content marketing

5 Best Practices to be Ahead of the Game in Content Marketing

2020 and 2021 are the definition of difficult. At least we all were forced to learn, adjust, and improve—the same counts for business practices such as the coined practice content marketing ever since web 2.0. If you work in marketing, you might have noticed that just doing the bare minimum to interact with the targeted audience is no longer good enough.  

Success flows to organizations that inform, not organizations that promote. 

Jay Baer, Youtility

Content marketing plans, creates, distributes, shares, and publishes content to reach your target audience. Brand recognition, sales, reach, engagements and loyalty are all aspects that may benefit from it. 

Learn more on how to build your brand through content.

Content marketing is the only marketing left.

Seth Godin

Here are 5 best practices to improve your content marketing approach to achieve your marketing KPI’s.  

  • Set SMART Objectives and make sure your content fulfils them. 
  • Know your audience, from customer persona to buyers’ journey.  
  • Apply a pillar cluster model 
  • Track and measure, look into your analytics 
  • Repurpose and remarket content    

Set SMART Objectives and make sure your content fulfils them. 

Nowadays, there is a lot of content that can be made and shared through numerous platforms and mediums. Does making it hard to identified the right kind of content in the right kind of platform to reach the ultimate objective. Therefore, setting a SMART objective makes it easier, in the long run, to create the right kind of content and channel to use for you and your targeted audience.   

SMART stands for:  

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound 

Example of a SMART Objective: 

By raising our weekly publication frequency from 5 to 8 articles per week, our blog will experience a 10% increase in traffic by the end of the month. 

Know Your Audience, From Customer Persona to Buyers’ Journey 

This is the core of content marketing. If you do not know your audience, you have no audience. Make it your priority to know who will benefit from your product, service, and content. Knowing your audience will be easier to talk with them about their problems and how you can be a solution to them. After creating a few customer personas, focus on one and their buyers’ journey. By understanding the journey, you can create content to reach them at each critical point to help them find the best solution.  

Awareness Stage  

The awareness stage is when the potential customer realizes they have a problem and is doing some research. This research can be from WOM (word of mouth), search results, reviews, videos with people with the same problem, blogs and more. Here you can create a different kind of content to educate them on possible ways to move forward. This can take different forms and shapes, through video, audio (podcast), picture, blog post and more.  

Consideration Stage 

They have made some research and are now considering to eighter invest in you are your competitors. Thus, it is time to shine and show your potential customer that you have the best solution for them. Remember not just to push an agenda, and this will seem less trustworthy. Try to communicate with them so that you can help them the best way possible.  

Decision Stage  

Congratulation, they chose that you were the best fit for them. Now educate your new customer about your business and make them ambassadors of your brand! 

If you want to create messages that resonate with your audience, you need to know what they care about.

Nate Elliot

Apply a Pillar Cluster Model 

This model is ideal for improving your audience reading experience and SEO (Search engine optimization) strategy. This approach will have a pillar page covering an overall topic, followed by cluster pages that support that topic. Then you interlink these pages to one another, showing that they are inter-related.  

Ready more on SEO: SEO For Startups: Ways To Expand Your Business 

Track and Measure, Look into Your Analytics 

Having amazing content for your reader is one thing; however, it is just a lot of wasted time and money if it does not convert into buying customers. Therefore, it is important to monitor each content that you create and publish. This will give you better insight into what kind of content works for your purposes and what strategy to use in the future. It is also helpful if you are doing to repurpose and remarket your content.  

Repurpose and Remarket Content    

it isn’t easy to constantly come up if knew innovative content. However, it is okay to repurpose and remarket your content. The key is to identify what content to repurpose and remarket and when. Based on Hotspot Academy, content can be repurposed and remarket every two weeks. It is important to analyze the performance of the content during those two weeks and critically choose which content led to more conversions to meet your SMART objective. 

Repurposing your content can be done in numerous ways. One option is to create an eBook out of a blog series. Create an audio version of the same content in a podcast or change it to a video format. Lastly, you can also summarize the content and make a guest blogging to increase your SEO authority.  

Interested to learn more about Guest Blogging? Learn more about it: The perfect place for B2B content marketing and guest blogging? It exists!

Expert Circle is working hard on providing the ideal solution for you to repurpose your content through different formats. Invested in helping you increase your online authority and reach your objectives. For more perks and information, join now and become a member. 

Elisabeth Klingler

About the author: Elisabeth Klingler
Tell us something about yourself.

Get involved!

Comments

No comments yet

Share This

Share this post with your friends!