Brands need to be able to connect with customers digitally. The content a business produces needs to reach customers in a way that feels organic and intentional. Content marketing provides an exceptional way of doing this; a robust content marketing strategy can make all the difference between a brand that resonates with its target audience and one that has trouble with conversions.
In short, content marketing helps you grow your business and tell your brand’s story. It is the entire process behind creating, developing, producing, sharing and distributing content to your target audience. Your content can be as versatile as you’d like, from blog posts and landing page copy to podcasts, videos, infographics and social media blurbs. Content marketing can also support social media and other digital marketing efforts, such as lead generation and nurture programs.
However, the content marketing landscape is a complex and competitive marketplace. While it is an effective way to drive business results and encourage conversions, a strong strategy needs to be in place to see the best results.
Here are some content marketing best practices that will allow brands to tell their stories with ease.
16 Content Marketing Best Practices
How exactly can content marketing help you meet your digital marketing goals? High-quality content marketing can help companies amplify their overall marketing strategies without putting too much of a strain on budgets. CMI found that content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing but costs 62% less.
Use these content marketing tips when building your content marketing strategy.
1. Take the Time to Strategize and Plan
In order to make your content marketing work for you, an adequate strategy will need to be established. It helps to take some time to brainstorm and think carefully about what you want from your content marketing efforts. Do you want to raise awareness about your brand as a whole, or are you looking to highlight a new product or service? Do you want to stand out as a thought leader in your industry and boost your competitive advantage? The answers to these questions will inspire your strategy and plan going forward.
During your brainstorming and content ideation processes, take the time to develop achievable goals. Every piece of content you produce should be based on research — meaning similar content has had a successful track record with others. But it is essential to keep in mind that your goals need to be attainable, not far-fetched and unrealistic. Depending on your needs, some examples of content marketing goals can be:
• Improve revenue
• Generate great leads
• Increase conversions
• Boost brand awareness and authority within your industry’s niche
• Attract strategic partners
• Enhance your customer engagement
• Build rapport with both new and returning customers
• Stand out within your local market
Need some inspiration? Look at your competitors and other brands you admire to get some ideas for your content themes and formats. From there, create an editorial calendar to keep your content production consistent.
2. Understand Your Audience
Learning about your audience is essential in making informed decisions about what content you create for your audience. It is all about meeting their needs and digging deep into their motivations, behaviors, challenges and goals. Creating buyer personas or writing briefs can help facilitate this process. By conducting research, you will ultimately be able to create empathetic content marketing campaigns that resonate with your audience on another level.
3. Audit Your Existing Content
Before you start generating new content, you’ll want to take a look at the content you have already produced. You can use the fact that you already have content to your advantage. Take a step back to examine what is already good about your content and what you can do to improve it.
For example, are you active on social media, or do you have a blog with consistent and unique content? How are they performing, and do they get any interaction from your consumers? A content audit doesn’t have to be too challenging to complete, and chances are, you’ll already have a good idea of what is working for your brand and what is not.
Additionally, sometimes you may be able to pause new content creation and instead focus on refreshing older content. A simple content refresh or optimization can help breathe a new life into an existing piece of content, instead of having to draft up something brand new.
4. Create Compelling Content
You should target all the content you produce to the specific demographic you want to reach. Remember that consumers want content they’ve never seen before. So, create unique content that consumers won’t be able to find anywhere else. Plus, exclusivity is key. Behind-the-scenes content, interviews with company members and product how-tos are wonderful options for standing out in the crowd.
When creating your content, ask yourself the following questions:
• What types of content would my ideal customer want to see? Are they looking for product tutorials, informational guides or broader thought leadership pieces?
• What kind of content will inspire consumers to keep coming back? Are the customers more likely to react to videos, blog posts or podcasts?
• What sets your business apart from your competitors? What makes you different?
• Are there topics or content pieces I can outsource to an industry expert or thought leader?
The answers to these questions will help inspire your content creation process.
5. Provide a Mix of Evergreen and Topical Content
In the realm of content marketing, evergreen content is content that is not time-sensitive. This type of content will always stay fresh, meaning it will always be relevant for your readers. There are plenty of benefits to investing in evergreen content, including:
• Providing a lot of value to audiences. The topics of evergreen content tend to stay relevant long after the initial publication date of the piece. No matter what season and year the reader finds the content, the information will be beneficial and informative.
• Continuing to drive traffic to the site months and years after publishing, since the piece still sparks interest and clicks.
• The ability to be updated when needed because of industry trends. This saves a lot of time for business owners in the long run, as they won’t have to constantly create new content.
Standard evergreen content formats include listicles, “tips and tricks” articles, informational how-to product videos, product reviews and videos.
Although evergreen content articles provide value to readers, prospects will also want to understand industry news and trends. By curating news from valuable sources or sharing expertise from the C-suite, companies can help their readers stay ahead of big shifts in their industry. A combination of these kinds of assets will help readers navigate best practices while demonstrating how new trends or developments in technology will influence their decision-making processes.
6. Personalize Your Content
Remember that your overarching content marketing goal is to make sure you know your audience and what they want from you. Creating and curating the right mix of content requires a good understanding of the target audience and their pain points. For example, would your audience appreciate specific industry insights from trusted, third-party sources? Or would it help to put your business in perspective by incorporating news stories and photography within your cross-platform content strategy?
Personas, or detailed profiles of possible consumers, are a great tool for determining what would interest audiences. When brainstorming these personas, establish each target audience’s age, demographics, interests, jobs, income and lifestyle. Since you will have many different potential consumers, you’ll need to have multiple audience personas. Make sure you differentiate your content, either through the topic, format and presentation or through balancing a mix of original content and licensed news articles, for each audience. This way, each persona is appropriately targeted.
7. Use Analytics to Optimize and Improve
There are many free tools available online, such as Google Analytics, that will give you a glimpse into your website’s performance. Taking a regular look into your website’s content performance will help you see if your content is performing to the best of its ability, as well as guarantee that consumers can easily access it.
Search engines are run by algorithms, which dictate how search engines crawl, index and present your website’s information. These algorithms can change rapidly, and if your website is not technically sound, you may lose all the search engine optimization momentum you’ve already gained. So, it’s essential to use analytics to ensure that all your web pages are performing correctly.
Additionally, analytics can provide insight into well-performing content topics and themes. Look at your content, and see which pieces got the most traffic, performed the best and created the most conversions. Look at which headlines got the most clicks and pay attention to the length of time readers stayed on the page. Take note of the common threads between your successful pieces of content and use this information to optimize both new and existing pieces.
8. Provide Value
There is immense value in content marketing, but only if the content you create adds value to your audience. The content you are creating is paramount in answering your audience’s questions and building trust. Deliver value by educating your audience through blogs, infographics, podcasts, and interviews. Creating story-driven content tends to perform better than authoritative content by positioning yourself as a curator of knowledge.
9. Diversify Your Content
Diversifying your content strategy means creating different kinds of content and expanding the types of topics and themes covered in previous assets. You are more likely to keep your audience interested if you keep things fresh. The following are great ways to expand your content:
- Blog Posts
- White Papers
- Ebooks
- Webinars
- News Content
- Thought Leadership Content
- Content Licensing
- Multilingual Content
10. Leverage Thought Leaders in Your Industry With Licensed Content
Demonstrating thought leadership starts with choosing the best content for your desired topic. If you are looking for content written by world-class writers and journalists, licensed content can help. Using licensed content takes the hard work out of creating content that you know your audience will enjoy.
With licensed content, business owners will:
• Save time: Curating external content will increase your output while freeing up time to devote to developing your original content, start to finish. Additionally, by getting a comprehensive copyright license, businesses won't need to waste time navigating getting copyright permission individually for articles that would interest their audiences.
• Diversify content: You want to stand out online, and when you consistently publish content with varying themes and topics, you will draw your audience back to you.
• Establish brand credibility: Harnessing the worldwide journalistic expertise of NYTLicensing solutions will work to help you stand out in your industry.
11. Outsource Content
We are all aware of how important content creation is when it comes to boosting your visibility and saving you copious amounts of time and money. Many companies do not have the time to maintain an editorial calendar that aligns with their business strategy nor one that manages to produce consistent fresh content. This is why outsourcing your content development and outsourcing your blog posts is the best way to maximize your content marketing efforts. In fact, 57% of the most successful companies in terms of content marketing are outsourcing at least some of their content efforts.
12. Promote Content
Content promotion is the process of distributing content via both paid and organic channels. This may include platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, social media, industry publications, and email marketing.
The goal of content promotion is to get the content out in front of as many people as possible. A strong content promotion strategy includes a multi-channel approach that connects with audiences, generates leads, cultivates loyalty, and drives awareness. Consider leveraging social media, curated content newsletters, industry publications, and your company website.
13. Repurpose Content
It is no secret that repurposing content is the easiest way to save time and resources, drive traffic to your brand and grow your business and brand. Repurposing content just means reusing assets and content pieces in new formats across different channels. This can include turning blogs into podcasts, turning interviews into ebooks or repurposing content with a copyright license. Repurposing content should not be overwhelming, but if it is, content licensing is the easiest way to repurpose already successful content.
14. Showcase Industry News
Showcasing industry news is a great way to establish your brand as a thought leader. Relevant news information can also help your audience make better decisions, as they navigate changes in their industry. 71% of industry leaders note that less than 50% of the thought leadership they read is delivering insights. By highlighting relevant news stories, your team can better connect with business leaders and decision-makers, who matter most to your business.
However, many brands struggle to produce this kind of content regularly. With conflicting deadlines resulting from product launches or end-of-year sales goals, it can be difficult to dedicate the right team to researching industry news content, especially since most of it is time-sensitive. By partnering with reputable publications and licensing their content, your team can still showcase news and establish your brand as a thought leader with fewer resources.
Since content is increasingly found behind a paywall, news curation is an effective strategy for brands to leverage. Since only 20% of Americans have a subscription to digital news, your team will be able to showcase unique content to your audience to build trust.
15. Create Goals for your Content
It has now been proven that content marketing enhances your business and plays a significant role in the success of a company. It is difficult to maximize opportunities if there are no goals or strategies in place. Without proper methods of tracking progress, teams will have a harder time determining what tactics are effective and why.
To successfully take advantage of content marketing, you need to set a clear attainable plan. By establishing clear content marketing goals and KPIs, your company can track insights like the number of leads, impressions, and conversions all of which will help you analyze and in turn, make informed smart decisions.
16. Consistency is Key
Creating a content marketing plan is the key to remaining consistent in your strategy. So how do you create this “plan” and stay consistent? The answer: start an editorial calendar. The effectiveness and benefits of having an editorial calendar are endless. In fact, 80% of the most successful companies in content marketing are using a content calendar.
Content Marketing Trends for 2024
As content marketing trends continue to evolve every single year, it is important for your business to stay up-to-date and relevant. 2024 will continue to push the boundaries and techniques of marketing. Let’s dive into some trends you should consider leveraging as we move into the new year!
Get Started with Empathetic Content Marketing:
Connection and building trust with potential consumers has never been harder, considering how much content is floating around on media channels, flooding social media, and overwhelming people’s inboxes. If you feel like your marketing campaigns are not resonating with your audience, you are likely to be missing empathy-based marketing.
During the pandemic, AdvisorStream noted that its health and wellness articles were among its best-performing assets, although they are a financial marketing platform. Even in B2B, it’s important to go beyond mere personas and data to foster those connections.
Combat Misinformation:
Trustworthiness and credibility continue to be large problems in the media ecosystem. For healthcare content marketers, this distrust is especially important. One study in Singapore showed that misinformation led to people regularly rinsing their noses with saline and garlic to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, instead of the regulations related to social distancing. Additionally, in another survey, 36% of patients noted that they do not trust pharmaceutical companies.
Due to the circulation and impact of misinformation and the lack of consumer trust, content marketers must be hyper-vigilant that their content is accurate and credible.
Create Video Content:
Video content marketing continues to be a great marketing format that helps drive your message and tone forward. High-quality video content helps you tell a story with visuals while developing a connection with your customers. Video allows businesses to show off their products and services with customer testimonials, product demonstrations, and behind-the-scenes footage content.
Measure Content Regularly
75% of the companies semRush surveyed are conducting a content audit once a year. 65% of those that are most successful are conducting these audits at least twice a year. For companies looking to outpace their competition, it’s important to regularly monitor content performance, track goals, and audit performance. Your team should then adjust its approach based on your team’s findings.
Final Thoughts
The above best practices will ensure that your content works for — not against — you. With some consistency and time, these tips will amplify your brand and improve your content marketing efforts, which will help with customer conversions, leading you to ultimately grow your business.
Frequently Asked Questions about Best Practices for Content Marketing
What are the pillars of content strategy?
Effective content marketing advertising normally includes relevancy, consistency, and authenticity. To be relevant, the content must be tailored to meet the specific audience’s needs. Second, content must be consistent to create a reliable presence for marketers. Lastly, authentic content helps build genuine followers and helps customers connect on a personal level with a brand.
What is a content strategy framework?
Creating a framework for your content strategy establishes a game plan for content goals, plans for content distribution, understanding the target audience, and following branding guidelines.
