Today, an unprecedented opportunity of immense proportions exists for entrepreneurs. The human race is undergoing population explosion on an epic scale only imagined prior to this time. What this translates to is a higher percentage of possible customers to whom you can proffer solutions and market your services.

Consequently, your firm can potentially achieve colossal expansion businesswise. Content marketing(1) is in all probability the most effective way to market your offerings and magnetize fresh clients to your business.

Welcome to the world of content marketing.

The more the number of customers you acquire the greater the number of business transactions, which means increased profit. The numbers make up your market pool of available clients.

The statistics below serves to buttress these conclusions:

• In 2019 there were over three billion users actively engaged on social media platforms worldwide.
• As at 2019, there were over four billion active internet users.
• Today there are over 1.6 billion websites and 500 million blogs on the internet.
• Email as a marketing channel has a staggering ROI of 4,400%.

• Marketing Funnel
• Content Marketing Tips
• Conclusion

Content Marketing Funnel (Stages)

Outreach:  This is the stage of attracting new customers. This will involve you reaching out to the public via your Facebook ads, landing page, videos and infographics. This is the type of content, which goes with this phase of the funnel.

Conversion: This is where you are involved in convincing customers to buy. You employ social media, informational blog posts, case studies and quizzes.

Closing: You make the sale here.  This will involve you making an email series, reviews and questionnaires.

Retention: You go all out meticulously to establish brand loyalty and returning customers. Your content must carry exclusive offers, white papers, emails, contests and surveys.

(Also Read: Top 10 Content Marketing Autopilot Tools)

26 Essential Content Marketing Tips for Every Business

• State the objective of your content

  What is the intention behind the content you are marketing? What do you hope to achieve? It is very important that you clearly define what your objective is. The reason is simply that the content you generate must reflect your objectives as a business entity.

• Define your target audience before you start to produce content

  Before you embark on any marketing or sales drive, it is vital that you first identify who your ideal customer is. This is the buyer persona and depicts the qualities as well as characteristics of those who would be interested in your offerings.

  This will help you avoid wasting resources like time, energy and money. It makes no sense creating a product without a customer, as demand must determine supply. The end in this “business context” must indeed justify the means.

• Go after specific keywords with your content

  Everything rises and falls on keywords in a manner of speaking. Your choice of keywords must be specific and targeted in order to attract the right kind of client.

  The reason why this is so is quite simple, keywords determine your performance in search engine ranking profiles. Your ranking propels you to the top in searches made and automatically attracts traffic to you, which is desirable.

  The strategy for making a profit is still universal and applicable today. Simply find a need and meet it in the best possible way.

  Therefore, the keywords you choose must be determined by, identification of what the client wants.

• Focus on solving a customer’s question with in-depth content

  This is one area in which many content marketers subtly overlook. You must make an effort to focus on addressing a customer’s questions no matter how complex. There are actually advantages inherent in doing that.

  First, prospects whose questions are thoroughly attended to will be satisfied, and that engages them further. This makes you an authentic authoritative source of information, which leads to their conversion into a paying client.

  In addition, if your content proffers answers to complex queries, it propels you to the top in search engine rankings. This, in turn, attracts massive traffic to your site and portrays you as a subject matter expert.

  The result is a massive promotion of your brand.

• Produce consistent content

  One of the strategies that enhance content marketing is the production of content that is consistent. Consistency in this context has to do with content that is relevant, fresh and trending.

  Customers often want to get as much information as can be gotten pertaining to products or services that stimulate their interest. In order to attain this, you must maintain the quality as well as the reliability of the information disseminated via your content.

  A good rule of thumb is to focus 70% of content matter on evergreen material and put 30% of the focus on posts that are trending.

  (Also Read: Top 10 Content Marketing Trends for 2020)

   

• Focus on the headlines

  Your headlines grant you a “foot-in-the-door” kind of opportunity. You must make a maximum impact within the short-term period a customer comes within your orbit.

  You must catch a prospective client’s attention and hold their attention. This is what makes your choice of headline very crucial.

• Make your content super actionable

  You must endeavor to make your content as actionable as possible. Studies show that people often do not take action on an issue. However, when they are compelled to do something, or encouraged they tend to do so.

  Ensure calls-to-actions feature regularly as part of your posts. In order for it to gain acceptability, you must unveil to them the benefits of content marketing that will accrue when they implement the steps you suggest.

• Use infographics

  The use of infographics is highly advantageous in your content marketing campaign. It helps you communicate complex data in a pictorial format for easy understanding.

  If part of your strategy is to capture and retain the customer’s attention, then infographics are the answer. It is both compelling, attractive and tends to be addictive. Another thing is that it has the capacity to circulate in a viral manner, and since it carries your logo, it gives greater brand awareness.

  (Also Read: Content Marketing Techniques When Creating Infographics)

• Include videos and images

  A cliché says that a picture is worth a thousand words. Customers come from all occupations and have different learning modes. Therefore, in order to capture their attention, it is vital your content has videos and images embedded.

  Clients who are particularly dominant in the visual and auditory quadrant will find content enhanced with video and images quite stimulating. Furthermore, such people are more likely to retain the information disseminated via your content. Consequently, such people are more likely to return and move from the status of just a prospect of being converted and retained as a full-fledged customer.

• Always create 100% original content

  Content is king so the saying goes. It is imperative you ensure you consistently deliver unique content. This is because it plays a huge role in determining how your website will perform in Google rankings.

  In addition, for you to do well in social media marketing (which is a given) the content you generate must be solid. It must be accurate, factual, verifiable and relevant to issues pertaining to the customers’ demands.

• Appeal to your audience’s emotions

  One thing you must know about and seek to address has to do with your customer’s emotional needs. The strategy is to capture the attention of your prospect, tap into their emotions and continue to engage them.

  You must understand how to use sales psychology and neuroscience to stimulate emotional responses necessary to achieve certain actions. This could be pain relief or solving a problem by buying your product, for example, a drug.

• Don’t be too content-centric

  One of the buzz words often bandied about in the industry is content-centric. However, there is a real danger of overkill with attendant unintended consequences.

  If you do not take care, you may actually end up disrupting the relationship-building process with your prospect/customer by doing certain things.

  The negatives include focusing on you and not the audience, being overly absorbed in making sales to the detriment of the customer, incorporating too much SEO methodology in your content and information overload directed at the audience.

• Monetize your content

  You can monetize your content in a number of ways. It all boils down to adopting a pragmatic strategy and drafting a plan, which you then implement.

  You can use calls to action to direct your audience to a free trial or take visitors to your products page, which depicts your offerings. You can sell advertising space using a pay per click (PPC) ads system.

  In addition, you can get sponsorship via an individual who pays for dedicated ad space on your website. Furthermore, you can create a high-value asset and set up an eCommerce shop to sell your product.

• Be mobile-friendly

  There are strategies involved in achieving this and it is critical for you to apply them to remain competitive.

  Ensure your site is responsive to give users the best browsing experience. Take care to optimize the speed of your site. According to Google, 53% of visitors to your site will abandon it if it takes more than 3 seconds for the page to open.

  Ensure your website loads faster by implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). You need to produce a site map to ensure the Google spider crawls through the site properly.

  Your titles and meta-descriptions should be properly optimized, so your site appears in search results. You should ensure your content has shorter more captivating headlines, should start with the most compelling content and should make use of more video content.

• Add social sharing buttons

  You must ensure that your posts have embedded within the social media sharing buttons. These buttons must be easy to use, as user-friendly as possible and must be eye-catching.

  Try to think up innovative ways of inviting people to click on your social share buttons. These could include an end-of-post call to action, which asks people to click on the buttons and share your content.

• Share your content on social media

  This is one of the best ways of extending your reach and spreading your business tentacles. A fact you must take into consideration is that billions of people frequent social media channels daily.

  Therefore, it will be wise of you to leverage the huge number of potential clients the platforms attract. Prospects will inevitably stumble across your business posts in due course. Therefore, you must be visibly present and active on social media.

• Collaborate with influencers

  The power of influencers in the social media space is far-reaching and impactful. These individuals by virtue of the larger than life status they have attained shape and drive public opinion.

  Therefore, collaborating with them is a step in the right direction. You must make an effort to adequately research an influencer to ascertain that his audience and/or fandom fits the persona your business is targeting.

  It is vital that their needs or demands align with your business objectives for seamless handshaking. Try as much as possible to leverage the influence of celebrities, authorities and outstanding achievers.

• Ensure your content reflects your brand’s voice

  Your brand’s voice reveals your company, your values, your vision and your mission all in one. Therefore, it is vital that any content you create must reflect your brand’s voice.

  The importance of ensuring your content aligns with your brand cannot be overemphasized.

  You must also take into consideration, the fact that the content you create will travel widely. This could be across numerous channels like social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest.

  In addition to that, online video platforms like Youtube and adverts via television, radio, and billboards will promote your content. Therefore, your content must be crafted to always showcase your brand at all times.

• Back up your arguments with data

  Few things are as convincing to a customer as a logical argument backed up with industry-relevant data. You must try as much as possible to put yourself in the client’s position and attempt to simulate his or her mindset.

  The customer before buying a product or service wants to make an informed decision.  What does he or she stand to gain by making that purchase? What are the cost savings involved?

  How does he or she get value for their money? Is there any way to determine the quality of the product or service he or she wants to buy?

  Providing data that is relevant, timely and addresses all these questions along with your argument undoubtedly wins the client over.

• Be bold and speak your mind (especially when others don’t dare)

  The dire need of the hour and the challenge of the times you will face, as a content marketer is standing out from the crowd. The deluge of posts and content churned out daily is virtually overwhelming.

  How can you be positively identified, from the numerous businesses out in the content marketing world who are doing exactly the same thing you are doing? This is even more difficult when you consider the fact almost everybody in the industry is saying the same thing.

  There is one way, and that is to harness the power of contrarian content marketing. This simply means channeling content that is contrary in nature to the mainstream, taking an unpopular stance against the majority prevailing opinion or flirting with controversy.

  The idea is simply to use reverse psychology to attract lots of attention. This translates to lots of traffic that should normally result in more conversions thereby leading to more sales.

• Accept that not all content HAS to tell a story

  Brand storytelling has proven to be an effective strategy for attracting and converting prospects into full-fledged clients. However, it may sometimes not serve the same purpose as a post that is simply down to earth.

  This is because adding value to your clientele is the final objective. If you can get to do that in a way that does not necessarily involve a lengthy narrative, then go for it. When the top marketing agencies work with a company, the goal is to establish the brand, which in turn, establishes the story of the business. Therefore, the content doesn’t need a long and elaborate story because it’s already embedded in the branding.

  The most important goal you should strive for should be getting qualitative results.

• Reuse your best headlines in PPC ads

  One of the most successful strategies you can employ in the field of content marketing is a PPC campaign. However, you can enhance its effects even further by injecting specific headlines into it.

  Simply modifying a onetime super successful headline and reusing it will most likely make a very favorable impression on prospects.

• Repurpose your content

  You must find creative ways of  ‘re-tasking” your content. This simply means finding a way around obvious limitations of time and energy. You have only 24 hours in a day and can only do so much within that period.

  Therefore, the efficient thing to do is to recycle your existing content. This will involve you doing some sort of a makeover on previous content in a bid to reach a new audience.

  In addition to this, you can distribute your repackaged content in another form and via another channel. This could involve converting a podcast to a blog post or converting a blog post to a YouTube video with both still referring to the same subject matter.

  If you do this, you will succeed in helping your clientele keep your business on the front burner.

• Build internal links

  Strategic internal links are search engine optimization power techniques harnessed for content marketing.

  All you are simply doing in internal linking is to connect a page on your website to a different page on the same website.

  Internal links help in website navigation, which is crucial for content marketing purposes. Therefore, you must create a lot of content to have linkable content in the first case.

• Evaluate the success of your content with data

  How do you know your content is achieving its purpose? How can you tell if your investment in time, energy and money is viable? Are you succeeding in your quest for traffic generation and is it translating into revenue and profits?

  The only way to know for sure is to harness the power of data. The use of analytics can accurately determine how your content performs. Data analytics will help you assess how well you are attaining your business goals.

  It is not enough for you to produce excellent content; you must be able to track and measure the results that follow appropriately. It is advisable to employ tools like Google Analytics for measuring traffic and Chartbeat for measuring attention metrics.

• Create an email newsletter

  You should unfailingly use this channel for your content marketing. This is because the return on investment (ROI) is totally off the charts. Besides that, email is low cost and direct. In your capacity as a content marketer, you can achieve a lot.

  Strategic planning, a consistent schedule, and good copywriting skills will definitely deliver stellar results.

(Download Whitepaper: 6 Tips for Maximizing Content Success in Business)

Final Thoughts

In summary, your actionable content marketing tips must have specific features namely:

1. It should focus on your specific audience
2. It must have merits, there must be something the customer stands to gain
3. It must bring confidence and meet expectations
4. It must meet the client’s needs, and solve problems
5. It must be in tandem with your marketing objectives
6. It must impart its message in a way and manner clearly understood

Other Useful Resources:

Why Technology Companies Should Have a Content Marketing Strategy

Best Practices for Choosing the Best Content Marketing Technology for Your Business

7 ways to execute B2B Technology within Content Marketing

Creating an Effective SEO Content Marketing Strategy

Why Technology Is Critical to Optimizing Your Content Marketing Strategy

4 Business Tips for Content Marketing in B2B Financial Services

5 Content Marketing Trends That Can Boost Your Business