UX

10 Simple Strategies for Successful Content Marketing

By Sergios Charambous

June 06, 2019

Whether you are an established brand or a startup, content marketing is one thing you should be thinking about. In fact, 98% of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are advocating for the trend and their reasoning is simple; it works.

In recent years, many startup founders have talked about how sales of their products skyrocketed after being featured in popular websites like Techcrunch and Business Insider. So, without beating around the bush, here are ten content marketing strategies that will propel your business to the next level:

1. Make it Short

While you can be proud of the long-form articles your team produces, the reality is that most people prefer short-form articles. In fact, according to research, most people prefer articles to be 1000-words and less. Another report found that readers spend about 15 seconds or less. This is because your readers have a short attention span and are on the look-out for the next interesting thing to read.

2. Use Visuals

As a follow-up to the first point, most people prefer quality visuals in the content. These visuals could be infographics, quality images, or video. The reasoning behind this is simple: When you visit a website, what do you look at first? Is it the sea of the words or the graphics on the site? The visuals have another advantage: They help in optimizing your content for search engines.

3. Keep Content Light

As a content manager, you might be proud of the formal content you produce. The truth is that readers are more interested in content that is formal but written in a fun, light way. Make the paragraphs short and add informal words. Doing this will make the content fun to read and more shareable.

4. Optimize Content for Search

As you write, remember that you are targeting people and search engines as well. Most people find your content by searching using the search engines. Therefore, you should ensure that your content is optimized for all the search engines. A few things that will help you in this are: Having a specific keyword in mind, having the keyword on the title and in the body of the article, and attributing all the visuals used in the article.

5. Write to go Viral

As a content marketer, your content should not be the same. Some of your content is not intended to go viral, and that is fine. At the same time, you should not be afraid of producing some written and visual content that is targeted to go viral. In the past few years, we have seen many companies move from zero sales to millions of dollars because of the viral content. A good example is Dollar Shave Club, a company that made millions of dollars from a simple YouTube ad.

6. Go Where Your Viewers Are

A common mistake we see with content marketers is to think that content is all about a blog. While a blog is essential, the reality is that it is not the end. A good way to approach content is to go where you are likely to find readers. In this, you should incorporate other mediums, where you are likely to find readers. These include tools like Medium, Facebook, Tik Tok, and Snapchat.

7. Quality Over Quantity

Another mistake we see marketers make is to focus on quantity of content over the quality. We see this all the time on social media where content marketers push hundreds of posts every day. When you focus on quantity, there is a likelihood that the quality of your work will decrease. If the quality decreases, the audience will keep on going down. Therefore, you are better-off, publishing new quality content once a week rather than low-quality content numerous times.

8. Focus on Your Niche

As a content manager, you are better-off focusing on a small niche than trying to conquer the world with your content. When you produce very wide content, there is a likelihood that fewer people will see it. This is because very popular niches have experts ready. A solution is to focus on you niche and a specific location. For example, as a Cyprus-based SEO company, we could have focused on getting clients from around the world but we decided to optimize our website for our country. Today, our website appears on the first page of Google when you search for our services in Cyprus.

9. Analyze, Analyze, Analyze

As a content manager, it is important for you to analyze every piece of content that you submit. By doing this, you will see how the different type of content performs for you. In fact, many CMOs are now using the various data analysis tools to evaluate the returns of all their content. There are many analysis tools that are available to you, mostly for free. For example, with Google Analytics, you can see the number of people who read your article or watch your video. Other tools will tell you where the traffic to the content came from, and the time you attract a large audience. Without in-depth analytics, your content marketing approach will be a costly waste of time.

10. Use Freelancers and Influencers

To attract a large audience at a fair price, you should invest in freelancers and influencers. In fact, more than 55% of companies in the US use freelancers for their content needs. A large number of others use influencers in the industry. Recently, we have seen a number of companies move from zero to be worth millions of dollars because of their partnerships with influencers. A good example of this is OnePlus, the Chinese company that is one of the fastest-growing smartphone brand by using influencers.

If you are just starting to implement content marketing or if you have been seeing wavering returns, we believe that these strategies will be a good starting point. They are not the end. As you will realize, content marketing is a journey.

Featured image via Unsplash.