If your business is online, you need a content marketing strategy.

Why? As well as being useful for SEO, content marketing helps you to make that all-important connection with your customers, building trust and loyalty.

However, without a strategy, your efforts are in vain. Here are 4 super easy ways to improve your content marketing strategy.

1: Launch a Podcast

A podcast might not be the first thing you think of when you think of content marketing, but they’re growing in popularity.

Picture it: It’s 8 am, your customer is heading out on the morning commute, and they need something to pass the time. Might as well do some learning, right? Podcasts offer insightful information to the consumer, and they engage and entertain.

Ken Greene of Engineer of Finance wasn’t sure that he should launch a podcast, but it has enabled him to grow his business substantially. With prospective clients reaching out to him from across the country, he says that it “might be one of the best things I’ve done marketing-wise.”

Here are some things to think about when launching your podcast:

  1. Pick the right topic that’s suitable for your audience
  2. Pick a relevant name
  3. Decide on a length. A podcast episode doesn’t need to be too long. Neil Patel’s Marketing School lasts just 5 minutes each time.
  4. Decide on a style. Will your podcasts be centered around interviews? Will you have a co-host?

2: Launch an Email Marketing Campaign

There are a wrong way and a right way to do email marketing. But firstly, why even bother with it?

Email should be essential to your content marketing efforts because it’s still one of the best – if not the best – ways of keeping in touch with your customers. When you gather your customers together in one place, you don’t need to keep spending your valuable resources on finding new ones. They’re right there.

All you’ve got to do is keep them happy with a robust email marketing campaign.

Here are some email campaign launch tips:

  1. Offer plenty of value; this means that you can’t continually sell to readers in every email. Sell some of the time, but make sure that the bulk of your emails are focused on building a genuine relationship with your subscribers. Educate, inform and entertain them.
  2. Don’t email your customers every day. The trick is emailing your customers often enough to make sure that you stay at the front of their minds, but not so often that you annoy them — once a week or twice a month should do it.
  3. Nail the subject line. An email marketing campaign will be ineffective if your open rate is low. To get that open rate up, you need a solid subject line all the time. Check this article for some cool email headline tips.

3: Create Stronger Content

It might sound obvious, but it’s worth pointing out that content creation is key to the success of your content marketing strategy – and it’s also something that causes many of us to struggle.

To create better content that your audience responds positively to, you first of all need to understand who they are and what their persona is. To help you get to know your audience better, use Google Analytics.

Secondly, once you know who your audience is you then need some fresh topic ideas; this part might cause some internal grappling. If you’re in a genuine creative slump, I recommend the B.U.I.L.D model – it could help perk you up.

Other than that, Answer the Public is a fantastic free tool that helps you come up with new content ideas. Alternatively, you could ask your followers on social media what problems they’ve been facing lately and build content around their answers.

4: Go Live With Video

Going live with video can be pretty scary if you’ve never done it before. But Facebook Live has revolutionized content marketing, and it should play a key role in your strategy from now on.

Video marketing is a big deal, but live video is even more significant. By 2018, almost 2 billion people had watched Facebook Live broadcasts, and the amount of live videos we consume each month is growing all the time.

What’s the appeal of live videos? A live video gives you a chance to catch your audience in real time, and you can use them to field questions and demonstrate your expertise in your niche.

Facebook Live also lets you show your audience that you’re a genuine brand, and it establishes a sort of realness between you and your audience.

That said, it’s important to take note that more and more of us expect a certain level of video quality from live streams in 2018. To make sure your video looks good and doesn’t turn people off because it’s grainy, use speedtest.net to check your upload speed.

Conclusion

These are four easy ways to improve your content marketing strategy. Podcasts are a great way to grab the attention of people who are too busy to read your blogs but do not discount the likes of email marketing. Meanwhile, make sure to go live – don’t worry, it’s not that scary.