In the age of digital marketing, content is king – or so said Bill Gates. Though many brands will no doubt already have a solid content marketing strategy in place, there are always new and innovative ways you can improve it. Here are 6 ways you can take your content marketing to the next level.
1. Take the time to really understand your audience
In order to really optimise your content strategy, you need to know your audience as well as you know yourself. Writing for them should be second nature to you, so you need to know their wants and needs like the back of your hand.
There are many techniques and innovative tools you can use to research your target audience that will show you common behaviours, desires, and habits of your target audience. Once you have this information, you can leverage it to create content that will have higher engagement, impact, and success rates.
2. Diversify your content
When you find something that works, you might be tempted to stick with it forever – after all, if it’s not broken, don’t fix it, right? Though this might work for a while, writing the same content over and over again can become, well, boring, for both you as the writer and the audience as the reader.
Don’t be afraid to switch it up once in a while. This doesn’t have to be anything drastic, though – how about trying out some long form blogs, shorter social media posts, or concise Q&A interviews to supplement your regular blogs, for example?
3. Get in plenty of keywords, but always keep it natural
Keywords will optimise your content for SEO. That said, too many keywords can make it look ‘spammy’. So, it is important to find the right balance between SEO whilst also keeping the copy natural, organic, and flowing.
4. Update your existing content regularly
Once you click ‘publish’, this isn’t the end. As a good rule of thumb, you should revisit live content every six months or so, and take a look both at the content and the analytics to show how the content is performing.
Then you can ascertain if there are any new keywords that could be added, along with more updated facts, figures, sources, and links, that can make your old content relevant once again.
5. Research each topic thoroughly
There are two aspects of research that you need to conduct – researching the topic itself to ensure you do not spread misinformation and instead sound like an expert, and researching how the topic performs.
In doing so, you will be able to thoroughly back up all your claims and be able to better optimise your content with the right keywords and metadata.
6. Quality over quantity
You’ll likely already know that you need to post content regularly, and have your schedule already sorted. However, to take things to the next level, you need to ensure that the speed and frequency of writing and posting does not impact the quality of the copy.
This means, don’t write pieces just for the sake of it to keep to your schedule. If you miss a week, don’t worry. The quality of the content should always take precedence over quantity.
With these ideas in mind, you will be able to take your content to the next level, setting your brand apart from the competition.