Content Marketing Tips to Boost Your Online Presence



Content marketing is essential in today’s business landscape; it’s how modern brands communicate with their audiences. Yet, the real art and science of content marketing come not just from creating narratives your audiences want to read but also from shaping those narratives so they’re persuasive and drive some kind of action. In this super-comprehensive guide to content marketing, we’re going to walk through the key tips and tactics that can take your content marketing from “okay-ish” to “next level.” If you’re just starting with content marketing, these tips should give you a solid framework on which to build. If you’re already doing some form of content marketing, they’ll help you hone and refine your efforts.

Understanding the Fundamentals of Content Marketing

What Makes Content Marketing Essential for Your Brand

Content marketing is about much more than just promoting a brand. It’s about nurturing trust and developing a relationship with an audience that can lead to loyalty. Businesses can establish themselves as thought leaders in their industry through content marketing, which is not about them but rather about their audience and the problems that audience might need solved. Historically, businesses have “sold” in a way that essentially and effectively interrupted their audience’s life. Content marketing is about “not selling,” or at least not selling in the way most businesses have in the past. A part of the strategy this form of marketing adopts involves using the non-lifet interruptive medium of “content,” in whatever form that content might take.

Defining Clear and Measurable Goals for Your Content Strategy

A significant pitfall in content marketing is generating content without a specific goal. Each piece of content should have a clear and defined business reason for existing. While “more eyeballs” or “more traffic” sound good, they are merely starting points. Good goals are tied to good actions: email sign up, webinar attendance, product sales. They lead. A good way to think about good goals is to use the SMART criterion: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound.

Knowing and Understanding Your Audience

Developing Buyer Personas to Hone Your Messaging

To create content that strikes a chord, you first must know the whom of your communication. This means starting with detailed buyer personas that represent your ideal customers. These personas should be far more than just the inverse of your professional, “We shouldn’t do that” characters—something I see all too often in my clients’ buyer personas. Your personas should be the detailed, richly fleshed-out characters that any good fiction writer would create (you know, the kind most of us English majors don’t really care for, but we get it: it’s part of storytelling). And why shouldn’t we tell a story here? Knowing your audience, after all, is the first element of the classic writing adage: “Know your audience, know your purpose, know your message.”

Understanding the Buyer’s Journey

A balanced content strategy takes into account all levels of the buyer’s journey—awareness, consideration, and decision. At the awareness level, your audience seeks basic, problem-centric, informative content. In the consideration stage, they’re comparing potential solutions and might benefit from a guide that contrasts various options, or from a case study that demonstrates a past implementation of one of those options. At the decision level, content that sells the product (or, more often, the service) in question becomes most effective. Delivering the right message at the right time in the right context across these three levels is a pretty good bet for content marketing success.

Crafting High-Quality Content That Trends and Converts

Embracing Storytelling as a Content Foundation

Content marketing that really works often starts with storytelling. Telling a good story can bring your brand down to Earth and allow your audience to make an emotional connection with it. That is the essence of great content marketing—to get your audience to trust you. And what better way to achieve that than through a well-told tale? If you can narrate a story about a challenge your target market commonly faces or about a real-world scenario where your products or services made a significant difference, then you have a good chance of making your content not just read but also reckoned with.

Writing In-Depth, Actionable Content for Your Readers

Content that is long-form has become much more potent, especially when it is targeted, detailed, and directly addresses the audience’s needs. Still, even with a growing potency, long-form content is not a substitute for quality—every piece should include not just insights and recommendations, but actionable, research-backed intelligence that answers the audience’s frequently asked questions on the topic. One way to unsubscribe from the culture of the regurgitated list is to dig deeper into the kinds of queries your audience is asking. Long-form content that is unfailingly valuable will perform better, both in terms of search engine optimization and customer engagement.

Prioritizing Evergreen Content Topics

Content marketing that works has as its foundation evergreen content. This is the content that will still be of interest and use long after it is first published. When we think of this kind of content, we often think of “how-to” guides, explainer videos, or tutorials on topics that in our niches don’t change too much from year to year. This is the kind of content that can consistently bring traffic and also coherently touch base with potential customers from here to eternity.

Diversifying Content Formats

Besides plain text, put resources into various other types of content that will reach a broad swath of your audience. Some of that content should exist in infographic format, some in video format, and some in the form of webinars or podcasts. As with every other piece of content, all these visuals and audio formats need to convey clear, engaging messages and call readers, listeners, or viewers to action.

Optimizing and Promoting Your Content for Maximum Reach

Leveraging SEO Best Practices

Writing excellent content is only part of the equation; the other half is making it findable. To optimize content for SEO, target long-tail keywords, organize the content with headers that can easily be understood at a glance, and include meta titles and descriptions that are practically begging to be clicked on. Use Google Search Console to get a read on what’s working and what isn’t, in terms of how content is being discovered. Also, do some linking—both internal and external—to help build authority for the content and your site, and watch what happens to rankings and traffic.

Promoting Across Multiple Channels

A powerful strategy for promoting content uses several pathways to widen its influence. It enables you to push product more effectively than you could through a single stream. Amplifying your reach involves sharing blog posts much like you would any other social media content: with energy and enthusiasm. Start with your own social media channels—tell your employees to do the same. Then, share with the audience in as many ways as possible, using the tools at your disposal, even to the point of redundancy.

Measuring and Iterating on Success

Tracking Performance Metrics

Ensuring that your strategy keeps improving requires regular checks on the performance metrics. Tools such as Google Analytics, social media insights, and CRM software can be used for this purpose. They help you analyze parameters like engagement, conversion rates, dwell time, and bounce rates. With this data in hand, you can now perform a side-by-side comparison with your KPIs to divine the efficacy of your strategy. Is it working? If so, carry on because it’s working! If not, make the necessary adjustments and adjustments to see if it rebounds.

Enhancing Strategies Through Data-Driven Decisions

Your next steps are guided by data, regardless of whether the next steps involve revisiting topics that are not performing as well as expected, concentrating on formats that yield many conversions, or even segmenting the audience to make it more precise. Content that has been historically successful can be revisited and refreshed as a way of giving campaigns that seem to be lagging right now a boost and extending the lifecycle of the content.

Implementing Historical Optimization

Increasing the performance of older content to meet new SEO standards or current user interests is possible through updating. This can involve updating metadata, adding new statistics, and refreshing imagery or links.

Integrating Automation for Consistency and Efficiency

Simplifying Social Media with WoopSocial Maintaining an active presence on social media is crucial for promoting content, but you don’t have time to post constantly. WoopSocial is a tool that can help. This social media management platform lets you create, schedule, and publish posts on various social media channels so that they appear to be coming from you and your brand. In this way, WoopSocial helps you maintain an active presence and keep everything running smoothly, all while you devote your time to other important tasks and strategies.

The Road Ahead: Future of Content Marketing

Content marketing is changing; staying ahead of it demands adaptations to audience behavior and technological trends. Our audience now—contrary to the past—expects us to lead with new formats like virtual reality, for instance. And as we pivot toward those new formats, we must continually optimize for mobile. Investing in our VR, virtual reality, content strategy, and engine aside, a crucial part of “prepping for the next” in content marketing is still working with data and personalizing insights. If we cannot do those two things, we are not future-proof.