Content marketing is at the core of any successful digital strategy. However, developing quality, impactful, and memorable content takes time and resources as well as smart content marketing tips.
The following marketing tips will help you get more out of your content and turn these marketing efforts into a profitable activity for generating leads and sales. We’ll also discuss managed content marketing services and why they’re the golden ticket to a successful content marketing strategy.
Stand out as an SME
The term SME can mean two things. It can refer to small and medium enterprises, but marketing experts use this abbreviation to talk about subject-matter experts.
A subject-matter expert is a person or organization uniquely qualified to discuss a topic. Interestingly enough, many small and medium businesses also often happen to be experts in their niche.
With 81% of organizations considering content marketing as a core strategy, cutting through the noise and getting your content noticed can be a challenge. Step one is to tell your audience why they should listen to you:
- As a subject-matter expert in your niche, you can bring a unique viewpoint to the table, such as an innovative solution to a common pain point.
- Turn your professional experience into thought leadership by introducing new topics and discussions before your competitors.
- No one knows your industry better than you. Inspire trust and confidence by adopting an authoritative tone.
- While large organizations can have a broader focus for their content marketing efforts, the strength of small and medium businesses is often in their specialization. Establish yourself as one of the top content creators in your niche by adopting a narrow but insightful approach.
- Build trust by delivering on your promises. Your content will be memorable and valuable if you discuss concrete solutions.
Create pivotal moments with strong CTAs
What comes next after establishing yourself as a subject-matter expert? Read on to learn how you can turn this initial connection into something more.
The previous sentence, and many others you’ll typically find at the bottom of blog posts or just above the fold in marketing emails, is a call to action (CTA).
The purpose of a CTA is to catch the eye and introduce the possibility of continuing the interaction, whether it’s signing up for a newsletter or scheduling a sales call. Once you establish this connection, you can keep nurturing the lead by delivering more content.
You’ll get better results if you use a few simple content marketing tips when creating CTAs:
- Keep your CTAs short.
- Use strong action verbs.
- Suggest an action that makes sense for the current stage of the buyer’s journey.
- Tell users how they can unlock more value by acting.
- Use design practices that will make your CTAs stand out.
Capture organic traffic with SEO
Organic search is often the first channel prospects turn to when they need a solution to a pain point. It’s crucial to make sure your content will show up in relevant searches.
The best way to facilitate content discovery via organic searches is to invest in SEO. While some keywords will occur naturally in your copy and headers, you can go further by identifying two or three strong keywords for each page and using them in the URL, meta tags, link anchors, image alt tags, and more.
A successful optimization strategy starts with keyword research. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner to identify the top search queries and keywords your target audience is likely to use and keep up with the latest search trends for your industry.
Facilitate content discovery and consumption with internal links
We’ve already addressed how CTAs can become pivotal moments between content consumption and the first contact with a prospect.
However, facilitating pivots from one piece of content to another is just as important. The buyer’s journey is becoming increasingly complex.
A strong internal linking structure can help visitors find more content that is valuable to them. Plus, internal links will support your SEO efforts.
You can integrate internal links in your copy to help readers explore related topics. Marketers also use pillar pages to discuss a topic in depth and share hyperlinks to pages that focus on different subtopics.
Stay on track with a content calendar
Content freshness is a key component of a successful content marketing strategy. Content can lose some of its authority as it becomes stale, and ongoing content marketing efforts from competitors can cause your pages to lose their top spots in search results.
Developing new content will also help you keep up with new topics and adapt to the latest search trends, including voice search, which is becoming more popular with over 135 million voice assistant users.
A content calendar is a simple tool you can adopt to streamline content creation. Besides helping you post regularly, it will support your strategic planning efforts.
Gain a competitive edge with content intelligence
Analytics can shed light on how prospects interact with your content and help you understand your content’s role in the buyer’s journey.
These are examples of the different metrics you can track:
- Use a visitor counter to see which content pieces and topics are the most popular. Use your findings to plan more content around these topics.
- Track your conversion rate for different channels and pieces of content. It will help you identify the top-performing channels and pages so you can focus your efforts on what is most profitable.
- Go further by tracking metrics by audience segment, something that only 41% of B2B marketers do. This approach will give you a better understanding of your different buyer personas’ unique needs.
If you don’t have a content intelligence strategy in place, Google Analytics can be a great tool to get started.
Streamline your efforts with a managed content marketing service
If you find yourself short on time or resources to implement the strategies discussed above, outsourcing content marketing to a managed service can be a viable solution.
Managed content marketing services can streamline this process and act as an extension of your marketing team. From identifying content creation opportunities to creating and publishing content on your behalf, a managed content marketing service will help you turn content marketing into a profitable endeavor.
Tempesta Media is a managed content marketing service with capabilities ranging from content development and publication to social media marketing, SEO, analytics, and more. Schedule a content marketing assessment to learn how Tempesta Media can make your efforts more profitable, or take a look at our 100 digital marketing mistakes e-book for more tips.
