A recent survey by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI ) found that 86% of B2C businesses plan to spend more on content marketing in 2013. 54% of B2B businesses said they intend to do the same. CMI’s data backs up what many of us already know — content is king and growing in royal importance by the day.
Content marketing aims to accomplish an array of goals — creating awareness, generating traffic, driving sales and much more. No matter what goals you have defined for your business, it is imperative to come up with a strategy that will allow them to be realized. Now, five awesome tips you can use to hammer out your very own content marketing strategy.
1. Prioritize Proper Content Creation
2. Start Tracking Your Competitors
3. Do All the SEO Stuff
- Keyword research - What keywords are your ideal customers entering into their favorite search engine? What tools will you use to find out?
- Link structure - No matter what you’ve heard about SEO marching in a new direction, links are still an integral part of the process. A combination of quality inbound, outbound, and internal links will work wonders for your content marketing efforts.
- Social signals - It is unclear how big of an influence social signals have on SEO, but the overall consensus is that they do matter. In fact, some have gone as far to say that creating a presence on Google Plus can provide a huge boost for search visibility. Whether it’s tallying up +1 clicks, retweets or Facebook Likes, an increase in social engagement can’t hurt.
- Be Good - These days, a big part of thriving with SEO is knowing what not to do. Some things you definitely want to stay away from are keyword stuffing, duplicate content and producing low quality material that offers no real value to real people.
4. Find the Right Marketing Channels
5. Live By Analytics
- Email analytics - Track opens, clicks and bounces to gauge the impact of email campaigns.
- Web analytics - Measure unique visits, page views, and bounce rates to determine the overall appeal of your website.
- Video analytics - Monitor number of views, shares and traffic sources to access the engagement quality of your video content.
There you have it. Five tips to help you not only create, but fine-tune your content marketing strategy. Whether you include these specific pointers in your own arsenal or not, make sure you come up with something because going out there unarmed is a failure in the making.
