There is no such thing as a silver bullet in content marketing. Just as there isn’t a universally best approach to fat loss, you could be hard-pressed to seek out one content marketing strategy that works for each business.
Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean your efforts are futile. Removed from it. For 85% of companies that use it, content marketing performs from moderately to exceedingly well. A part of that success comes from understanding and following the industry’s best practices.
Now, before we dive into best practices for 2023, let’s quickly run through foundational content marketing principles it’s essential follow whatever the 12 months in your calendar.
The Core Principles of Content Marketing
Even in the event you follow best practices discussed later within the article, your content marketing strategies are sure to crumble without good foundations.
Understand Your Goal Audience
Behind every successful marketing campaign there’s a marketer that rigorously analyzed their target market. The exceptions are mostly blind luck and never something you must bet on.
Having an intimate knowledge of you target market helps you:
- give attention to the best content distribution channels
- adjust style and tone of voice to create greater emotional connection
- create content that helps solve actual problems your target market has
- zero in on customers pain points and increase conversions rates
Moreover, it’s essential consider that your target market aren’t just the those that are using your product or services. The pool is commonly much wider, forcing you to also goal individuals who your customers take advice from (influencers), in addition to the people they should get approval from (decision makers).
Set Realistic Goals and Plan of Motion
The identical research mentioned within the intro states that 73% of B2B marketers have a marketing strategy, with 40% having the strategy written down.
I’d argue that this research actually shows how only 40% of marketers have a marketing strategy. Because if it just isn’t written down, there’s little accountability, and it is mostly too complex to simply sit in a single person’s head.
Defining realistic marketing goals and metrics is difficult. When you find yourself doing it for the primary time, you’re going to miss together with your estimates. Probably by quite a bit.
My advice is to get down and dirty.
First, watch who you might be comparing yourself with. Your marketing budget is prone to be much smaller than top dogs in your area of interest. As an alternative of picking a fight with them right off the bat, aim to surpass corporations which can be only one or two levels above your weight category.
Secondly, you’ll want to outline the steps it’s essential take to succeed in your goals. Increasing organic traffic by 50% in 12 months is a superb goal. Nevertheless, don’t stop there. Break it down. Define what number of content pieces it’s essential publish and what number of backlinks do it’s essential construct to get there.
Do this for your entire goals and you’ll already be a step ahead of most content marketers.
Master the Basics
I like to think about content marketing as using content to construct trust and awareness and generate traffic, leads, and customers. Often in that order.
While you take a look at it that way, they only technique to achieve success at it’s to know the fundamentals of:
- Content planning (target market research, keyword research)
- Content production (choosing the best content type, consistently producing well-structured content with actionable advice)
- Content optimization (on-page search engine marketing)
- Content promotion and distribution (off-page search engine optimization, PPC, influencer outreach, social media marketing)
This can be a tall task for any business that isn’t sufficiently big to establish an in-house marketing team. Nevertheless, even in the event you outsource it, it pays to know the fundamentals to be certain that the agency you might be working with is spending your money correctly.
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Content Marketing Best Practices in 2023
With firmly established foundations, it’s time to explore what are the most effective content marketing practices it’s essential start implementing in your online business in 2023.
1. Create Keyword-Based Content Strategies
In personal experience, one of the common mistakes businesses make just isn’t having a transparent, keyword-based content strategy. They think that just creating quality content is enough. Unfortunately, this just isn’t the case of “in the event you construct it, they’ll come”.
If you would like to grow by converting organic traffic into leads and customers, it’s essential have a content strategy based on in-depth keyword research.
We have now a number of clients in industrial B2B niches and even there we’re seeing competition seriously ramping up. Just throwing content on the wall and hoping something sticks rarely worked to date, and is certainly not the technique to go in 2023.
2. Find Ways to Provide Additional Value with Your Content
Increasingly brands are understanding the worth of quality content. If you would like to compete for the highest spots in SERPs for difficult keywords, look for brand new ways to offer additional value by making your content more convenient to devour and easier to use.
That may mean loads of various things in practice:
- Ensuring that long form pieces are logically structured and are available with a simple to make use of content table.
- That broad and general advice gives place to actionable suggestions and relevant real-life examples.
- Supporting complex concepts with custom animations or (info)graphics that include steps, diagrams, and other visual representations that increase the understanding of the subject.
- Reaching out to experts in the sphere and sharing their thoughts on specific issues.
- Adding polls, quizzes, and calculators to make content more interactive.
This just isn’t a definite list, but it surely ought to be enough to get your creative juices flowing.
3. Be Consistent
Doing quality content marketing is quite a bit like trying to realize a fitness goal. The important thing ingredient is consistency.
It’s best to:
- produce and publish content consistently
- have a minimum level of quality every content piece should satisfy before it goes live
- try to maintain a consistent style and tone of voice across all channels
- have a set of visual brand guidelines to create a recognizable visual style
If you happen to are only starting out, don’t be afraid to check things out. It would take some time until you discover your brand voice. While you try this, create your brand style guide – and keep on with it!
4. Construct What You Can, Outsource What You Can’t
Scaling up content production with none drop in quality is tough. If you happen to would not have a dedicated marketing department, I’d recommend turning to a content marketing agency for help.
Now, that doesn’t mean you must abdicate your entire responsibility to an agency. Nor does it mean that you must give them the entire reins.
For instance, we work with a number of businesses which have excellent content writers with in-depth knowledge of the topic area. On this case, we take the role of an editor – prepare content briefs, review outlines, add custom graphics, and ensure that the content follows best on-page search engine optimization practices.
In other words, those businesses use us to plug holes when it comes to their marketing skills and knowledge.
One more reason to remain involved to a point is to ensure that the content follows your brand tone and voice and really connects together with your brand, in addition to to coordinate lead generation and other promotional activities you is likely to be doing in parallel.
5) Leverage Your Analytics
As increasingly businesses compete for customer’s attention, only those with a strategic approach to content marketing are going to see a fat ROI.
Recently, we talked with a semi-known brand in the inside design area of interest. They’ve over 500k monthly organic traffic but fairly low conversion rates as most of that traffic is generated by awareness phase-level content.
They desired to spend most of their budget on constructing links to pages which can be already performing well. While that may probably work okay, the more cost effective idea was to separate that budget in 3 parts.
The primary part could be used to proceed boosting pages which can be already generating some leads. The second part could be used to extend overall conversion rates on the location.
Most interestingly, the third a part of the budget could be used to spice up pages which have the most effective conversion rates when it comes to percentages, but currently generate a really small amount of leads because they’re rating poorly and don’t get loads of traffic – in other words, potential gems.
Source: Scoop.it
The important thing takeaway from this story is that creating such a concrete and cost-effective strategy was only possible since the client meticulously tracked the performance (traffic,conversion to guide, conversion to paying customer…) of all of his pages.
6) Be Transparent and Authentic
9 out of 10 consumers say that authenticity is significant when deciding what brands they like and support.
In an age where every brand message is designed to sell something and where every social media post is meticulously planned, persons are sick of that uncomfortable feeling of being manipulated and told what to think. They crave transparency and authenticity.
It’s certainly one of the explanations behind the massive success of Joe Rogan’s podcasts.
So, if there are causes you would like to support and speak about, find those you actually care about. Be honest about your product and repair, and what you’ll be able to offer.
Last but not least, when the context allows it, attempt to have some fun with the content you’re creating. Do your part to make the Web a greater place.
Trust the Process
It just isn’t easy to measure the success of your overall content marketing efforts, especially as VPNs, GDPR, and other tools and laws reduce your tracking capabilities.
On top of that, content marketing campaigns with a modest budget can take 6+ months of consistent work to indicate provable results.
Putting in earnest work for a number of months and never seeing results can quickly develop into discouraging. You may even be tempted to pivot and make significant changes. Think twice before doing that.
If you happen to are following industry best practices and have polished internal processes that may catch and eliminate quality issues, it’s time to exercise patience and put some trust in the method.
