Successful content marketing builds strong relationships and brand loyalty through helpful, educational content. While it requires extensive work to do well, when done right, content marketing helps companies meet their long-term brand, product, and revenue goals while decreasing ad spend.
Follow these 22 content marketing tips to ensure your content efforts support a successful content marketing strategy.
1. Know Your Target Audience
Creating content that attracts new leads and keeps current customers engaged requires a deep understanding of your target audience.
While demographic information can certainly help, running an effective content marketing strategy requires digging deeper into audience needs and desires.
To better understand your audience, consider these questions:
- What are their interests, pain points, and goals?
- What does their buying cycle look like?
- How does your audience like to consume content, and on what platforms (e.g., email, socials, websites, online communities)?
Answering these questions helps you create the right content at the right time to establish your brand as an authority on the topics your ideal audience cares about most.
Focusing on who you want to attract ensures you select the right topics and target keywords to address your audience’s needs while simultaneously supporting an effective content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.
If you don’t already have buyer personas or customer avatars established, documenting the answers to these questions and keeping them accessible to all creators in your company will ensure each content piece furthers your business goals.
2. Keep a Consistent Brand Voice
Keeping a consistent brand voice ensures your audience knows what to expect each time they interact with your brand. This cohesion creates a seamless experience for content consumers and further deepens your brand and content marketing strategy.
No matter what channel your audience finds your content through, your messaging should speak to the same audience using the same brand voice.
When your team first began creating content, your brand voice likely wasn’t clearly defined. As you create more content, it becomes easier to establish and refine your voice throughout your content.
Creating brand guidelines makes it possible to clearly define a voice and use it consistently, even for companies with a diverse marketing team. A brand guide helps establish editorial standards and provides detailed information about your voice to elevate your brand identity and enhance your messaging.
Here are some content marketing tips for an effective brand voice:
- Create a user-friendly experience by writing for easy comprehension rather than trying to impress readers with complex terminology.
- Write each piece of content for a specific audience and speak to their needs and goals.
- Produce a mix of content from your company viewpoint, plus additional first-person experiences from internal SMEs or founders.
3. Make Your Content Work Towards a Goal
Building on the last two content tips, your content should focus on either educating your audience or solving a specific problem. This could be tied to the pain points your product solves or the goals your product helps readers achieve.
Focus on creating content that positions you as a solution or drives content consumers further into your funnel, where you can later present your product as the solution. In this way, the content you create works towards both audience goals and your company’s business goals.
Having already established your target audience, now think about how your content can:
- Establish brand awareness and grow your audience, but also attract the right prospects.
- Bring your audience further into your funnel with internal links and calls to action (CTAs).
- Tie back to your business goals by presenting your product as the solution.
4. Keep Content Fresh
Fresh content is either new or recently updated to ensure it remains current and relevant to your audience. This could be in reference to articles, blog posts, podcasts, social media posts, or even videos.
Keeping your content fresh supports a strong content marketing strategy by delivering the most up-to-date information to your content consumers.
Fresh content also improves SEO, since content that is relevant and timely for readers is more credible. Algorithms want to serve the most credible content to searchers. Factors that influence search rankings, like lower bounce rates and longer time on page, also improve with content refreshes.
The beauty of creating content online rather than in physical print is how efficiently you can update it with new statistics and more timely examples. This is particularly useful in frequently changing industries.
When you update content, you should also update its publication date to reflect your changes. That way, both consumers and search engines will know it’s current.
Beyond keeping content fresh, another content marketing secret is content optimization, which helps content marketers reap the full SEO benefits from their content.
5. Monitor Competitor Content
SEO tools like Ahrefs help you monitor competitor content to ensure you’re not missing any important topics in your content marketing. Monitoring competitor content helps to identify topics that bring in the most traffic for your competitors, with implications for understanding what’s most valuable to your audience.
These insights help you build a stronger content marketing program that best serves your audience.
6. Maintain a Content Calendar
To ensure you’re consistently delivering new and refreshed content to your audience, it’s helpful to create a content calendar that helps you maintain a publishing schedule.
A content calendar, or editorial calendar, improves content marketing strategies and content management by organizing the planning and content creation process. It also provides a way to easily monitor what topics and keywords you’ve addressed and to keep track of new ideas.
7. Perform Original Research
Running a relevant survey and publishing your findings in an original research report can establish trust in your brand and increase your brand authority.
Conducting research supports your content strategy by providing original data to discuss in your content and bolsters your SEO strategy by creating linkable content other brands will want to cite.
Further, research reports serve as high-quality lead magnets, which support your overall business goals of capturing new leads.
8. Create Shareable Assets
Shareable assets like images, infographics, videos, or interactive elements can improve readability and enhance comprehension by providing a summative aspect to further expand upon in your content.
Shareable assets improve inbound linking and time on page, two components critical to SEO success.
To create shareable content assets, consider the following:
- Explain a complex topic with a handy visual guide.
- Summarize key points from a top-performing blog post.
- Make an eye-catching, entertaining graphic.
9. Conduct Outreach
Conducting outreach is another way to get your content in front of more content consumers.
The key to great outreach is personalizing your efforts to build relationships, not sending mass-generated email spam. Spend your outreach efforts connecting with leaders and influencers with a similar audience that cares about the content you’re creating and the solutions your products solve.
10. Don’t Get Caught up in Word Count
No matter what content marketing advice you’ve heard or what SEOs previously thought about writing longer content to outrank competitors, clear and concise writing should always be your priority over achieving a specific word count.
Getting to the point quickly helps readers get their questions answered and keeps them engaged longer, which ultimately results in lower bounce rates and longer time on page, two components essential to website success and SEO rankings.
11. Follow the Hub and Spoke Model
The hub and spoke content model is one method for implementing an organized structure in your content marketing that supports SEO site architecture.
The hub and spoke model is a set of interlinked pages on a given topic. The “hub” is a main page that serves to link out to additional pages of related content or “spokes.” These pages work together and create a seamless way for readers to get high-level information on a topic, while housing links for easy access to more information when a reader is ready to dig deeper.
The hub and spoke model helps readers get the information they need to broadly understand a topic and also find more detailed content in an organized manner.
12. …Or the Content Pillar Model
Converse to the hub and spoke model, where the goal is to keep information organized across separate articles, content pillar pages provide in-depth information on a topic so readers can access all the information they need on one page. Pillars also link out to related content “clusters,” but they differ from hubs by going more in-depth on the primary page than the “hub” of the hub and spoke model.
Whether you use the hub and spoke model or the pillar cluster model, both provide a helpful structure for SEO and readers alike.
13. Add Personality and Opinions
The internet is crowded. It’s no longer enough to write the same content as your competitors by rehashing what’s at the top of search engine results pages.
Adding personality, opinions, and first-hand experience makes content stand out and adds value to readers. It also helps readers get to know, like, and trust your brand and keeps them coming back for more. Your brand can develop loyal content consumers (and customers!) when you inject personality into your content.
14. Understand the Buyer Journey
The buyer’s journey is the path a prospective buyer takes from being unaware of your brand, to considering your solution, to finally making a purchasing decision.
Creating content that speaks to content consumers at different stages enhances your content marketing strategy by informing how content serves your audience and bringing leads further down your digital marketing funnel.
Understanding the buyer’s journey also supports SEO strategies by informing top-funnel content topics like “how to” and “ultimate guides” down to bottom-funnel content like product comparisons.
Understanding the journey helps you create content that best serves the reader and accelerates their journey to purchasing your solution.
15. Write for Information Gain
Writing for information gain means adding new information to your content that current articles aren’t already discussing. Content that brings something new to the table builds a brand’s reputation as a source of interesting insights.
Content that’s written for information gain focuses on adding to the discussion rather than rehashing what’s already published. This helps consumers expand their understanding of a topic, and information gain in SEO helps your brand outrank your competitors.
To get started writing new content for information gain, consider these questions:
- How can you add value to what’s already published online?
- What can you say that’s different or challenges the current narrative?
- What nuances can you cover that are missing?
- What proprietary research could inform better content on this topic?
- What expert insights can you add?
16. Put User Experience Front and Center
Putting the user experience front and center means writing for human consumption, not algorithms. This means focusing on creating content that is clear, concise, and broken into skimmable headings and bullet points.
Concise writing is not only more accessible for humans, but it also supports SEO by making it easier for algorithms to understand as well. Ultimately, Google’s goal is for its search engine results pages (SERPs) to serve the most helpful content to searchers. If you make the user experience the priority, you’ll serve the algorithm as well.
17. Prioritize E-E-A-T
A recent update to Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines added “E” for “experience” to the previous E-A-T acronym, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. With this update, Google now prioritizes firsthand experience when deciding what content to deliver to searchers.
Writing from a place of experience, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness are all staples of good content, but beyond supporting a great content marketing strategy, it also now supports SEO.
18. Integrate AI Wisely
Generative AI has come a long way, and we’re at a critical juncture. Those who aren’t using AI may find they can’t be as productive as those who have harnessed its power. That doesn’t mean you need to ask ChatGPT to write everything for you, but you can use it as a strategic partner to help you bring your content marketing vision to life.
For more information on how to integrate ChatGPT into your content creation process, check out these posts:
19. Repurpose Your Content
Another tip for content marketing: Don’t let your best content ideas live once and die on your website. You can improve your content team’s success and efficiency by repurposing content across different platforms. This is an effective way to get your content in front of new audiences with different content consumption preferences.
To start repurposing your content, try turning successful blogs into videos or turn your webinars into blogs, then share those new resources on your social channels and through email.
20. Promote Your Content
Promoting your content drives further reach and traffic, supporting your content marketing strategy by delivering your content to the most people and increasing the performance of your content marketing efforts.
Sharing your content across different social channels is just one example of content promotion. Your team can also promote content through ads, send blogs and videos to email subscribers, and make sure everyone mentioned in your content knows when it’s live to increase the likelihood that they’ll promote it from their platforms.
21. Track Your Content’s Performance
Tracking your content’s performance helps inform better content practices and supports a stronger content marketing program.
To assess the effectiveness of your content marketing, monitor and report on content marketing metrics such as site traffic and conversions using analytics tools like Google Analytics. Focus on identifying what’s working effectively and what you could do better. For example, you might uncover top-performing pieces and strive to recreate your most successful methods.
22. Don’t Forget Technical SEO
Last content marketing tip! It’s important to ensure your technical SEO is working with your content marketing efforts and not against it.
Technical SEO supports improving the back end of your website by repairing broken links, enhancing page speed, and implementing an internal linking strategy that improves your content performance.
Take Your Content Marketing to the Next Level
Content marketing and search engine optimization strategies perform best when they’re integrated and working together — but it’s a tall ask for just one team.
If your team can’t handle it all, we can help.
Here at Victorious, we’ll take all of these content marketing tips and best practices together to strengthen your content marketing efforts and put them to work toward your SEO and business goals.
Contact us to learn how.
