10 Content Marketing Tips for Brands & Marketers

Content marketing is the driving factor in your website’s traffic. The crown jewel. The keystone. By writing quality content and publishing consistently, you can slash your ad spending numbers and raise conversions.

If you aren’t effectively using content marketing – check out this graphic from Codefuel.com. Some studies suggest digital ad spending will soar to $242.80 billion by 2024.

Source: eMarketer

If you aren’t using content marketing, you’re behind the times and this is your sign to catch up!

If you are using content marketing already let’s get a little honesty going…

No one is perfect – and there are things to keep in mind when improving the content you’re putting out on your website.

Here’s a quick brush up on the basics from Ahrefs.com:

Quick Takeaways:

• If you aren’t using content marketing, it’s time to get with it

• Building an organic audience over time can be more efficient and better for your bottom dollar than 100% paid advertising

• Maintaining a consistent and quality content marketing schedule is crucial to your bottom line

We’ve thrown a list together of helpful tips for your brand to maximize the value of your content marketing efforts:

10 Content Marketing Tips for Brands

1. Know your audience

Any great piece of content starts with a firm understanding of what your audience needs from an article. Naturally, you’re trying to get them to your site to buy into your product or service, but the key part of that is getting them to your site.

This guiding star is especially beneficial for businesses that expect their prospects to seek education and information before they purchase. Creating context about why they need your item and leading them to the conclusion is key.

Imagine for example, you’re looking to sell grill aprons. Creating content focused around keywords like recipes or grills will bring your target demo (grillers) to your site. Things like “Top 10 Summer BBQ Recipes” or “Best Grills on the Market” will draw them into your site.

As they read, they’ll realize “wow, I DO need a grilling apron for all this meat I’m slinging.”

2. Use Good Sources

Good sources are important. Being able to show legitimacy in what you’re saying improves trust with the reader, making them more likely to convert. Think about it this way – using someone else’s credibility to prove your point is not just okay to do, it’s the smart thing to do.

The big sites to avoid? The same ones that your high school teachers used to yell at you for (We’re looking at you Wikipedia).

This also includes citing data.

ConvinceandConvert.com says:

Ground your content in facts: Data, research, and numbers are the foundation for any story. Your ideas and opinions and spin might be part of that story—or they might not be, depending on what you are trying to convey.

They’re right! Data drives your legitimacy and your points home to the reader.

3. Hire Great Writers

If your operation is expanding or you’re running out of time to properly handle your content marketing efforts, it might be time to hire some help!

There’s two options for this that yield similar results. You can either hire experienced content writers that have experience in SEO writing, or – hire a content marketing agency to do the research, writing, and publishing.

There’s benefits to both, but with a consultancy you often gain access to resources and experience you can’t always get with individual writers. Doing your research on both is important to finding what’s best for your business.

4. Optimize for SEO

Understanding the keywords and topics that are most important to your target audience is the foundation of any good marketing strategy. Not only does it bring the customer into the center of your focus, but it aligns your content to their needs. Measuring growth in your organic search rankings and traffic is a great way to determine if your strategy is working.

And it allows you to adjust to the latest trends and hottest topics while staying focused to an annual content plan. Having the right keyword strategy ensures your marketing strategy is aligned to buyers.

Source: FinancesOnline

There’re tons of automated SEO tools that can make your life much easier when optimizing your content.

5. Publish Consistently

This should be a no-brainer, but sometimes things slip through the cracks. But the reality of content marketing is that for your efforts to be successful you need quality content as close to daily as possible.

On average, it takes about 3-4 months of consistent, quality content to see larger yield. One article per week is a solid start, but getting into a daily rhythm of publishing will give you the quickest result over a shorter period of time.

6. Distribute on Social Media

Source: Invade Digital Media

How’s your social media presence? If your answer is we have none or not great, chances are your visibility is low. Being plugged into your target communities builds brand recognition and trust with prospects.

If you haven’t been already, you should be publishing your content across all of your social media channels in your brand voice to give your traffic that extra boost.

7. Distribute to Mail Lists

Who can forget services like MailChimp and Constant Contact? Creating subscriber lists out of customers and prospects that visit your site creates an easy line of communication. Sending out daily articles straight to their emails is a no-nonsense way of getting your information out there.

These sites also have built-in analytics pages to give you the best overview of your distribution efforts. Things like open rate, best time of day to send, and percentage of links being clicked.

8. Use Analytics

Analytics should drive your content. Using Google Analytics and other internal analytics tools from the resources you already use will give you insight into where your content does best.

Additionally, analytics tell you where your content could use some work. If certain pieces aren’t drawing many eyes or have the lowest conversion rates, it might be time to experiment with other types of content.

9. Optimize For Mobile

This seems like an obvious one, but when was the last time you opened your website on your phone? Mobile viewability is not only necessary but a must have when publishing content. More than half of all content is viewed on a phone.

If your website isn’t optimized for it, you’re only making yourself look bad! This is one of those things that is perfectly acceptable to hire contractors or consultancies for.

10. Repurpose Your Content

We didn’t forget about all that hard work you’ve already put in! Your best performing articles don’t need to sit on your website rotting to the webpages of time.

Articles that once brought in great traffic eventually fall out of touch with the ever-changing world of search engine optimization. Not to mention, the actual content can become irrelevant to today’s world.

Having your writers restructure your content into different forms can be the gift that keeps on giving. Even a quick freshening up of an old article from a few years ago with modern information can be the makeover your content needs to be back on top of the page!

Quick-Fire Content Marketing Tips for Marketers

Content marketing has become a big part of consumer engagement and attracting the attention of the right audience online. That means that a lot more companies are doing it, and it’s getting harder to stand out amid the sea of audio, video, images, documents, blogs, and more.

Virtually every marketer and business owner have found themselves in a rut trying to create enough content, get the desired engagement, and find interesting ways to innovate. Research shows that that 70% of B2B marketers are creating more content than they were the year before, and 54% find it difficult to produce engaging content.

Here are 25 content marketing tips you need to help you find more success:

1. Use your content to gently guide your customers through your buying cycle. Don’t treat it like a speedboat, full-throttle through to conversion.

2. Use social ads as a way to amplify the reach of your content marketing when you push it out through your social channels. A $10-20 boost on Facebook can go a long way.

3. Promote your content through a .com website domain as often as possible. 84% of top-ranking pages use .com as their top-level domain.

4. “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing,” says Tom Fishburne of Marketoonist. If you have to force your audience to see the value in the content, or hard sell it, it won’t work. Build content around a takeaway for the audience.

5. Don’t write short posts just to get the job done and over with. Write long-form content of 1,000+ words to help improve your search rank, traffic, and value to the reader.

6. Create a buyer persona before you start planning or producing content. That way you have a better understanding of who is reading it and the answers they’re looking for. That leads to much higher conversions.

7. Guest blog on popular industry sites and put a link back to your site within your byline or bio. This builds traffic as well as personal brand authority.

8. Avoid verbose headlines and go with short, simple, optimized titles that get the point across. The closer you get to looking like click-bait, the more wary your audience may become.

9. Never skip an opportunity to leverage email in your content marketing. 80% of businesses report that email is directly tied to their primary revenue.

10. Blog consistently, not sporadically. In a Hubspot survey, 82% of marketers who blogged daily reported acquiring at least one customer via their blog, compared to 57% who were only blogging monthly.

11. Share your own content and use the social sharing buttons next to your content. You can use a plugin to make this process even easier.

12. Repurpose old content in a new way to bring something fresh to users who may not have seen it. “In the end, the repurposed content needs to provide some level of unique value to people, or it’s not worth doing,” says Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing.

13. Syndicate your content to reach a new audience and drive referral traffic back to your site.

14. Always create a content strategy. The most effective content marketers are more likely to have a documented content marketing strategy in place.

15. Create a strategy for content promotion. Use a checklist for each post that lists all of the social channels and applications you’ll use to promote your content.

16. Always have a plan for building your audience. Use time-saving content marketing tools like Narrow.io that work with you to help organically grow your following.

17. Make reference to influencers by linking to their content or quoting them within your content marketing. Then reach out and let them know when you’ve mentioned them, either through manual social notifications, via email.

18. Sometimes the best type of content marketing is a genuine thank you email or letter. At When I Work, the team sends out handwritten thank you cards to all new customers. Nearly 70% of the time, the cards get shared on social media, and referrals are up by 23% as a result. It’s such a simple thing, but it’s a win-win for both the business and its customers.

19. Don’t generate one-off pieces of content. Create series pieces to drive repeat traffic. A great example of this is Neil Patel’s $100,000 Challenge series.

20. Remember to use the basic principles of conversion optimization so that all of your content, on every channel, has a higher chance of generating leads and sales for your team. Think about headlines, visual engagement, content layout, and call to action, just to name a few.

21. Pay close attention to your analytics so you can keep track of the most popular topics and content types that are bringing in or driving traffic to your site. Do a lot more of what works, and cut the dead weight from your strategy.

22. Trending content is important, but remember to include evergreen content that will continue to produce traffic month after month, year after year.

23. Always keep the focus on your audience when you produce content, no matter the type or channel. “Don’t focus on having a great blog,” says Brian Clark, Founder of CopyBlogger. “Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.” Need help building the right audience to promote content to on Twitter?

24. Talk and write as if you were having a conversation with a friend. Your audience is far more likely to relate to and engage with content that is conversational in nature. Speak on their level. You’re not a textbook.

25. You can’t force good writing. Try different conditions, influences, and times of day for writing. Find the conditions that are most conducive to your creativity. If you can’t manage, you can always turn to freelancers to help you produce the content that your audience is hungry to find.

Wrap Up

Content marketing, while rewarding, can be difficult to keep up with and regularly maintain. By using some of the tips we’ve provided, you can get and stay on track to blow past your conversion goals for your content marketing efforts!

Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weekly blog content service or schedule a free consultation.