5 Ways to Make Your Content Marketing More Effective
If you’re creating a content strategy for your company, you’ve probably determined how many blog posts or site pages you want to add per month and possibly what the topics should be. And while this a solid starting point, it’s not enough to generate the results you want.
Beyond frequency and topics, there are quite a few other elements that play into content marketing success. On this page, we’ll discuss what they are and how you can use them to make your content more effective. Keep reading to learn more, and give us a call at 888-601-5359 to create a content strategy for your business.
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1. Know your audience
First and foremost, you need to know exactly who you’re writing for. Before you even pick up your pencil (or, more realistically, open your Word doc), you should have a clear idea of who will read the content you create.
You can start with your company’s general demographic, but you need to dig a little deeper than that. Creating marketing personas is a great way to make your audience feel more personal, and it’s often easier to write for one person instead of a whole group.
Once you have these personas, keep them in mind every time you sit down to write. What concerns might they have? What tone will resound best with them? And what other questions might they have about your topic? Pretend that you’re writing directly to another person, and you’ll be much more successful with your content.
2. Focus on quality
When you create your publishing schedule, it can be tempting to fill up your calendar with lots of posts right off the bat. And while this may be doable if you have a substantial team to contribute to the writing and editing, it’s always best to focus on quality over quantity.
Not only does cranking out a high volume of posts make it difficult to keep up with your own strategy, but it’s also challenging to come up with genuinely interesting topics on a regular basis. Unfortunately, many companies resort to writing about topics that have been covered by hundreds of other sites, which doesn’t provide anything new or valuable to their audience.
You may think that a topic is a good choice if other sites wrote about it, but if it’s already been covered in detail, you don’t want to repeat what other writers have already said. Choose topics that your potential customers actually want to learn about and offer your unique perspective on the issue.
3. Experiment with different formats
When most marketers think of content, they think of blog posts and article pages. And while these certainly fit the definition of content, they’re not they only options.
As you grow your strategy, experiment with different formats like infographics, videos, and even downloadable content like PDFs. You may find that your readers prefer something other than text on your site, which can help you improve your strategy going forward.
For example, a healthcare content marketing strategy may discover that users respond well to video. In response, they continue to create videos to accompany their blog posts about procedures, recovery times, and more.
And as you continue to create blog posts and other written content, experiment with formatting options. They may seem like minor changes, but small graphics, bulleted lists, and more headings can help your readers better comprehend information.
4. Optimize your content
In addition to informing your readers, content can also be a great way to attract organic traffic to your site. Be sure to optimize all of your content for one or two keywords, and you’ll have a much better chance of reaching new visitors from search engines.
If your content is text-based, this is easy. However, if you’re working with visual content, like infographics or video, you need to do a little bit more work. Include keywords in the page’s title and headers, and write a brief introduction about your topic. Then, be sure to optimize your file names and alt tags.
5. Measure and improve
Much like any online marketing strategy, analytics should play a role in your content marketing. This means that before you even start writing or designing, you need to set specific, measurable goals for what you want to accomplish.
It will take time to start seeing results, but as search engines index your content, and you begin to build a following, you’ll get a clearer picture of whether you’re successfully attracting and engaging the audience you want.
As you measure the effectiveness of your strategy, look for ways to improve. Are certain topics performing better than others? Does your audience seem to prefer a specific format? Google Analytics can show you all of that. Use that information to revise your strategy going forward, so you can meet your goals.
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Want to make your content marketing more effective?
Whether you’re in the early stages of creating a content marketing strategy or you just aren’t seeing the results you want, WebFX can help. Our dedicated team of Internet marketers and content creators has years of experience creating personalized content marketing strategies for reaching and connecting with specific audiences.
Contact us today to speak with a strategist about how you can improve your business’s content marketing strategy.