5 Tips to Build a Content Marketing Strategy that Delivers Results

In a digital world saturated with content and a constant flow of information, it can be difficult to stand out. Companies are constantly dishing out new content in the hopes of elevating their status in the relevant SERPs and capturing the attention of their audience, all the while feeding the content machine and cluttering the cyberspace so much that it really takes a forward-looking brand to stand out and make a name for itself. This is the sad reality of the modern business world, but that doesn’t mean that you’re destined to live in the shadow of the more established brands.

You can, in fact, elevate your standing in the competitive industry with top-notch content, but not by focusing on quality alone – that’s to be expected. Instead, you need to combine numerous content tactics that drive audience engagement and you need to be consistent if you are to create a strategy that will take your brand forward as a whole. Here’s your guide to a content strategy that delivers.

Aligning the brand with the audience

When marketers and business leaders think of content marketing, they tend to focus primarily on the factors that make an article SEO-friendly or readable, but they rarely think about the branding factors that make a quality piece of content truly stand out from the rest. After all, it’s no surprise that people will click on a link that leads to a familiar website they can trust rather than a link that leads to a brand they’ve never heard of before. This is because global audiences put their trust in authoritative brands, which is why branding your content strategy should be your top priority.

Rather than focusing on just the quality of the piece, you should also focus on weaving your brand’s personality, visuals, tone of voice, and its unique values into the narrative to capture the attention of your audience, build up your company’s reputation, and establish a deeper relationship with your customers. If the content you create doesn’t portray your brand’s unique identity, then your audience won’t have a clear incentive to keep coming back to your site – because they can find quality content elsewhere.

Go in-depth on every topic and implement SEO

Branding your content is important, but beyond that, you also have to make your content relevant to the leading search engines, such as Google or Yahoo. This is achieved in a number of ways, one of which is to focus on creating long-form written content that will provide in-depth and relevant information to your audience, and hopefully answer all of their questions to prevent them from going to other sites in your niche. You will have to use analytics and audience data to figure out what lengths work best and to make better marketing decisions overall, but that doesn’t mean that length is the only factor.

It’s also crucial to integrate relevant keywords into the content by sprinkling them throughout the article in order to tell the search engines what the content is about and whether or not it is relevant to a target audience. Be wary, though, the keywords you use have to be relevant to the topic and the body, because Google will penalize your site if you try to stuff extraneous keywords in your articles and blog posts.

Optimize content using only relevant data

Data is crucial for content creation. Without it, you don’t have the necessary information to guide your content strategy, nor the means to optimize your content according to the needs and likes of your audience in an efficient and effective way. Essentially, you’re just shooting in the dark, which is why you need to track relevant metrics, compile audience data, and produce actionable reports.

Now, manually creating reports can be a waste of precious resources like time and employee productivity that could be better used elsewhere, which is why experienced marketers are nowadays integrating comprehensive digital marketing reporting tools with data visualization into their system to automate the reporting process and create actionable steps they can use to improve their content strategy. Once you have this information, you can start to diversify into other content types.

Diversify your content offering

Nowadays, content comes in numerous forms, and even though written content is still best for SEO purposes, visual content is quickly becoming the most popular content form on the web. It’s simple, really, visual content captures the attention of the viewer and inspires likes, shares, and comments through its unique ability to keep engagement high from start to finish. With that in mind, be sure to start creating visual content forms such as videos and animated videos, interesting images, and infographics to boost audience engagement across the board and on all relevant platforms.

Keep the conversation going and inspire action

Creating an amazing content strategy is not just about the content itself, it’s also about engaging your audience in meaningful conversation and being the brand that builds and nurtures a community. To achieve this, you need to share your content on social media and ask relevant questions, inspire your followers to create user-generated content, and answer all relevant comments to keep the conversation going. This is what makes content truly stand out in the saturated market.

Wrapping up

Content marketing is one of the most powerful ways to elevate your brand’s status and authority, enhance its reach, and build a trusting relationship with your target demographic. With that in mind, be sure to use these tips to take your content strategy to the next level and inspire audiences around the world to become your customers, followers, and brand ambassadors.