Content marketing is a powerful weapon in your inbound marketing arsenal -- it can drive awareness, generate leads, establish trust and increase traffic to your website. And like all marketing tools, if you can form an effective strategy around your content, you’ll see better returns for your efforts.
At Fastmarkit, we look at content as an integral aspect of every marketing initiative because therein lies a brand’s ability to a tell a story that will captivate its target audience, provide solutions to a pain point, position thought leadership and drive engagement.
With blogs, email campaigns, e-books, social media copy, SEO, white papers and more, the possibilities and options for a content marketing strategy can feel infinite. Luckily, throughout the past decade, the best practices of content marketing have been thoroughly explored and examined. Here are seven actionable content marketing tips for anyone interested in doubling their site traffic.
1. Create A Content Calendar
Creating a content calendar is a great hack to strategic success. A content calendar is a shareable resource that everyone on your marketing team can access and use for content marketing planning. It also provides a visual display of what, how and where your content will be distributed throughout the year. This effort will help you produce a consistent flow of content that, in turn, will help support your overall marketing goals.
2. Segment Your Audience To Truly Know And Reach Them
In order to know what types of content you should produce to drive traffic, it’s helpful to learn about your current and potential audiences. Audience segmentation provides a way to understand various customer personas and characteristics -- who they are, how they’re different and how best to reach them. Segmenting your current audience will also better equip you to find and reach out to new target audiences.
Analyzing demographics is a great place to start. Group your audience members by age, gender, geographical location, income, family size and other factors. You’ll need to dig deeper, of course, with insights and data that indicate behaviors and preferences. These indicators can help you created data-driven personas, which will then help you create and serve up relevant content.
3. Create Evergreen Content
Once you’ve segmented your audience, you’ll be able to develop content that speaks to each segment as effectively as possible. To find out what potential customers want, try researching competitor and industry blogs, forums and social media groups to see what types of content your prospects are spending time with, what they’re sharing with others, what they’re talking about and what they’re asking for.
Audience segmentation is helpful in this effort. For example, if you want new prospects to visit your website, content should be focused on building brand awareness and establishing your company as a trustworthy expert (think how-to guides, whitepapers, e-books). Content for current customers should focus on expanding their relationships and affinity with your brand, perhaps through webinars, specialized discounts and comprehensive guides. In addition, you can develop separate landing pages for each audience segment you plan to target.
4. Diversify Your Reach
A diversified approach to content distribution is the best approach, from my experience. According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, on average, business-to-business (B2B) marketers use 13 different content marketing tactics. If you are only creating one kind of content (like a weekly blog) and only promoting it through one channel (say, Facebook), you’re severely diminishing the potential impact of your content.
Utilizing the right channels will help your diversified content generate targeted, qualified leads. Facebook is the most well-known social media channel, and YouTube is great for video-driven content like tutorials, reviews and inspirational shorts. In my experience, LinkedIn and Twitter are more appropriate channels for B2B interactions, and newer platforms, such as Instagram and Snapchat, can be great for reaching millennials. Understanding what social media platforms best fit your particular needs will help you reach a wider audience with your content.
5. Be Consistent
Consistent content engages customers. Being consistent with your content doesn’t just mean you’re publishing regularly -- it means you are also maintaining a consistent voice, tone and quality.
A style sheet can be helpful in curating a consistent voice and tone, and a content calendar can be a big help with planning consistent distribution. These items can hold your team accountable to a clearly defined schedule, prompt the sharing of content ideas, notate special events (that may require a content boost) and fine-tune distribution. Having a consistent content plan will likely give you a leg up on your competition.
6. Utilize SEO
Incorporating accurate SEO into your content marketing strategy can do wonders for organic site traffic. SEO can help your website rank higher in search, and highly ranked pages consistently have higher click-through rates (CTR). A good SEO strategy -- complete with long-tail keywords, effective meta-descriptions, quality images and descriptive URLs -- can help increase CTR and website traffic.
7. Analyze And Optimize
You’ll never know if you’re driving traffic if you don’t measure the performance of your content. Split A/B testing is a particularly useful tool for finding out what kinds of content drive the most traffic. And, as an added benefit, A/B testing also helps you understand your target audience more deeply, which will only serve to help you create more effective content.
What do you want to test? Almost anything on your website or in your shared content that can affect user behavior can be tested, but you’ll want to focus on the elements most important to driving traffic. These elements include your headline, call to action, content length, images, site speed, landing pages and so on. Once you’ve determined what kinds of content work best for your purposes (namely, driving traffic) your work becomes that much more effective and your overall content marketing strategy clearer.
A the end of the day, it’s critical to provide a clear path to how content will help foster the overall strategy and what will be tracked to ensure success. Doing so will help streamline both content production and marketing efforts.
