If you thought content marketing was all about blogging, think again! Whether you’re just getting started with putting together a formal content marketing strategy or you feel your progress has stalled, try some of these content marketing tactics to get the most out of your team’s efforts.
1. Optimize and Improve Existing Content
Even if you feel like what you’re doing right now isn’t working too well, you don’t need to start from scratch when it comes to content marketing.
Most businesses already have a substantial collection of content marketing assets at their disposal. However, they may not be making the most of them.
You can make your resources stretch further and squeeze more ROI out of your content budget by optimizing your existing content.
You need to start this process by developing a strong content management solution. If you don’t even have a clear picture of what content you already have, you won’t know where to start.
Cataloging, sorting and tagging your existing content will enable you to see:
- The gaps in your content that need filling
- Old content that can be updated and expanding
- Other content that can be repurposed in a different format.
Spending some time and effort on optimizing content can be a profitable investment. Something as simple as rewriting a headline or tweaking your landing page copy could make a huge difference to your conversion rates.
Make sure you schedule in some regular time to review existing content and make improvements where you can. You can also take advantage of A/B testing and automated optimization tools to improve your content over time.
2. Utilize User-Generated Content
Here’s another content marketing tactic that will take very little of your budget and resources, but can have a massive positive effect on your traffic, engagement and profits.
User-generated content is very affordable for one thing because you’re not using any of your own resources to produce it. Instead, you hand over the reins to your customers and audience.
One simple way to encourage user-generated content is by asking your customers to write reviews or post images of themselves on their social media accounts using a specific hashtag (a giveaway or other competition always acts as a good incentive). You can then repost this content on your brand’s social channels.
This type of content requires very little effort from your end and yet it can bring huge benefits to your brand. Eighty-five percent of consumers say that UGC influences their buying decisions more than brand content.
3. Go for Live Streaming Video
It’s very easy to forget that content means more than just words on a screen. Many brands are doing very well by publishing primarily visual content — video in particular.
Video has been growing in popularity online for several years, and it’s most definitely here to stay. 60 percent of web users now prefer online videos over television and 72 percent of customers prefer to learn about products via a video.
One area of video marketing that’s definitely exploded in popularity in the last couple of years is live streaming video.
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitch all offer live streaming as an easy-to-use feature and it’s an accessible way for brands to get started with video marketing. There’s no need to produce polished videos — simply addressing your audience in real time is a real and authentic form of content marketing that’s become very popular with web users.
Internet users watched over a billion hours of live video in 2019 and 80 percent of people would prefer to watch live video from a brand than to read a blog.
Live videos can build better relationships with your audience by making them feel involved with your brand and giving them a behind-the-scenes peek into your business.
Image Source: Twitch Quarterly Hours Watched (in billions) vs. Competitors
4. Optimize Content for Google Rich Snippets
SEO continues to be as important as ever, but the game has changed. For years, the goal was to achieve position number 1 in the search engine result pages. Now for many, that goal is to achieve position zero.
What exactly is position zero? Achieving this coveted title might mean that a web user doesn’t click through to your website at all. But instead, content from your site is displayed right there in the SERPS as a rich snippet.
There are many benefits to getting your content to appear as a rich snippet. While users don’t have to click through to read your content, in some cases they can actually improve your click-through rate, as they act as a sort of preview or taster of what they can expect when they click for more.
Rich snippets also help to give your SEO a boost overall and can raise your brand profile and authority.
5. Experiment with New Platforms
New content platforms are popping up all the time, so if you’ve been publishing your content on the same places for the last 5 years, it might be time to review your approach.
Posting on new platforms can help you reach a wider audience and it can also help you to think differently about the type and topic of the content you produce and inspire you to do something new.
For example, consider the viral video platform, TikTok. It might not be immediately obvious how you can take advantage of a community of young people by publishing short music videos but some brands are already seeing success by thinking outside the box.
In the early days of Instagram, many brands thought the same way as the platform was seen mostly for photographers and creatives and there were no native marketing tools available.
But now the brands that invested in building their presence on Instagram are reaping the benefits of building a following on a platform that boasts over 1 billion active users.
Need More Fresh Ideas?
Get in touch with our team of content experts who work with brands in a number of different industries to find out how DivvyHQ can help you to tame your content chaos and reinvigorate your content marketing strategy.