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Friday, November 13, 2015

9 Actionable Content Marketing Tips

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9 Actionable Content Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

In a world where marketing strategies are rapidly changing, you need to harness the dynamicity of these shifts for your brand to stand out. The good news is that you can scale your strategy to your needs, options and budget. According to statistics by Kapost.com, only 32% of businesses believe that their marketing strategy is effective. Here are 9 actionable content marketing tips that the 32% are probably using:

1. Visual Content

Visual content is a crucial part of marketing over the internet. Content with visuals gets 94% more views when compared to content that is only textual. You need to use compelling infographics, imagery, and videos. The best approach is to combine both visual and textual. For instance, if your viewer cannot watch the video on their mobile because they do not have a strong internet connection, or their phone doesn’t have enough charge, the text must communicate to them. Use visuals on content on your website-the pages, the blogposts, and even on social media posts, like on Twitter and Facebook.

2. Curation

Over time, users have become less concerned about promotional content. There is a need for information, which is what every marketer needs to capitalize on in their content marketing efforts. Since people are being drawn to leadership quality content, you need to know how to curate. This means developing yourself to become an authority in your niche. To do this, look for content to educate your audience. It needs to be very relevant and valuable, answering your users’ questions.

3. Diversity

It can be very difficult to frequently come up with fresh content for your blog or website. This is especially if you do not have a large team of content creators. You therefore need to come up with diverse ways to utilize the content that you can get. For example, you can tweet the main points in an article for an entire week. Each major point becomes the tweet of the day. You can also choose to write a blog series made up of smaller blog posts, instead of doing long blog posts. Better still, popular posts can be turned into posters. This marketing strategy utilizes the concept of a little goes a long way.

4. Evaluation

You need to keep evaluating your marketing efforts. This will help you know what strategies are yielding results and those that are not. In your analysis, focus on content formats, promotional efforts, distribution channels, and content message. For instance, you can do an analysis of your best customers or most engaged visitors. What kind of content attracts them? What content results into conversions? Another important facet of evaluation is to take note of the most current trends in content marketing. This helps you to make the necessary adaptations to keep yielding results from your marketing efforts, and stay at the top of the game.

5. Evergreen Content

Every content marketer must aim at creation of evergreen content. This is a smart move in content marketing. While news is trendy and may create a lot of traffic to your site or social media page, it has a very short shelf life and will not engage viewers when compared to other types of content. It is better to focus on content that is valuable, for instance one that shows people how to do something, gives tips, or answers the questions that they may have. Valuable content continues to build traffic and engage viewers even long after it is published.

Another way to ensure that you are producing evergreen content is via identifying gaps in content and filling them. Look for various searches and analytics on their volumes. If the results are minimal compared to the volume of searches, find ways to fill the gaps. You also need to consider your competitors and the extent of the challenge to fill the gap, as well as the type of content that you can create.

6. Historical optimization

This strategy entails updating old content so as to generate more traffic and leads from it. Old content refers to any posts that exist on your website, whether you had published them years or even months ago. You need to optimize it ensuring that it is fresh and up-to-date. You need to identify the posts that led to the most conversions in the past, as well as those that did not, but generate traffic. You then need to come up with a way to improve those that converted so as to convert more, and those that did not convert to begin converting. Could changing the title work? Could including keywords that rank higher in search results help improve conversion rates?

7. Scheduling

Scheduling for content has been found to be more effective than call to actions like following blogs or signing up for emails. Instead of just forwarding emails randomly, you can invite your followers to sign up for a video that you send at a particular time every week. Keep it short and make sure that you do not fail to deliver the content at the stipulated time.

8. Partnership

A team of experts in content marketing is definitely able to do more when compared to an individual’s input. For instance, you can look for other marketers and brands and create a mega marketing campaign. You can even create an event or co-author a series of content, for instance, ebooks. When working as a team, you reach a larger audience, increase your credibility at an individual and brand level, as well as provide backlinks for each other that help improve rankings for different brands. This partnership can be extended to social media, where the various brands share interesting content from other brands from time to time.

9. Headlines

This has remained the most basic, yet the most crucial aspect of every marketing effort. If you cannot draw your visitors attention by using a killer headline, then, even your well thought out content will remain inaccessible to them. Capture your visitors with intriguing headlines.

Conclusion

As the above practical content marketing tips show, it is possible to harness the dynamicity in today’s online marketing. You can join the 32% of businesses that effectively use marketing tactics. You need not go beyond your budget, options and needs.

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