Diana Bajraktari
Senior Content Strategist
Content marketing is one of the most efficient ways of developing your brand, driving traffic to your website, and getting people to notice your products and services. Content creation has taken many forms, yet there are some best practices you need to follow if you want your content to be found online.
Content marketing involves creating and sharing useful, relevant, entertaining, and consistent content. It can be in a variety of text-based, video-based, and audio formats.
The primary goal should be to attract and retain a specific audience, with the ultimate goal of driving profitable consumer behavior.
But, with so much content being created and shared every day, it’s essential to stay up to date with the latest trends and best practices in content marketing to keep up.
1
Set your Content Marketing Objectives
Before you embark on a content marketing strategy, you must first define your goals, both for your overall content marketing strategy and for each individual piece of content you create. An objective-oriented approach enables you to craft content for specific purposes. This makes everything that follows easier since you know what you want the end goal to be. For example, to improve user experience, you will work on UX-specific content. To increase traffic, you’ll focus on including target audience keywords. By defining what you want to achieve through your content marketing efforts, you can tailor your content and follow a systematic approach to achieving your objectives.
Make sure that each blog post, social media update, image, video, or other type of content you create expands your business goals. In the end, content marketing is about diversifying your approach, ensuring that you’re reaching multiple audiences through various channels and content formats. It’s important however that your content is optimized for top performance across the board. If you’re willing to follow this approach, you must also be prepared to allocate sufficient time to optimize all content formats.
Once you’ve established your goals, track your progress through various metrics, such as:
Other advantages of a content marketing strategy are:
More budget: If you can prove your marketing success, it will be easier to ask for a bigger marketing budget in the future.
2
Recognize Your Audience
Along with deciding on your content marketing goals, you should also understand your target audience’s pain points, challenges, and problems. Since they relate to the products and services you provide. This is a big part of what your content will address.
Content marketing is very customer-centric. It’s less about selling and more about educating and entertaining your readers to gain their trust. To do so, you must first understand who your audience is and what they need from you. This gives you an idea of how much workable content you currently have and how much content you need.
This involves two key actions:
Understanding your audience is about understanding what they are more likely to respond to. Your content must target pain points and address concerns, sparking intrigue and pushing engagement. Creating an initial customer persona helps determine the type of content you should create to increase interaction. This in turn provides a clear path ahead, simplifying your approach to creating content that speaks to customers.
Any content development strategy begins with the creation of a customer persona. It identifies your target audience, which helps you in deciding the most relevant topics to cover. It’s important that the customer persona research process is ongoing. You must include additional elements as you go forward to fully grasp the needs and wants of your customer base. Doing so aids in addressing growing customer concerns and covering every nook and cranny to establish a comprehensive approach to your content marketing efforts.
Understanding your target audience’s needs and values is the key to content marketing success. According to research, 47% of respondents research their audience, and 44% believe that improving the quality and value of their content has led to success.
3
Create Content Based On Result Types
Google constantly introduces new types of results. Because of this, there is a large variety of different result types on search engine result pages. In the same way, you need to make sure that the keywords you are targeting have a high search volume. You should also make sure that you are structuring the content in a way that Google will want to surface and show it.
Recently, a few result types have become very popular, the most notable being short-form videos. Typically, short-form videos last between 10 and 30 seconds and up to 5 minutes.
Short-form video content has become the most effective type of social media content and has even begun to show up as a result type on Google. This is due to dropping attention span rates. Nowadays, people want to consume content that is shorter in length but higher in volume. Adapting to these changes is important to score success in the dynamic landscape of modern content marketing. It’s important to note that this applies to other forms of content as well.
In 2022, 51% of marketers intend to increase their investment in short-form video content.
When creating content for your website, check to see what’s already showing up on Google and what your competitors are doing. Following competitor progress is essential to understanding what people are gravitating towards. This enables creating content strategies based on proven content marketing efforts that are more likely to succeed.
Visual content or imagery can make content easier to digest and more appealing to share on social media.
This is also a good way for showing up on Google Images, the second most popular search engine after Google’s main search page.
Nowadays, a lot of people consume content through audio formats like podcasts. When you create content, you should consider how Google believes users are consuming it, based on what appears on Page 1 of Google. Then consider whether you can produce content for these mediums.
4
Check Your Content For ROI
It’s difficult to link ROI to anything in SEO or the organic channel, as opposed to paid media or email marketing, which usually has more clear-cut CPC, conversion rates, and other key metrics.
This is why it’s important to define how you’ll measure your content for ROI and show how it contributes to the organization’s results.
The best way to get more buy-in around SEO and why content is valuable is to report on how the content is bringing more visitors to the site or helping them convert. Reporting focuses on determining your SEO performance by localizing successful components in your content marketing efforts. It is an opportunity to hone in on what’s working and drive your attention towards these elements to further increase success.
You should set up reporting before creating the content either using an enterprise SEO platform or smaller tools, so you can measure how your content is performing, such as target keywords now ranking on Page 1, which will result in an increase in organic traffic and organic conversions. This involves providing an overview of your SEO performance and defining specific KPIs that will serve as reference points in your SEO reports. The main goal of these reports is to determine opportunities for growth without needing to recreate everything from scratch. You simply focus on areas that require improvement and follow an action plan. It’s important that your KPIs are clearly defined such that tracking your performance after making the changes to your content is straightforward.
By doing so, you can tell a story about how being proactive with SEO is beneficial because you are bringing users to the site today and will continue to drive traffic to this same piece of content for a long time.
According to research, 70% of companies that are highly successful with content marketing track the ROI of their content. Moreover, 77% of them assess overall content marketing performance.
When it comes to ROI, brands continue to see the best direct ROI from Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube ads.
5
Despite AI-Generated Trend Human Content Is Still A Priority
AI generation tools are a hot topic in the content marketing world, and for good reason. With AI-generated content at our fingertips, anyone can create more content faster. AI will be around for a long time due to its ability to make life so much easier in so many ways.
Google’s E-A-T guidelines were recently updated to include an extra “E” for the experience. This shows Google’s continued emphasis on authoritative content, and it’s important that you prove to the user that you know what you’re talking about. Google wants to ensure that users receive accurate information from reliable sources. This is why creating content using traditional methods is still prevalent in modern content marketing. While AI can be used to generate higher-volumes of content, it’s best that you follow traditional methods and utilize AI to increase quality by employing functionalities to ensure high-quality.
When creating content, lean on your own expertise—or collaborate with others. Then provide actionable insights that AI cannot provide.
By following these steps, you can take advantage of the efficiencies of AI-generated content. More importantly, you will continue to create valuable, stand-out content that aligns with Google’s requirements, providing users with accurate information and quality.
6
Re-Optimize And Repurpose Your Content
By monitoring how current content on your site performs, you can determine whether it is possible to re-optimize or repurpose content that is outdated or underperforming. This is a proven strategy to revitalize previous content work that is still relevant currently. Content recycling is utilized to extend the reach of existing content. You can freshen up old blog posts by updating them and including new elements important to new developments about a specific topic.
One of the most effective methods for doing this is to perform a content audit. This way you can identify which content is performing well and which content may need to be refreshed.
It is pointless to reinvent the wheel, especially if the content is already of high quality, but could benefit from additional target keywords.
By evaluating your current content, you can identify content gaps. You may need to create new content or find content that could be combined so that it performs better. Overall, recycling existing content is an efficient method to reach new audiences without needing to revive the entire content creation process once more. You can build on what you already have and only focus on specific areas to boost performance and reachability.
Other ways to repurpose old content include:
Once you have reworked old content, you can republish it on your blog and share it on social media to increase traffic.
7
Optimize Content For Rising Search Trends
Search is no longer limited to written queries but also includes voice and image searches.
In this case, your website’s content should be optimized for upcoming search trends that prefer voice-over text. Optimizing for voice search queries is taking that extra mile that many won’t take in their SEO content marketing efforts. Looking at the bigger picture, optimizing for voice search could just be the differentiating factor setting you apart from the competition.
While text search queries are typically 3-4 words long, voice search queries can often exceed 20 words. Unlike written queries, which are usually written in phrases, these queries are question-based.
Write posts in the form of questions and answers to optimize content for voice search.
Break up long paragraphs into subheadings and bullet points and add FAQ sections. These are some ways that voice search queries can select parts of your content to show in featured snippets. It’s important that your voice search keywords include conversational phrases and natural formulated sentences. This ensures that your content appears for less formal queries, which is usually the case for voice search queries.
Most voice search queries are carried out on mobile devices, so in order to rank your site in search engines, you need to optimize your website for mobile devices.
Some effective ways to provide a better user experience include:
Because content marketing is a long game, you won’t see results right away. When you consider the benefits, this is a minor drawback. Paid campaigns can be successful off the bat but consistent content marketing ensures longevity in the online space, generating traffic and engaging potential prospects continuously.
Content marketing is an effective way to promote your company without spending money on ads. If you have a limited marketing budget, but time to dedicate to content creation, you still can win clients for your company. In addition, content marketing focuses on generating organic traffic, which is proven to be more sustainable over time than traffic obtained from paid marketing campaigns. Moreover, content marketing addresses multiple areas in addition to conversion, including brand awareness, authority, and trustworthiness to name a few. These are important components that contribute to your overall online success, leading to increased sales and customer retention.
Unlike paid ads, which stop working as soon as you stop paying for them, high-quality evergreen content keeps working for you long after you stop paying for it. You can publish a blog post tomorrow, and if the content is relevant to your target audience, it will still generate search results five years later. Content generates ROI without annoying potential customers with ads.
All in all, it is safe to say that the benefits of organic visibility through content marketing trump the success derived from paid marketing campaigns. In the end, it’s all about the long game, and content marketing provides an established method to generate sustainable traffic that is recurring and high in volume for years to come.
To achieve content marketing success, learn to respond to shifting customer interests and trends to meet the needs of today’s digitally demanding consumers.
Through consistent, high-quality, relevant, and useful information, good content marketing builds long-term relationships with current and prospective customers. It also strengthens your SEO efforts and brand positioning. By implementing these practices you can cut through the noise and generate real results.
