Content marketing is a very sensitive cranny of digital marketing, and the success in it is all about the care and consideration you give. The organizations which experience success in content marketing can be found highly committed to planning and strategizing for this purpose. However, committed doesn’t actually mean they spend more money on it or create a huge volume of content, but it is all about knowing the tricks of the trade.
After many years of trial and error experimentations, here we are sharing some relevant information in terms of content marketing best practices. Before starting to read through these tested tips, one should tune your mindset to the key concept as “knowing your audience is the primary step to success.”
For this, you need to create your ideal buyer persona, which differs from business to business, by considering their approximate age, gender, job functions, location, industries, etc. Use all these inputs to rightly zero in on your viable prospects. Content marketing is primarily the task of building credibility and trust of your brand. You won’t succeed even with the best generic strategy if your target audience (buyer persona) doesn’t find you relatable and relevant. Next, let’s explore the content strategies category wise.
Content Marketing – Best Practices
Blog content
From where the target audience gathers information.
- Don’t post content in vain – Ensure that the topic you consider for blog articles are relevant pain points of your target audience, which you address well. You can do a baseline keyword research using tools like Searchmetrics, SEMrush, etc. to identify the topics. People don’t actually search for brands, but they are looking for answers.
- Ensure readability – Always present your content in concise sections with enough spacing, bulleting, etc. to make it more digestible to people than presenting a clutter of text.
- Right time, right size – Follow the best practices in terms of ideal word count for blog posts and also try to post them at a frequent interval to the expectant audience to ensure readability.
Keywords
Keywords are phrases which your target audiences use to look for their answers.
- Don’t simply stuff keywords – From the Panda update of Google algorithm, you will be penalized if keyword stuffing is detected. It is a black hat SEO technique, and you should avoid hidden keywords, duplicate content, and plagiarism also completely.
- Cover related topics too – Hummingbird search engine algorithm of Google is capable of natural language processing to understand the exact user intent and can assess the relevance of your related matching to search topics. So, discussing related topics may also increase your visibility.
- Write the most informative content based on the keyword – It is not any more use of keywords, but it is the most meaningful contextual use of keywords which matters. So, to rank on top against particular keywords mean you have to write the most relevant piece of content to act as the right resource for the keyword.
Search engine optimization
SEO is the science of generating natural and free results through search engines.
- Make unique content – Every page you create for your business website should feature content which is fresh and unique. Each page gets indexed on search engines, and if the page content satisfies the intent, there is a better chance of your page coming on top of the SERPs.
- Write for real users – Do proper market research to identify your target audience. You are not actually aiming at the search engine crawlers, but real people. If you want people to think you are relevant, always develop content with people in mind. Don’t worry about the understanding of the robots; they too are tuned to track the human-oriented content.
- Relevant backlinks are the key – Anytime when a user links back to your content, it helps to boost your SEO. This is the major reason why you need to impress people and win relevant backlinks. Backlinks are golden snitches in content marketing.
On-page SEO
Optimizing content of the web and improve the page’s SEO value.
- Set Meta – Properly use the Meta tags, which are there to describe the content to the Google bots. You have to put proper Meta descriptions in order to define the content well. Metadata is displayed right beneath your URL in the SERP.
- Responsiveness – Google is now penalizing non-responsive web pages, and mobile-first indexing is quickly taking over. So, ensure that all your content is made responsive to load perfectly on any device ranging from desktops to tablets and mobile phones alike.
- Keyword targeting – You can effectively use keyword research tools like Google AdWords, SEMrush, Keyword Planner, etc. to segregate them based on the search volume and organic difficulty.
Infographics
Creation of pretty and informative visual assets, which are easily digestible to the target audience.
- Make them imagery talk – It is the worse approach to content development if you simply put in an infographic which cannot convey any message to the audience. But, it’s a good idea to cut down the text and try to convey information with easily understandable visual elements.
- Don’t overdo – We may see elaborate infographics on many websites, which may be excellent from the aesthetic point of view, but may be perceived as so complex by a common user.
- Avoid any clutter – Adequate use of whitespace is the new success mantra for content designers. It will help to invite the attention of the users to the most relevant content. A congested and overly busy design may dilute the message or let the users miss it out altogether.
Click-throughs
The number of clicks you win divided by the impressions
- CTR from everywhere – Unlike previously, click through is not just from the PPC ads, but from anywhere like emails, social media, organic search results or specific links at blog posts or other pages.
- Targeting is the key – As discussed in another point above, whether you are planning for a mailer or a social media campaign, you should exactly know your target audience and their questions to develop the content, which they may tend to click on.
- Plays it simple and elegant – Click-through rate is a key metrics which shows how good you were in making an impression. So, keep your teaser as short and simple as possible, right to the point. You can tell the entire story they show interest in the thread.
So, as we always say, content is the king and is the single-most biggest consideration to make on planning for any digital promotional activity. It is not a loss to hire an expert content specialist who can work closely with your team and come up with the most relevant content for your business.
