Our 5 Favorite Content Marketing Tips
Posted by Mary Chris Hines on Fri, Jul 08, 2011
Distributing valuable content to the public is a proven way to engage the consumer and more often than not, turn them into a valued customer. Thousands upon thousands of web surfers spend thousands upon thousands of hours looking things up on the World Wide Web. If you are a marketer that can catch and hold their attention, they may return again and again, and finally purchase from you.
So that said, let’s look at our favorite content marketing tips so you can get started now rather than later. No sense putting off making your profit!
1. Know Your Audience or Public
Different strokes for different folks - this is a good statement to keep in mind when analyzing the audience for your product or service. Teens have different interests than retired airline pilots. Fishermen look for different information than housewives. Who is your target audience?
You must have your target audience well-narrowed-down so you can create the right kind of content – the kind that will be effective in engaging and compelling those reading your website. You have to know all about them. Ask yourself these questions:
- What drives them?
- What do they want?
- What do they need?
Of all content marketing tips, this may be the most important.
2. Fill a Need
When you have a full understanding of your target audience, you will know how to fill any needs they have (as far as content goes), whether it be information about the best places to fish in Canada, how to build a birdhouse or where is the best place to view the aurora borealis.
Without knowing your audience’s needs and wants, you can’t begin to offer content that will satisfy them. You want content that will help them in some way – by answering their questions or giving them important information.
3. Ensure You Provide Quality Content
Quality content is a must. Badly composed, grammatically incorrect, typo-filled content immediately turns off the reader, and that back button is so easy to click. The information you provide needs to be relevant, informative (filling a need), and interesting enough that the reader will keep reading.
You can also continue to add new quality content on a regular basis, with the end objective as having the potential customer come back again and again. As you build loyalty and trust with the reader, he will eventually buy from you.
Of course, another factor in quality content is keyword use. Any list of content marketing tips must address keywords within the content. Naturally, making the content findable with search engines is vital, but keywords also should enhance the content and not detract from the message.
When you stuff your content with keywords, just sticking them in for the benefit of the search engines, you can drive away traffic rather than attract it. Here’s an example of stuffing an “article” with keywords and creating content that is truly meaningless.
4. Communicate with a Fresh View
Saying the same old things in the same old way doesn’t inspire anyone. In fact, if your potential customer comes to your website to get a new take on something and sees the same information he just read at another site, he may just sigh and, once again, move his mouse to the back button.
Content writing can be a challenge in making your message stand out. But stand out it must. Devise a new concept to include in your content to make it different and inspirational. Use some brilliant writing techniques. The possibilities are endless.
5. Monitor and Analyze Results
To measure your success (or failures) with content marketing tips like these, you need to monitor results, such as number of visits and from where, who is sharing your information and if it is eliciting tweets. Then once you do an analysis of the results, you can fix any content so it is more effective.
Some marketers like to have a back-up plan for their content marketing strategy.
If your efforts aren’t getting you the results desire, you could look into hiring an agency or an individual consultant to help you get the right content for your website. Perhaps one of the earlier steps is missing or “off.”
Taking action with these content marketing tips should at least get you going in the right direction, and following them professionally and with some time and attention should get you the results you are after.