Organic traffic and keyword rankings are achieved with a high quality, well-thought-out content marketing strategy. Unfortunately, many businesses admit that they simply haven’t developed and drawn out this plan. That’s where we come in. Check out some tips on how to evaluate your website’s current traffic, as well as some tips on how to improve the content you publish on your site.
The Importance of Building a Content Marketing Strategy
You could be hurting your business’s online presence if you fail to build a content marketing strategy. Why do businesses need a content marketing strategy?
- You can increase brand awareness and the trust consumers place in your brand.
- You give your site more opportunities to rank on search engines.
- You give your audience information and knowledge about your products and services, in turn, you can increase conversions.
- It’s a great way to introduce your brand’s story to your audience.
- Great content can help differentiate your brand from your competition.
Start by Evaluating Your Current Content
Develop your goals—and make sure they’re measurable
The first step in developing a strong content marketing strategy is to make sure you understand which goals you want to reach. Ask yourself, what do you and your team want to achieve out of your content marketing strategy? Only after you express the mission and write it down can you align your content with the goal you’re trying to achieve.
It’s also crucial to know when you’ve reached your goal. Make sure the goals you write down (like more traffic, higher keyword rankings, and more form fills) are measurable. Use tools like Google Analytics and SEMRush to track your progress.
Check on your existing KPIs
To track your progress toward your goals, it’s important to know where you started. Connect Google Analytics to your business website and start analyzing the numbers. Are certain blog posts performing better? That should tell you to create similar posts in the future. Is your website attracting new visitors from posting content on social media? Analyze these and other Google Analytics measurements to start getting a clearer picture on how your content marketing is performing online.
Google is not the only tool you can use to find out how your content is performing. Social media platforms have excellent analytics tools as well. Facebook probably has the most robust analytics tools of all social platforms. However, you can also find data from Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. When you post your website’s content on social media, you can use the platform’s analytics to figure out which content is the most popular and which factors affect this popularity (including image used, time posted, hashtags used, etc.).
Get to know your target audience
To build and grow your content creation strategy, you have to get to know the people who will be consuming it. Study your target audience and create content that caters to their needs, wants, and interests. Determine the type of content that interests your audience, whether it’s blogs, infographics, videos, instructional guides, etc.
Ask yourself, how interesting and valuable is your content? Is it something you would want to read? If not, it’s probably not something your audience wants to read either. Content marketing is a fine balance of writing interesting and valuable content for your users and writing keyword rich and SEO friendly content for the Google Bots. The best balance is when you can combine both methods into a single blog post, and provide value to both users and search engines.
Is your existing content SEO friendly?
You’ve already asked yourself how valuable your content is for your audience. Now you need to evaluate how SEO friendly it is for Google and other search engines. Content marketing campaigns that effectively raise your website in the Google ranks include the following elements:
- Keywords in the title, headings, and throughout the body
- Headings used throughout the article to break up content
- High-quality image used in the blog and as the main image
- Meta tag and alt tag descriptions added to the blog and image descriptions
- Blog is at least 500 words, depending on the topic and competition
Tips for Building a Strong Content Strategy
When you evaluate your existing strategy, make notes on places you can improve. Then, create a calendar that maps out when you’ll create and publish specific content. Strategize the content topics your target audience wants to read, and build your calendar of content creation around their most frequently asked questions at your location and in your Contact forms on your site.
Build your content around the questions they need answers to! Then get to creating, editing, optimizing, and publishing with these tips:
Create to engage
When we mention brand storytelling, we’re not asking you to write a novel—but it wouldn’t hurt to add a little fantasy. After all, it’s good to entice your consumers enough to at least get a click from them. But in an online world overflowing with information, this can sometimes get challenging. How do you get your consumers to engage?
Excite them.
Creating a story with online content is more about taking the user on a personal journey. You can do that with effective and exciting content.
A good emotional tug won’t hurt. In fact, studies show that a positive emotion-inducing ad or video is a sure fire way to get your audience to stick around. Make them laugh, get them excited about a product, and throw in a GIF of a puppy that’s adorably falling asleep for good measure. Once they’re joyous and entertained by your content, you won’t be able to get rid of them.
Give ‘em what they want
Obviously, the best content for consumers is the content that resonates with them again and again. It won’t happen all at once, figuring out what an audience likes and what they don’t like. There are different ways to write about a single topic and, depending on your voice or brand, consumers will like certain things more than others.
Let’s say we write a Buzzfeed-style list of stuff and then we make an infographic about the same stuff, and the infographic gets more likes and interactions. We should learn from this data and create more infographics.
Also, when you share your content on social media, you get a hint as to how your audience is receiving your content. It’s the easiest way to tell if they like it or not. Users are free to comment, like, and share all they want with no inhibitions. Learn from these interactions.
Publish more videos
We know humans are visual creatures; meaning, they love videos. Cisco even predicted that by 2020, 80% of all consumer Internet traffic will be video. Content marketers are learning that video is way more accessible than words alone.
Get all the tips for video marketing, then get to creating! Add a little spice to it—humor is always a safe bet (unless you’re just not funny, which would be unfortunate). Keep it short, though. Videos can run dry rather fast, so grab their attention within the first 10 seconds or you might lose them.
Hashtags are your best friend
Always use hashtags when posting your content on social media. Don’t know where to start? Just put one of those in front of your blog’s target keywords on Twitter or Facebook. This way, people can find your posts much more easily. By broadening your reach, you will receive more views. Using them automatically adds your Tweet or Facebook or Instagram post to an online conversation about the topic.
This tip makes it easier for people searching for content to find yours. When you use hashtags on appropriate keywords and short phrases, it can make your post 21% more visible and engaging.
Trending topics get views
Speaking of hashtags, have you ever seen the trending section of Twitter? It allows you to see a popular—sometimes messy—conversation of topics and current events. You may also notice that they do not always pertain to what is actually happening in the world. People often Tweet with ranking hashtags to include something funny or maybe only semi-relevant content. Yet, the likes and retweets start stacking up.
It’s a good idea to be relevant or topical with your blogs. Write content about something that reflects or plays off of a current event; this type of content tends to get people’s attention, especially if it’s clever. Because that’s all you’re really doing—grabbing people’s attention. That attention is deserved if followed by content worth viewing, and if you followed these content marketing tips, that shouldn’t be a problem.
Allow for interaction
There’s nothing more fun than a brand that talks back. You represent your brand, your product, your company. You must uphold a professional and authoritative demeanor. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have fun with your audience.
By representing a brand, you are constantly informing your audience about your product. If your audience has questions, answer them—all of them. Even the goofy ones. If you go to a large brand’s Facebook page (Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Disney, etc.), you’ll see their comments are filled with questions and complaints. This is an excellent opportunity to extend some of that creativity and wit, while simultaneously being informative and professional. After all, your social media is your owned media—use it to your advantage. Take these brands for example.
Let Us Work on Your Strategy
Yeah, a lot of aspects come into play when developing a content strategy. So when busy business owners simply can’t handle the heat, they hand over the reigns to our team. Learn more about content marketing in Las Vegas, so we can start building your strategy.
