Content marketing best practices involve creating valuable and relevant content that engages and educates the target audience, utilizing a strategic approach to distribution and promotion, and measuring and analyzing the results to continually optimize performance.
Content marketing best practices are proven processes or techniques that have provided optimal results in the past and continue to provide for other marketers. When you adhere to the best practices, it saves time invested in implementing what works and what doesn’t. You significantly save your effort in the trial and error method spent in experimenting with all viable solutions and focusing on the right thing that works for you.
Content marketing is constantly evolving, and the content that you create must be up-to-date, resonate with your audience, and stay in compliance with search engine optimization guidelines, and Google’s algorithm updates. In this article, let’s look at some of the best practices to follow to deliver the best results.
Content Marketing Best Practices
It all starts and ends with your business. You might have a stellar service, product, or idea, but you must reach your audience in such a way that it impacts them. How else do you think people can come to know of your presence? It’s through content marketing.
1. Provide Content for the Digitally Savvy Consumers
After the COVID break-out, content consumption has increased due to people staying indoors and the need to stay abreast of the happenings. Not just that, there’s a complete phase shift in the way businesses are conducted.
Digitalization has paved the way for customers to easily access their needs. Businesses mark their digital presence by hosting a website and mentioning their products and services.
Customers get to know your business through blogs, landing pages, forums, FAQs, case studies, newsletters, email marketing, social media posts, press releases, ads, videos, and podcasts.
With the advent of smartphones, the dispersion and consumption of content have become a cakewalk. Consumer content consumption grew at a faster pace in 2022, fueled by new, compelling, and original content.
Your customers check your websites before buying from you. For a business, it’s very important to showcase what your business does, how they would benefit from your product or services, testimonials, reviews, installation page, significant features, and social media mentions.
According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2019, approximately 81% of Americans research products or services online before making a purchase.
As a marketer, you must make the best use of digital marketing for your business. Only when you optimize your website for your audience, boost traffic to your website thereby increasing sales and expanding your business.
2. Solve Your Audience’s Needs
Find out what your audience needs. Customers buy due to necessity. When you create products that solve their problems, you are obviously increasing your customer base.
Let’s use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs that describes the human motivation behind buying products. His theory states that people must first satisfy their basic fundamental needs to advance higher in social, emotional, and self-actualization.
Have you been in situations where the customer has asked you why they must try your service? What benefit, specifically, ROI would they get if they hire you for content marketing services?
Well, in such cases, you must explain to the customer how content marketing helps a business to get the needed visibility in the competitive market.
Not just that, but building brand awareness, lead generation, increased organic traffic, and getting backlinks. According to a survey, 91% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers consider content marketing an effective strategy for their organizations.
Maslow’s needs hierarchy framework helps you to answer basic questions, such as, “Why must my prospective customer buy my service?” and “What does a business need?” When you have answers to these questions, you can conveniently convince your customers to try your service.
3. Speak Your Audience’s Language To Connect with Them
“A common language bridges hearts, connecting minds.”
The attention span of readers is decreasing as the days pass. To connect with your audience, you need to grab them fast. If your business is targeting Gen Z, find out how they consume information and target your marketing efforts in such a way that you impact them.
Gen Z spends most of their time on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, while the older generations use Facebook. Focus on creating reels, short videos, informational byte-sized infographics, and creative visuals to engage them.
Establish a conversational tone to connect with them and avoid complex jargon, idioms, and phrases in your blogs. Introduce a new terminology with graphics, anecdotes, and examples to make it more engaging.
Provide authentic and engaging content as a value for what they have invested into your product or service. Develop a good content marketing strategy in line with your customer preferences that can satisfy the needs of your users, or customers.
Use tools to find out what your customers are searching for, and provide solutions in your blogs. Also, know your customer’s demographics by developing a buyer persona to create personalized marketing strategies.
4. Adapt Storytelling Framework
The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller — Steve Jobs.
Humans are wired to be empathetic. When you tell a story, it creates a bond between the storyteller and the reader or listener. It evokes emotions and kindles a sense of belonging.
That’s the reason why stories of the struggles and triumphs of an unknown person on YouTube receive the maximum views and likes.
That’s why businesses encourage their customers to share their testimonials and their experience. When your brand has helped a business to rise from ashes, you must record it, make a case study, and put it everywhere for people to see.
Write just like how you converse with someone. Use a hook in the beginning, to grab your audience’s attention, introduce a theme and stick to it throughout the content. Repeat it frequently throughout your blog or video naturally and seamlessly.
If everything’s going well, life would be boring. So, slowly introduce your story’s antagonist. Yeah, the antagonist is the problem that you are trying to solve. Then, obviously, you need to bring the protagonist – your solution. Talk about how it can change your audience’s lives.
What’s life without a little humor? Create a pun, a joke, or sarcasm to make it more interesting. But, here’s the catch. If you are unsure whether it would be relevant to your content and context, better not to use one.
And, close with a happy note giving your audience a taste of what your product or service is by offering a free trial, ebook downloads, or a tool. Re-iterate the main message and instill anticipation in your readers by arousing their curiosity to wait for more products or services from you.
5. Be Generous – Give Freely
When you are a startup or introduced a new tool, how would people know about it without you giving it to them? Offer a free trial, $1 trial, freemium account, or free downloads.
A new product must be tried by the users or experts to understand the actual working capabilities. That’s you can know the pros and cons and work on it to fix bugs if any.
Freebies give you a positive word-of-mouth advertisement. Many users may feel compelled to write reviews on the tool or service that you have introduced. Sharing reviews on social media gets viral which invites more users to try your products.
It builds a rapport with the clients, customers, and prospective buyers.
6. Create Customer-Centric Content
You need to understand the audience to develop customer-centric content. The key to creating an effective content marketing campaign is to attract the right audience and engage with them. Analyze and understand what the customer needs and wants.
Record your customer’s behaviors and keep track of it using tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar as your customers are not just scrolling but, they are searching for solutions. Provide authentic and engaging content as value for the time the audience has invested in your product or service. Develop a good content marketing strategy in line with your customer preferences that can satisfy the needs of your users, or customers.
7. Create a Content Calendar
Creating a content calendar for your site is a great way to lay out all of your content. It can help you strategize for the next six months to a year. These calendars can help you organize your time and prepare for upcoming events and deadlines.
A content calendar helps you schedule content and makes your content planning simpler by allowing you to stay on track. This helps prevent you from doubling up on topics, which have been published before. It also enables you to stick with the theme you’re trying to establish.
You can plan what type of content, such as blogs, videos, and podcasts, and what time they should be published by personalizing it. Some businesses skip the content calendar step, but this is a big mistake. You want to make sure you have a proper content schedule and that you don’t fall behind.
8. User-Generated Content Marketing
User-generated content is a vital part of any marketing strategy. Utilizing user-generated content marketing can give you credibility and benefits, such as brand advocacy, and can help you build an effective relationship with your customers. On the other hand, it provides you with better data insights and high-quality content from the hands of your customers, which you can utilize for creating strategically optimized marketing campaigns.
9. SEO-Optimized Content Marketing
Optimizing your content is essential to making your content rank in the SERP. This is achieved by ensuring that a web page’s content is optimized for search engines. It is necessary to write web content that appropriately contains keywords inclined to search intent.
The content should also be easy to read, updated regularly, and unique so that search engines can index it well. The more original content a site has, the more likely it will rank higher on search engines.
You can use tools, such as ahrefs that can help you perform extensive keyword research, such as Keyword Density (which depicts the difficulty of a particular query to rank) and Search Volume (which depicts the amount of content that exists for the particular keyword).
Optimizing your website with SEO can help you stay relevant when answering the queries of your users, and it also helps you to rank.
10. Leverage Your Data
Data is an asset for any organization that helps you understand your audience more clearly. Data can give you insight into customer behavior prediction based on targeted demographics and buying patterns and makes it significant that it is one of the most significant content marketing best practices.
This would enable you to create personalized marketing strategies to reduce your expenses on unwanted advertising on products that the audience may not be interested in.
Leveraging data can offer insight into identifying and tracking customer patterns and behavior to optimize content based on real-time interactions. Data enables you to make data-driven decisions, which is more effective and reliable to optimize your current performance.
11. Create Mobile-Friendly Content
With increasing mobile users, Creating mobile-friendly content is an essential requirement. According to a recent Statista report by today, there are 4.2 billion active mobile internet users. If you are not creating mobile-friendly content, you are missing out on immense opportunities.
Design your content concisely and in a touch-friendly way, which can make a good first impression on your prospects.
If you want to improve your brand awareness and target the right audience, tap into them and convert them into customers. You should provide them with quality content. For example, you can consider information from your reviews, feedback, comments, and customer forums, where they make common queries that need to be addressed.
12. Content Marketing Analytics
It would be best to utilize content marketing analytics to track and analyze your content performance. Content marketing analytics gives you insight into your past performances and analysis of what you need to improve to increase your ROI.
It gives you insight into your users, or customers, and what content they are interested in, which can help you curate better content for them. You need to set up a good content marketing framework before measuring your analytics. There are numerous content marketing analytical tools, like Google Analytics, which help you to monitor your performance.
Another content marketing best practice is to measure your KPIs and metrics that can help you reach your desired goals. Measuring your performance can help you identify the critical factors that help your competitors perform well, resolve the content gap, and improve the organic traffic, thereby increasing the SERP ranking.
You need to constantly measure your performance to make sure that you are traveling on the right path and ensure that your marketing efforts are not being watered down.
13. Social Media Marketing
Utilize social media tools, such as Buffer, enabling you to publish on all social media platforms at once. Social media marketing gives you the opportunity to create an online community that can promote and improve conversions, which is very significant particularly if you are a B2C organization.
Social media also gives you the opportunity to promote your content considering a particular demographic. This is where leveraging data, which we discussed above, can help you.
For effective content marketing, should utilize all social media channels. When you do this, you can also reach a broader audience base and get access to more data but make sure you customize the content based on the specific platform you use.
Closing Thoughts
Content marketing is everywhere in the digital world. No wonder it delivers results. It helps you stand out from the competition, increases your brand awareness, and drives traffic to your website. Utilizing content marketing is not the end game but leveraging it strategically is crucial.
We hope you use these content marketing best practices and make your brand memorable for Google and your customers. For more exciting information and updates on content marketing, check out our recent blogs.
