reduce the amount of content you post but that still can prove successful.
6. Provide content marketing for global customers
As an online business, you have the ability to tap into a global market. It’s not an opportunity that everyone will take advantage of you may find you have some global readers that have the potential to turn into leads.
With that being said, your content marketing can often benefit from being universally friendly. Not everyone who engages with your content will be from your native country and so it’s worth thinking about creating multilingual content marketing. There are plenty of tools to use online whether it’s converting video to text or captioning your content in a different language.
Take a look at where your audience’s geographic location is and if there’s a substantial amount in other countries, then it’s worth providing content that caters to their own language. Even your website could be an option when it comes to helping increase global awareness of your business.
Think beyond simply communicating in your native language and maximize its potential for your brand. You never know just how much of a difference it could make.
7. Find your niche
Businesses that end up being the most successful when it comes to their content marketing strategy are those that find their own niche. Even if you have a business that’s fairly broad in its offering of services or products, there’s still a niche that can be created through your content style.
Consider your past content marketing and how well it was engaged with. Try to collate those that were most successful and look for what is similar. It might be the type of content you’re writing about or the style of visuals you go for when it comes to your visuals.
Sometimes, your niche has already been established but perhaps it’s something you’ve not realized yet, what that niche is.
If you’re stuck, then asking for feedback from your readers and existing customers is worth doing. Ask them what they like about the content you provide and why they continue to engage with it. Focus on the details, rather than simply getting ‘I like the brand’ type answers.
8. Generate a tone of voice for your brand
To stop your brand from sounding too generic, it’s useful to generate a tone of voice when it comes to your content. Some prefer a more conversational approach whereas other companies will use more formal language. The tone of voice is down to what you feel is necessary for your business as a whole.
It’s important that it matches up to the overall theme of your brand, otherwise, it risks becoming disjointed and therefore difficult for your target audience to engage with.
The choice you make is also influenced by your audience and who they are in terms of their age group, background, and other businesses that they interact with. You want to create a brand voice that stands out and is unique from the other brands that you’re in competition with. Many companies have made success simply by the style they used.
Find what works and if it’s not effective enough, make adjustments until you start to see a significant change in how your audience is interacting with the content you create.
9. Analyze your progress
Monitoring and analyzing the progression your business makes as a whole is important. Not only do you gain an understanding of how far you’ve come with your content marketing but it also indicates what changes you need to make to your strategy.
Pinpointing those areas for improvement is going to help refine your content strategy and to utilize your resources available in the best way possible to create incredible online content.
If you’re not paying attention to the analytics in front of you, chances are your content marketing will never progress to the effective levels you’re aiming for. You need to be able to see clearly the content that’s doing great and what could do with going back to the drawing board.
There are many tools that are freely accessible for you to analyze your progress. For example, social media platforms have their own insights for those with business accounts. This can show you the type of content that’s getting the best reach and what might have nose-dived.
10. Utilize as many social media platforms as possible
There are so many social media platforms available now that it’s hard to keep up as a business. With each platform, comes an opportunity to create content but the challenge is the volume of content that needs creating.
Even though there might be a dozen or so social media platforms to choose from, you shouldn’t need to sign up to each and every one of them. There’s only a few that will likely work as efficiently as you want it to.
With social media, it can be a case of experimentation with your content and figuring out what social media channels are going to work best for your business in terms of those measurable goals you have.
As part of your content marketing strategy, social media is part and parcel of running an online business. They’re big advertisers for your business, whether you use paid advertising or generate organic reach.
As a business, you want to be influential and create a following that engages in your content, regardless of what or when you post. Getting to that point though will take time and an effective content marketing strategy. Make sure you use these tips to your advantage to give your content marketing a boost that it needs.
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