Content marketing as a way of targeting your audience can be very effective when done right. But to gain attention and generate leads, it takes a bit more than just creating, publishing and distributing content.
If you are a business currently looking to use content marketing to generate revenue, we have put together a list of top tips you can use to expand your customer base and increase sales.
1. Identify and define your target audience first
Align the content with your brand but also with your audience rather than customers. What kind of content does it take to turn visitor into customer?
2. Consistency is key to success
Consistent approach to styles and formatting across all channels is key to ensuring high credibility and conversion rates.
3. Systematically reuse content across social media platforms
Create articles but use the content across other platforms too, create YouTube videos, series of tweets, infographics, Facebook posts, live streams, Medium posts, Instagram stories and more.
4. Leverage long-lasting content
Articles containing useful tips have longer shelf life than news and similar, create e.g. tools to make life easier, great meta tags examples, effective webform design or crucial web design trends.
5. Reap benefits of content gap analysis
Use all available tools to identify terms, competition and the scale of challenges, consider volume of searches, use Google Keyword Planner, brainstorm article ideas outbound the identified opportunities.
6. Aim for quality and learn from others
Learn from those who are ahead, plenty of content campaigns out the to learn from, but only the beat quality has the potential to stand out, if you want results, do things differently.
7. Be original and don't rely on news
Avoid reblogging and rewriting of press releases and white papers, be original, use your own voice and your opinions, there's nothing wrong with reporting but you need to go further.
8. Readable content and SEO
Readers can be deterred if an article is badly formatted, large paragraphs, no formatting, no images is just enough for the visitor to bounce, think about SEO and how to use it to gain more traffic, use Google Analytics.
9. It's about quality and longer form
Aim for quality rather then quantity, users either want short form content easy to digest, or dive into details and spend some time on it, avoid 500 to 800 word count.
10. Optimise, measure and learn
Use Google Analytics for custom reports, dashboards and article performance tracking, optimise for important keywords and social channels, refresh older content to rank better and get new social shares.