Content marketing is fun but it often feels overwhelming.
It’s about inspiration, perspiration (doing the work) and good luck. Making that content move on a social web is sometimes more about having your content in the right place at the right time!
But despite the frustrations the only way to succeed in content marketing is to continuously improve the strategies and approaches used in every content marketing campaign.
That’s the persistence part!
Bringing every phase of the campaign to the highest level allows content marketers to become more flexible, creative and effective in their daily work.
However, becoming an effective content marketer would require time and energy to devote into each specific task and to produce content assets that would appeal to a targeted audience. The more you practice content marketing, the better off you will be excellent in what you are doing.
In this post, I’d like to share with you tips on how you can become more effective in your field, produce better results, earn more traffic and leads through your content pieces and retain your happy customers.
Let’s get started.
1. Identify and understand your targeted audience
Answer the “who” question in content marketing. “Who is your audience?”.
By looking at your brand’s selling points, mission/vision, core values and business-related goals, you will have an idea of which group(s) of people your business is primarily targeting. Unless you identify your audience, you’ll be having a hard time seeing good results from your campaigns.
You should also brainstorm about the different persona groups that you know would benefit from your brand’s offerings (product, service, information, etc..).For instance, if you’re selling a cloud POS (point of sale) system, you could list down these persona groups: retailers, ecommerce webmasters and small business owners. They would normally comprise the whole audience that your content marketing campaigns should be able to target and engage with.
To understand the behavior of your targeted audience, you can place surveys or chat rooms on your website to get some feedback from your customers. This could help you improve the way you create your content assets as you will be able to identify the needs of your users and help them solve their problems.
2. Be eager to experiment and produce actual data
A regular audit of your content marketing campaigns allows you to evaluate which strategies/methods/approaches had managed to positively affect your current results. This would help you develop new strategies that will eventually be the core foundation of your campaign.
An audit normally comprises of the following tasks:
- Identifying which content format (image, article, video, etc..) gets the most number of shares, comments and traffic.
- Determine which piece brings the most number of leads (potential customers) to your company by looking at the site’s Google Analytics account (conversion goals).
- Listing down content assets with the highest return on investment.
At the start of the campaign, you can already estimate the return of investment of each of your content asset. This presentation by Ross Hudgens is an awesome resource to help you calculate the ROI of your content.
3. Replicate content strategies from other niches
If you’re working for multiple clients but they are in the same industry, the tendency is to be less creative with crafting your content assets for all of those clients. The main reason is that you may be creating the same content format, use the same topic, and promote it with the same method which diminishes your ability to be creative with the process.
The key solution for this is to replicate content strategies from webmasters from other niches. To get started with it, you can look for types of content that are most commonly seen on many blogs in that other niche that you choose. Use Buzzsumo, Topsy and Cognitive SEO to find the content asset with the most number of shares and links. When you already have a list of the most shared pieces, you can select five or ten of them and adapt the techniques used by the content publisher in creating and promoting the piece. Observe and gather the results of that experiment for future references.
4. Understand other aspects of online marketing
Content marketing should also be tied with other aspects of online marketing including social media and conversion rate optimization (CRO).
Your knowledge about CRO could help you craft an asset that can generate sales and leads to your business. A good background on how to write call to actions alongside your content could entice customers to contact you for products/services. It could also give you an understanding on which color, font and design is the most attractive to your users.
Social media skills could help you promote your content to targeted group of audience even if your brand is still new in the industry. Those people who’ve shared your competitor’s assets are good targets for outreach and content promotion. Reach out to those people and just ask them if they could see your content (never tell them to share your piece, they know what to do).
Listening to your customers on social networks is a good way to get some topic ideas for your blog posts. By doing this, you get assured that your blog posts are the ones that your audience would love to see and read.
There are a lot of other online marketing aspects that you must be able to understand and at least know the basics so you can maximize all your efforts in planning and executing your content marketing campaign.
5. Learn from the best content marketing experts
Reading case studies, stories and actionable tips from the top content marketing experts could help you test new strategies for your campaigns whether it deals with content creation or content promotion.
Here is a list of the top influencers in content marketing:
Follow them and get updated with their shares. Learn from them and become good marketers.
Final thoughts:
Becoming an effective content marketer requires consistent effort in providing good results to your clients and learning from your mistakes to be able to improve your strategies the next time around.
Guest Author: Venchito Tampon is the sole blogger at DigitalPhilippines.net, a link building blog that produces high quality link building articles every week. He offers professional link building services to local and offshore clients. Follow him on Twitter and Google+.