7 Tips to Boost Your Content Creation Efforts
Content Marketing means creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.
Most small businesses know the importance of content marketing, but often don’t feel like they have the time to produce content or don’t have the money to have someone else produce the content for them. However, content marketing doesn’t need to be a big demand on your time (or your budget)!
78% of customers equate content marketing to relationship building, but to build relationships you need to reach your audience.
7 content marketing tips that will help your business to connect with your audience time and time again
Know your target audience
Before you begin creating content, you need to define the audience that you are trying to engage with. It’s not a complicated process – all you are doing is describing your customers and the identifying the type of material that resonates with them.
Once you have defined your target audience, you can take that information and build content that you can promote to similar, or lookalike, audiences who share many of your target customer traits.
Choose your keywords
Keywords will help your content be discovered quickly and easily by both existing and potential customers.
Google has a great keyword planner (it’s free!) that can help you find the best keywords to use for both your website, content and social media posts. When you’re using the Google Keyword Planner, input keywords you already associate with your business and Google will give you a list of similar ones you can use to beef up your traffic.
It’s important to keep your keywords in the back of your mind when creating content. Always pick a “focus keyword” that you incorporate into the title of your social media post, the title of your content, description, content and URL.
Make sure your Content is visually appealing
Graphic content is equally important. Offer tags to which customers can subscribe, such as ‘Fun Facts’ or ‘Top Best’, and what often draws them to a certain piece of content is an image that’s been custom designed by the creative team. Deploying vector graphics, high-quality photographs and appealing text overlays to give the customer a sense of what each piece of content is about before they click the link. Without using these visuals as part of our content strategy, the posts instantly become much drier and readers would likely feel less inclined to share our content.
Include a CTA
Lead with a call-to-action and the rest of your content should support that CTA.
This best practice holds true when creating any type of marketing collateral. Your call-to-action should be clear to the reader and they should understand what you want them to do as a result of your content.
A few common call-to-actions:
- Subscribe to an email list
- Use a coupon
- Visit a store
- Follow on social media
Whatever your call-to-action, your ultimate end goal is for the reader to engage further with your business; so, if you find people aren’t interacting with your CTA, change it up and test another one.
Make sharable and search-friendly
Make content using a focus keyword with a hashtag. Hashtags make your content more search-friendly. When a customer goes to make a post, they’re given the option to alter the provided copy or add their own. Additionally, they can add hashtags which can promote a greater amount of traffic on a given piece of content.
Link to your content
By linking to your content, you are providing Google’s search algorithm with valuable information: how key phrases in one article relate to another article. By providing Google’s search algorithm with more information, you help build your SEO and boost your search rankings.
However, your linking strategy shouldn’t only be with your own pages – try to get others to link to your content (called backlinking) and you’ll see a strong boost in traffic. Backlinking shows Google’s search algorithm that your website is one of authority and, therefore, it’s one that searchers would value if Google sent them there.
A boost for an article = a boost in overall website authority.
Analyze your effectiveness
Use software such as Google Analytics to track your most and least successful content as far as metrics like page views, average time on page, and bounce rate go. With this data, you can optimize future content and be more informed when making content strategy decisions. You can also use Google Analytics and Google URL Builder to track conversions or goal completions (such as completing a contact form or free trial form), which can come in very handy. As well, look at how many comments or social media shares a particular piece of content got as this can be a good indicator of how successful or useful it was to the reader.
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