The world of content marketing is changing. And, as a marketer, one has to be ready for these changes. Ready to adopt them, ready to adapt, and ready to take advantage of them in order to stand out from the rest.
Of course, the best way to dominate this marketing game is to be one or two steps ahead of your rivals. That’s why you should learn as much as you can about popular and emerging trends that could reshape your next content marketing strategy.
In order to have the absolutely best blog posts and be different from the rest, take a look below at some proven strategies recommended by a number of experienced marketers.
Have a plan
- What is your plan?
- What do you want to achieve with this strategy?
- Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing strategy?
You need to know your goals before you begin planning. That way, you will have an easier time determining what is best for your strategy.
Run a content audit if you must, conduct customer persona research. These are all important and they will let you know what your strategy needs to look like and what you will need to do to make it happen.
Remember, all of this has to be well-aligned with your business plan. If you don’t have a well-defined business plan, you won’t be able to devise a good content marketing plan.
To make things easier, if you still don’t have one, look for a good content marketing plan or simple business plan template online. That will help you immensely and make the whole process significantly faster.
Competitor analysis
Competitor analysis leads to better marketing results. If you are still not doing it, you are lagging behind.
The results you receive about your rivals need to be integrated into your content marketing strategy. That way, you can significantly improve many facets of your marketing, including conversion rates.
Fortunately, there are tools that can help you with ‘espionage’ and monitoring. By using the right automated tools, you can easily get to know what your competitors are up to in terms of their number of quality links and where they are getting backlinks.
Swipe This! How to Create a Killer Copywriting Arsenal Using the Competition
Of course, the first thing you need to do is to figure out who your strongest competitors are. With a quick Google search, you should be able to get an answer to that question. Just type in your main keyword and look at the results.
The websites that show up on top are your biggest rivals. To determine further details about your competition, you might need some help from software like SEMrush or Ahrefs.
Once you do that, you should analyze their links. Click on any of those competing web pages and you will find the number of links it has earned.
This analysis will provide you with important insights that you will, no doubt, benefit from when crafting your content.
Guest blogging
When you publish quality content on an external site, you are giving yourself a chance to generate high-value results while gaining traffic, and ultimately, acquiring new leads.
If you’re still on the fence about guest blogging, you should know more about some benefits that come with it. First of all, when you start writing for external websites, you are boosting traffic to your own website.
Of course, organic and social media traffic should be a large focus in your audience acquisition plan but this kind of (referral) traffic is important too.
On top of that, writing for others will improve your SEO. Build a solid library of relevant backlinks to targeted keywords and you will, no doubt, see an improvement in rankings.
Finally, once people start reading your posts on other websites, they will realize that you are an expert. Once that happens, you will become an authority, your brand will be seen as a brand that can be trusted.
Just be patient with your cold email outreach for guest blogging. Be respectful and polite, stack up on patience, and your ideas will go through with the right people.
And, if you want to make your life easier when sending these emails, you could find a good Outlook widget to help you with time-efficiency and automation.
Remarketing
Remarketing is a method where you show ads to people who have already visited your website while they browse the internet.
Marketers have been investing a lot of effort into remarketing because of its efficiency. To be precise, the more frequently a potential consumer sees an ad, the more likely they are to convert.
It is possible that you might experience a drop in your click-through rate, but remarketing makes conversion twice as likely for people that click on your ad after seeing it.
Starting remarketing isn’t so difficult. It doesn’t require a great number of resources and it’s not so complex.
You need your existing customer data to plug into platforms that are at your disposal. You could make use of Google Ad Remarketing, AdRoll, and Facebook Ads.
Just keep in mind that you should segment your audience accordingly so that you don’t end up retargeting everyone with the same promotion.
Content distribution
Investing in content distribution is a must nowadays. And it’s simple to figure out why. If no one sees your articles, there is no point in writing them.
That’s where content distribution comes in. It should be a core aspect of your content marketing strategy.
Content distribution channels include owned media channels, such as your company’s website, emails, newsletters, blogs, and social media pages. You can also pay to get your content distributed, you can use social media ads and Google Ads, but you can also have your content distributed by third parties like magazines and guest blog posts.
Remember to be creative about getting your content in front of the right audiences. Passive distribution doesn’t work well, and if you solely rely on it, all your hard work will go to waste.
Final thoughts
Follow these strategies and you will gain an advantage over your rivals. Don’t think that your rivals are not monitoring your brand. Because they are.
Just be patient and consistent with writing. No marketing strategy is a plug-and-play thing. Success doesn’t happen overnight.
There is also one more thing you should know. Once you start making a name for yourself, content marketing becomes easier. So, like with everything else in life, the beginning is the most difficult part.
Finally, once your business starts growing, and becomes a valuable and strong brand in the industry, you will even be able to sell your website easily.
You never know if one day you will decide to make a career switch, just take a breather and relax for some time, or simply retire and enjoy.
I believe the old adage hold true, If you do it, do it right. Now there is a clutter of all kinds of content and to stand out you need to be unique, insightful, experienced and most of all helpful. You need to offer your readers content that they like and also in the manner that respects their time (and click/like/comment) by being useful and easy do read through.