You have your audience personas identified, your case for creating content established, and your goals and metrics ready to measure. But how do you create successful content and how do you ensure it has a future?
The key to creating a content marketing strategy that drives engagement with your brand—and ultimately profit for your business—is to produce intelligent, easy to find content that makes your audience feel smarter and valued without a struggle on their end. Follow these steps to ensure you are reaching the right people in the right way.
88% of B2B marketers use content marketing in their strategies, and 76% of B2C marketers use content marketing in theirs.
Step 1: Create Content Your Audience Needs and Wants
Your content strategy should start even before you begin to write content. That involves researching what type of business-related content will attract your target audiences. Topics that answer questions, that educate or that entertain are safe bets for raking in big traffic. But where can you find good topics?
Talk to people. In everyday conversation with coworkers and clients/customers, you’ll likely stumble across a few topics that seem to come up more than others. Are there common pain points they all experience? Is there information they don’t know that they should? Those are the topics worth writing about. So are success stories. And if you can include humorous examples from those conversations in your content, all the better.
Following industry influencers and companies on Twitter and other social media platforms is a great way to discover relevant topics. Is there a thought or a post they shared that caught your eye? Consider producing content that is centered around it. If they’re talking about it, it’s probably important, and it’s probably one that affects your audience to some degree. It can spark new ideas and questions worth researching and expounding on, too.
Everyday experiences at work and home can also inspire thoughts that can be transformed into valuable content. We spend a majority of our time both in our offices and in our houses, so why not leverage it to make content that’s not only insightful but also relatable. Sharing your work life and home life experiences can generate questions about products, services or your business you may not have thought about previously.
Is Google’s Search Console linked to your website? The Search Console is chock-full of keywords and keyword phrases that can become topics for content. These are the search terms your website comes up for in search results, so consider writing about them to capitalize on that traffic.
Step 2: Conduct Keyword Research
With the ways search engine marketing has evolved, keywords play a more natural role in the context of bringing attention to quality content worth reading and seeing.
Strategically placing focused keywords into your content not only enhances its visibility but also helps your content resonate more strongly with readers on a personal level. If they see the exact phrase they are searching for, they will trust that your content will give them the answer or solution they need.
Keyword research should be managed with great care, as the keywords you choose should be related to the foundation of your business mission and your brand. Consider the sorts of phrases your customers enter into search engines to find the products and services related to what you offer.
Simple, short keywords used to be the ticket to ranking high in search engines but these days those phrases are usually highly competitive and difficult to rank for. You’ll want to put your attention on long-tail keywords, or phrases with four or more words. Those can be easier to rank well for and typically attract high-quality visitors that are more likely to convert.
The science to choosing the best keywords is all in the data but be careful not to be greedy and choose keywords with high search volumes. While they may have a ton of search volume, you likely won’t be able to rank well for those keywords without spending many months of effort for little gain in ranking. You want to focus on keywords that:
- More specific and are longer, 4 or more words, to your products or services.
- Have an appropriate amount of average monthly searches for your target market.
- Have low competition (how much they are being used by your competitors).
- When you search them yourself, appear to be lacking good, quality results within the first page of the search engine.
There are a number of available tools you can use for keyword research, both paid and unpaid. Google’s keyword planner is great for providing some general insight into average monthly searches. You don’t need a budget to use their keyword planner and can begin to accumulate data right away. KWFinder offers a clearer picture of difficulty and provided suggestions but the free version has a daily limit. An inexpensive, paid version is well worth the cost for regular use.
Step 3: Conduct Competitor Research
The websites and content of your competitors are open books of their marketing strategies. It is possible they are doing certain things better than you are, and that’s ok; now is the perfect opportunity to figure out how to not only replicate their efforts but also exceed them, with better results to boot.
Even without access to some of the more advanced “spy” tools out there, manual investigations into their sites can yield some telling results.
- Examine the types of content they host on their site and push to their customers—like blogs, videos, infographics, and case studies.
- Evaluate the quality of their content based on its professional tone, UX design, and helpful/entertainment factor.
- Gauge their social media presence: what platforms they use, their number of followers for each, and the responses that their content generates from those followers.
Inspecting the SEO of your competitors’ websites is an indispensable part of this process. While some aspects of SEO might be more of a behind-the-scenes process, there are several parts of that process available to the naked eye.
- Page titles
- Proper keyword placement in URLs
- Alt text for images
- Internal links
- Blog categories and tags
It doesn’t all have to be manual, though. You can employ paid tools to conduct deep investigations into the SEO work of their websites, letting you see what they’re doing that you’re not.
- Spyfu digs up all of their search engine ranking tactics: keywords, AdWords campaigns, organic rankings, meta descriptions and title tag usage, and search volume on the keywords they use.
- SEMRush reveals the top keyword of your competitors, compares search engine ranking for keywords, and the performance of their paid search campaigns.
If the competition is benefitting in a big way from certain keywords, these tools will expose them and let you make smarter decisions about your own keyword strategy.
Step 4: Make Sure Your Content Enhances the User Experience
Quality content will not help much unless your audience can engage with it as easily and as conveniently as possible. Small businesses that put the user experience before all else when designing their website will help their customers find what they are looking for and what they need quickly and efficiently. A website’s user experience (UX) is determined by how easily a person can navigate it and obtain the information they need. The more user-friendly the UX is, the more likely your audience will stay on your website.
Mobile-friendliness is a good measuring stick for determining the success of your UX for content. Mobile phone usage surpassed desktop usage for internet access in 2015 and continues to reign. Since then, mobile-friendly content has been more important than ever.
Mobile-friendliness means more than making sure it all fits within the parameters of a smartphone. Your content also needs to be easy to digest. Break up your written content into chunks with:
- headlines
- images
- videos
- shorter paragraphs
- and bullet points
This makes it much easier on the eyes and helps your content avoid the “wall of text” trap that will fatigue readers and repel them. Take content readability a step further and check out our previous article for more thoughts on writing web content for businesses.
Test your content on a smartphone screen to evaluate its readability. Make sure the calls to action can be filled out with ease and that the flow of information as users scroll is streamlined without interruption from annoying pop-ups or sidebars.
Try out Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to get a read on how compatible your content is in its current state. Their Webmaster’s Mobile guide and Principles of Mobile Site Design explain the importance of mobile-friendliness and how to make sure your web content adheres to accepted UX standards. Following the steps and remaining faithful to a professional UX philosophy makes your content more searchable, clickable, readable, and ultimately more profitable for your business.
Step 5: Use Social Media to Make Your Content More Timely and More Tactical
This seems like a no-brainer, but too many small businesses either underuse social media or fail to use it properly. The reality is, the parameters established by platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram can help guide you when deciding what content to share.
- Twitter’s 140-character limit facilitates short, snappy comments that still pack a punch in the message.
- Instagram displays images and videos that fit the size of an audience member’s phone screen.
- Facebook supports multiple tones and various forms of content—videos, images, GIFs, links, and written subject matter.
- LinkedIn is where you reach out to professionals in your industry and connect with them.
Craft content that is appropriate to each of these channels, is in line with your established social media goals and objectives, and that matches the expectations of the people who use them. Social will set the framework for how your content is produced, as it will be your main platform for sharing it with your customers.
Be prepared, though. Conversation on social media can move at a breakneck pace, and you’ll have to keep up if you want to reach the eyes and ears you need. A content marketing calendar keeps your content on track, organized, and scheduled during specific days and times so you never fall behind.
Good content is paramount, but a content marketing strategy also requires science, structure, and testing. Creating interesting content that can be found and consumed is achieved through carefully balancing the creative and technical aspects of content marketing. An intelligent strategy also requires routine monitoring of all the metrics as time progresses and your tactics evolve to incorporate new data and ideas. It’s a living organism that will only get stronger with regular care and evaluation.
We specialize in content marketing strategies that incorporate social media marketing, UX design, keyword research, and deep competitor analysis. Let’s talk today about how we can develop a strategy that beats your competitors and wins you more customers.
