Content Marketing – 6 Powerful Tips for Keeping Trouble at Bay

Content marketing is at the heart of digital marketing success. According to a recent poll, three in four marketers agree that compelling content is crucial in closing sales and driving a successful digital marketing campaign. Moreover, content is among Google’s top three factors influencing the success of digital marketing strategies.

Consequently, content marketing is gaining popularity, helping businesses increase their share of voice and boost their bottom line. However, content marketers often struggle when creating effective content marketing strategies, causing businesses to suffer heavy losses.

Here are six effective and time-tested content marketing tips that will help you optimize your content marketing efforts while keeping the commonly-encountered issues at bay.

1. Identify the Sweet Spot

The sweet spot is the intersection of your organization’s expertise and passion and the customers’ pain points and interests. In other words, it is the point where the content is best consumed, actively engaging the target audience to generate the maximum response to the firm’s marketing efforts.

For instance, Walmart has created three sweet spots by classifying their customers into three categories, namely the value-price shoppers (who need low prices), the brand-passionate shoppers (low-income groups who still shop for brands), and price-sensitive upscale shoppers (who are interested in profitable deals). Defining these sweet spots enables Wal-Mart to define its content tone and target the relevant message to engage the right audience.

Identifying your sweet spot will enable you to create fresh content that will appeal to a broad segment of customers, nurturing your market position as a credible and respected thought leader.

2. Offer Evergreen Content

Once you have identified the sweet spot, invest in creating evergreen content that will provide long-term value to your readers. Regardless of where you publish it (blog post, ebook, webinar, or on social media), evergreen content enables you to engage your customers for a long time as it offers value-adding and relevant information to the target audience.

One way to create evergreen content is by determining your content tilt. Content tilt gives you an edge over the competition, enabling you to lead a unique category. Determine how you can tilt the sweet spot for your business to an area with little or no competition. Use the content tilt to generate unique content that effectively engages your readers.

Focus on your customers’ needs and create a mission statement to help you deliver relevant content through the most effective channels. Use digital marketing tools like Google Trends to help you find your content niche.

An effective content marketing strategy can generate leads by creating and publishing evergreen content that is relevant and of value to your target set of customers. It helps you connect with your existing users and potential customers looking for answers to their problems or are attracted to your content and want to know more. Inbound marketing techniques such as content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimization put customers in the driver’s seat, enabling them to make choices in favor of the business.

3. Keep a Tab on the Competitor's Activities

Monitoring your competitors is a great way to stay updated about the current market trends and understand the changing customer preferences. Use competitor activities as case studies to identify the strategies that worked for them or proved unsuccessful.

Pay close attention to the posts, the publishing frequency, the popups, the channels, and the SEO strategies used by them. Analyzing competitor activities can help you develop fresh ideas for your brand while avoiding the common pitfalls in the content marketing domain.

4. Don’t Confuse SEO with Content Marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a significant aspect of content marketing strategy; however, it is crucial to remember that these two are not the same. Merely stuffing your article with keywords to get a higher spot on the search engine results page (SERP) can prove fatal to the long-term success of your brand.

SEO enables you to drive traffic to your content while optimizing the customer acquisition cost (CAC). However, SEO and value-adding content work synergistically to engage customers and build links, putting your content marketing strategy on the fast track to success.

5. Tap the Unused Potential of Videos

According to the Content Marketing Institute, blog posts with videos are ten times more likely to engage your audience than text-only posts.

Videos help you tell an effective and engaging brand story, helping your content rise above the competition. Nearly 65 percent of the online audience watch more than three-quarters of the video, enabling marketers to enjoy higher retention and click-through rates and increased customer conversions.

Identify your target customers, match the content of the video to the issues and challenges faced by them, and include a call to action to guide them with the next step. Make sure the video script includes the purpose and a clear message to be delivered to your audience.

Videos are effective lead-generating tools that can be used to build awareness and thought leadership, nurturing your lead base.

6. Measure the Effectiveness of the Content Marketing Strategies

Monitoring the success of your content strategies will help you understand your readers’ preferences. Content marketing analytics quantify the return on investment (ROI), helping you measure the success of your content strategy.

Align your business goals with your marketing efforts by using content marketing metrics across channels such as websites, applications, social media, and blogs. The following content marketing metrics can help you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns:

• Consumption Metrics: Measures the number of people consuming the content and the channels used.
• Sharing Metrics: Tracks who is sharing the content, the frequency, and the channels used to share it.
• Lead Metrics: Analyzes how the content is helping in generating leads and nurture them.
• Sales Metrics: Evaluates the influence of the content on the bottom-of-the-funnel content results and the revenue generated.
• Retention Metrics: Measures the percentage of repeat visitors and the bounce rate.
• Engagement Metrics: Tracks how the content inspires the audience to take action and the type of action taken (shared post, commented or purchased product or service).
• Cost Metrics: Determines the content marketing costs and the resulting ROI of the content strategy.

Spend time gauging the performance of your content marketing campaigns to sharpen your marketing strategies and offer the most engaging content to your customers through various delivery channels.

In the world of digital marketing, content is king. Good content can help a business build strong customer relationships, boosting its brand image. However, creating compelling and audience-centric content is often challenging. Use the above-mentioned tips to overcome the challenges when creating a successful content marketing strategy.

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