Best Ways to Simplify Your Content Marketing Strategy and Focus on The Essentials

Content marketing has long been a central point in the marketing world. And for good reason studies prove that content marketing costs less but earns six times as many conversions as traditional marketing channels.

However, a lot of marketers consider it to be overwhelming, time-consuming, and not very clear at times. They often get confused because of the number of marketing channels, various types of content, and the competitive race in which they try to cover everything but fail because it’s simply impossible.

In such circumstances, it is crucial to eliminate irrelevant elements from your strategy and concentrate on tactics that really make an impact on your business. In this post, we will show you best ways to simplify your content marketing strategy and focus on the essentials.

12 Tactics to Narrow Down Content Marketing Activities

Content marketing is a really big piece of work. Although it brings substantial benefits to many companies, some people still can’t figure it out completely. Here are only a few stats to reveal that it needs a little bit of simplification:

• Two-thirds of B2B marketers struggle to define what content is effective and what isn’t.
• Only 8% of marketers consider themselves “very successful” or “extremely successful” at tracking content marketing ROI.
• More than 60% of businesses don’t have a documented content strategy, while 64% of marketers want to learn how to create one.
• In the US alone, content marketing investments reach over $12 billion a year.

Now that you’ve seen how difficult it is to develop a sustainable content marketing plan, it is time to learn 12 ways to make the process simpler. Let’s check them out!

1. Have a Concise Documented Strategy

Working without a proper strategy is never a good idea, regardless of the niche you are dealing with. The same goes for content marketing, so you must not fail to plan your activities. At the same time, you also don’t want to go too extreme by turning your strategy into a course paper.

A minimalist approach is more likely to be rewarding. Tend to make a one-page strategy and cover the most important aspects of content marketing. There is no ultimate template for a one-page strategy, so we suggest you answer the 3 big questions:

• Why: Why you take action? Do you want to raise brand awareness or educate consumers? Think about this prior to creating content.
• Who: Who is your target consumer? Do you know his/her age, location, values, academic background, and income level? You must find it out to create a buyer persona.
• What: Now that you’ve answered these two questions, you should ask yourself one more thing: What type of content can help me reach out to my audience?

2. Segment Your Content to Less

Not segmenting content is like casting a wide net and not catching anything. It is necessary to adapt content so as to fit a specific group of consumers. Segmentation is crucial in that respect because it’s a step toward a more personalized content.

Don’t try to cover all the possible segments in your niche. Instead, try to minimize interests to the few most important aspects such as hot topics, real-time content, case studies, or pain points. Besides that, you should test different types of content that work for your audience and choose the most effective ones.

3. Create Solid Content

No matter how beautiful or well-designed your posts may seem, they won’t make a big impression on readers if they lack quality. Therefore, your goal is to create solid content that really covers topics from all angles. One long and good post is always a better option than writing several short articles.

A study revealed that the perfect blog post length is now around 1.6 thousand words. The reason is obvious – people want to read high-quality content that really answers their questions and offers practical solutions to their problems.

4. Focus on Content Pillars

A content pillar is simply an in-depth piece of content, such as an eBook, whitepaper, video, or research report that can be broken out into many smaller assets, such as blog posts, infographics, and emails. What makes content pillars so important for your strategy?

They allow you to produce a lot of related and meaningful content in a relatively short period of time. For instance, you can use an eBook to get dozens of blog posts, social media announcements, charts, and images. All you need to do is to repurpose content pillars and turn them into a series of smaller (but highly relevant) pieces.

Image Source: BuzzSumo

5. Focus on Your Form Factor

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a rather technical aspect of content creation, but it is crucial because it enables the audience to find you online. For this reason, you need to pay attention to article titles and subheadings, keywords, hashtags, meta-tags and other form factors.

Keywords definitely play a major role in that respect, so you should carefully choose words and phrases that match the most frequent search inquiries in your niche. Google’s Keyword Planner makes the job much easier, so don’t forget to use it while creating the keyword strategy. 

6. Develop an Advantageous Editorial Calendar

Content creation is all about consistency. You need to make an editorial calendar that works both for you and your audience. The best way to do it is to plan at least one or two weeks ahead, automate digital activities, and keep several pieces of extra content in case you need to fill in spontaneous gaps.

This way, you will be posting content regularly and the followers will get used to your rhythm.

7. Rely on Visual Content

Visual content is dominating the digital world. According to the research, video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80% or more, while Facebook posts with images see over 2 times more engagement than those without images.

This means you can’t ignore visual content. As the matter of fact, you should focus the whole strategy on images, infographics, and short videos because these formats proved to inspire users’ interest and boost lead generation.

8. Maintain a Source of Your Content

A CRM system which helps you and your team maintain content marketing is always a good way to speed up and simplify promotional activities. Such software ensures access to every piece of content you’ve ever created. Additionally, it helps you to monitor and track your content performance effectively and timely.

9. Collect Great Cross-Department Ideas

Marketing may be one of the company’s focal points, but it doesn’t mean it’s the only department in your organization. On the contrary, you can generate the best results only if you establish a synergy of all units.

You should collect interesting cross-department ideas and plan implementation, while crowdsourcing ideas will add to the variety of your content. Besides that, cross-department cooperation will help you successfully address pain points in all areas – from sales to customer relationships to product development.

10. Get Your Influencers with Consistent and Quality Content

We already discussed the importance of content quality for your marketing strategy. However, we need to add that well-designed posts have a huge side effect because they attract new followers and establish you as the key opinion leader in the niche.

At the same time, this is the easiest way to reach out to influencers. When you prove expertise with consistent high-quality content, you can expect social influencers to start sharing and discussing your posts. That way, you will expand the network of professional acquaintances and address wider audiences.

11. Use the Right Tools

Your creativity and inspiration are irreplaceable, but no man can successfully manage the entire content marketing strategy single-handedly. That’s why you need to use digital tools that align with your strategy and give the potential for improvements. The choices you make depend on the nature of your business, but here are a few apps commonly used by marketers:

• Headline Analyzer: It helps you create compelling headlines and attract the attention of users.
• Canva: This is a simple and intuitive design tool that makes it easy to create images, infographics, and other types of visual content.
• Survey Monkey: If you want to launch a survey, this is the right app for you.
• Hemingway App: Make your articles flawless using the proofreading and readability tool.

12. Hire Specialists

If you can’t handle content creation by yourself or simply don’t have enough time to do it, don’t be afraid of hiring specialists. It may cost you more, but the final result of your marketing strategy will be much better.

Content creation is by far the most important marketing strategy of our age, but it’s often confusing due to the complexity and the number of communication channels. That’s why a lot of marketers get stuck and fail to capitalize on this fundamental tactic.

In this post, we showed you some best ways to simplify your content marketing strategy and focus on the essentials. Did you already try some of these tricks? Do you have other interesting suggestions to share with our readers? Feel free to let us know in comments and we’ll be glad to discuss this topic with you!

About the Author

Sophia Anderson is a professional content writer at EduGeeksClub and a marketing blogger who is keen on exploring new trends in content marketing and putting them into practice. When out of hours she is looking for her voice as a novelist and completing an online course on e-commerce.

Feel free to get in touch on Twitter.