Jay LeonardAre you currently reaching your content marketing objectives? Now is the time to revise and refine your content marketing strategy. Content creation and marketing are more critical than ever, and their influence is primed to rise even higher. Tellingly, 93% of B2B marketers 
are now engaged in content marketing, and 82% of businesses plan to increase spending on content marketing in 2014. Success in content marketing, including increased reach and high rates of website traffic and lead generation, requires relevant, information-rich, captivating and highly shareable content. Excellent content creation calls for commitment, creativity, real-time industry knowledge and thought leadership. Now, let us discuss some changes you can make to revamp your content strategy.
Content Marketing Tweaks
1. Consistent Publication
Not having a consistent blogging schedule can cause decreases in readership, subscriptions and website traffic. Blogging often is best, as the more often a company blogs, the more its rates of website traffic and lead generation will increase. According to HubSpot, companies that update their blog content at least 20 times per month generate over five times more traffic than those that update less than four times per month. To increase quantity, while preserving quality, you need to implement an editorial calendar. The calendar can help you consistently deliver high-quality content on schedule. The rewards for publishing valuable, information-rich and captivating blog content on a frequent, consistent basis are enhanced SEO, higher website traffic, and more lead generation and conversion.
2. Enticing Titles
Selecting enticing titles for your blog posts is vital, since it can lead to increased readership, enhanced SEO and social reach. You want your content to appear “highly clickable”—prompting prospects to view your must-read content. Although keywords are still relevant, resist the urge to jam-pack your titles with keywords, if it would make them too long and awkward-sounding. Great content titles are clear, concise, highly relevant, actionable, authoritative and intriguing. The more clickable your titles, the more your content will be read and shared on social media—further boosting your reach and lead generation and conversion.
3. Social Sharing and Content Promotion
You need a strategy for sharing and promoting your content. Without one, you risk missing out on a valuable opportunity to reach an engaged and captive social audience. Syndicate your content on websites like Business 2 Community and Social Media Today; share your content on all the major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest.
Leverage your content with your network of industry contacts. Identify industry thought leaders, and start communicating with them. Comment and ask questions across all your channels, and include links to your content. A major value of your company blog is its shareable nature, and the ability for your audience to share your content for you. To encourage this, be sure you have social sharing buttons embedded on your blog. Treat all your content marketing as a communication channel with your target audience. Always respond to comments and questions posted to your content in a quick and friendly manner. If you wait too long, prospects could lose interest and move onto a competitor. Take your audience seriously, and respect your business prospects.
4. Content Variety
Variety is crucial to an effective content strategy. To keep your readership engaged, keep things fresh by covering a wide variety of valuable, relevant topics. Consider varying your content types as well. Blog posts are not the only option; try adding infographics, webinars and SlideShare presentations to your blog content.
Aim to consistently create content that is so valuable, captivating and information-rich that it demands to be read—triggering high rates of social sharing and dramatically amplifying your lead generation and conversion. May this year bring you a new level of content marketing and business success.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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Apologies, but I’m going to have to vociferously take issue with every single point here. In the words of the ‘Dude’ meme, you’re not wrong…
1 – Blogging for blogging’s sake is waste of time and resources. ’20 times a month’ is a figure based on old rss publishing stats, and does not take into account the needs of developing audiences with new content. The sad truth is that, sometimes, there isn’t that much to write about that’s relevant for your audience. Avinash Kaushik and Matt Cutts blog about twice a month, Jon Loomis, whenever he learns something awesome about Facebook. Their readership figures are HUGE. Also there’s the issue of not clogging up the interwebs with the same tired material. We’re not Conedy Central, and our content is not ‘Friends’.
2 – You have a point, but it’s horrifically obvious. You could replace this section with ‘be relevant.’
3 – Again, pretty obvious. Your employees, partners and clients are your greatest content advocates, and most likely your immediate audience. What you REALLY need are solid audience analytics, and someone to translate and create an action plan off the back of that.
4 – That’s not necessarily true. If your audience are engaging with just blog posts, then you shouldn’t break your back trying to make new materials. Testing, figures and analytics are what’s important here. Understanding your audience, their engagement times and points, and their needs are key to developing your content programming.
This isn’t a personal attack, but this is exactly the same mTerial that people were talking about ad Social Media Week, et al, two years ago. We have better practices and strategies that we should be talking about, and helping our industry move forward, rather than recycling the same messages again and again.