You’ve probably realized by now that most of your digital marketing success depends on how successful you are when it comes to planning, creating, promoting and managing your content.
You’ve also noticed all the special efforts your competitors are putting in so that their content stands out from the crowd and attracts the attention of the audience.
Instead of being paralyzed by the sense of urgency to improve, focus on making small steps forward in the right direction.
Here are six bulletproof ways to improve your content marketing campaigns you should begin with.
1. Don’t settle for the average
You can’t make the most out of your content marketing efforts unless your content is stellar. However, to achieve this aim, there are several criteria it needs to satisfy:
- Every piece of your content should address a genuine need of your target customers, be useful and relevant, and really worth the time they spend engaging with it. Try to make life easier for your customers by answering questions that keep popping up, offering a solution to their problems or simply entertaining them.
- Proofread your content for spelling and grammatical errors. You can always check your written content with Grammarly.
- Format your written content in a way that is easy to read and understand. Make it scannable in order to keep your customers engaged, and turn your prospects into actual customers.
- Use SEO. You might create a great content piece, with a capacity to go viral, but if you don’t optimize it for search engines, using the latest SEO techniques, it will not get the traffic it deserves.
- Pay special attention to the titles that you use, as they appear everywhere. Have more question-based titles using words such as “what”, “why” and “how-to”. This will raise your chances for ranking as a featured snippet, bringing you more traffic and backlinks.
- Diversify your content. Use webinars, podcasts, catalogs, brochures, whatever suits the needs of your prospects.
2. Segment and personalize
When crafting your content, keep in mind that your target audience is not coherent. Your prospects and customers may differ in many ways, starting from their demographics, such as their age, gender or location, to their position in the sales funnel.
Try to craft content that is tailored to specific segments of your audience. For example, to address the needs of your prospects who are in the awareness phase, and who are just beginning to recognize your product as a possibility to solve their challenge, you should produce more informational content, such as tutorials, how-to videos or eBooks.
For the prospects who are at the bottom of your sales funnel, and that are already making their purchasing decisions, provide coupons, live demos or free trial versions of your product.
The rise of AI automated solutions have made it possible to provide content that is personalized to fit the needs of your individual prospects by offering special discounts or giving product recommendations. Consider implementing some of these solutions to bring your content, the satisfaction of your customers and your business to a whole new level.
3. Improve your E-A-T
In addition to creating high-quality content, and tailoring it to the needs of your target audience, you should also put an extra effort into improving your E-A-T profile.
The acronym stands for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness, and adhering to E-A-T guidelines will ensure your content ranks high in searches.
Here are a few tips on how to boost your score:
- Earn backlinks from relevant, high-authority websites.
- Find credible influencers you can partner up with so that they can share your content, or write guest posts for your blog.
- Link all the claims and data in your content to trustworthy sources.
- Include a short bio and credentials of the author at the end of each content piece.
- Keep your website fresh and regularly updated.
4. Give your content a boost with AdWords
SEO is essential for making your content marketing campaigns successful when it comes to attracting more traffic, engagement and conversions.
Still, if you want immediate or even better results, give your greatest content pieces the push they need to go viral by using Google AdWords campaigns.
Paid advertising is a great way to boost the online promotion of your content, and thus your business too.
However, to make your paid campaigns truly efficient, AdWords management needs to be strategically planned out, so that it can attract the right audience using the right keywords, and drive quality traffic to your website.
Unless you’re a marketing expert yourself, outsourcing this task, as well as SEO, can be beneficial to your business.
5. Focus on great user experience
Improving the user experience of your prospects should be on top of your mind when dealing with your content.
Your aim is to make user experience run smoothly and seamlessly, so that your prospects want to engage with your content longer and return to your website due to the convenience it provides.
Here are some essential steps for improving user experience you can’t afford to skip:
- Make sure your content is optimized for mobile devices.
- Have more visuals in your posts. Videos, photos, GIFs, infographics, graphs will make your post look more appealing, and at the same time, they will help your users understand the content easier.
- Optimize your content for speed, so that it loads fast. Your prospects don’t want to wait for a website to load, and they’ll bounce.
These changes won’t take too much of your time and effort, but they’ll surely positively affect your engagement and conversion rates.
6. Don’t be afraid of long-form content
The human attention span is shrinking, and most of the Internet users are looking for bite-sized posts they can easily scan through and digest.
However, don’t give up on long-form content yet, as it still contributes to the overall success of your campaigns.
Long-form content is a great way for you to show your expertise by going in-depth with a relevant topic. It will also help you showcase your personality and your writing style, build your reputation and install trust in your readers. Furthermore, it will help you improve your SEO rankings, bringing your content closer to your target audience.
Use the tips above to improve your content marketing strategy and start making small changes, as each one of them brings you closer to your goals.
Keith Coppersmith is a business and marketing expert who has experienced both the rise and fall of many businesses. As a regular contributor at BizzmarkBlog, he enjoys writing and providing insight into the marketing industry based on both practice and theory.