Top 6 Tips to Boost Your Content Marketing Strategy for Your Business

“Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left”—Seth Godin.

Reread these lines every time you think of sending mass advertisements to customers who expect stories and meaningful information from your business. 

It’s the content that will rule the digital landscape – making content marketing quintessential for businesses looking to push their online visibility. 

Today, content marketing is not just about creating and distributing content. It’s a strategic approach to improving online reputation, growing brand advocates, and building a loyal community.

With 71% of B2B customers reviewing a blog during their buyer’s journey, a solid content marketing strategy will take your business miles in no time. 

Whether you’re just starting to implement your content marketing strategy and considering using a professional firm like Merritt Group to help you, or you are a veteran with a strong content marketing strategy, your business can passively reach the target audience, answer their questions, and convert leads into sales.

Top 6 Tips to Boost Your Content Marketing Strategy for Your Business

Follows these six actionable tips to make the most of your business’s online presence.

1. Give importance to videos

For a long time, we have heard ‘Content is King’. Even though these lines still ring true, what you may not know is that videos are the emperor! Look around you, and you will see video content taking the prime spot. 

With YouTube becoming a data avalanche, and the second largest search engine, your customers search for videos for every small thing. Whether it’s explainer videos or trailers and previews, customers turn to videos. This means you cannot take video content marketing for granted. 

Another important aspect of using video is improving SEO using transcriptions or subtitles. 

But, how to convert video to text?

Using different transcription software, you can add transcripts below every video to enhance your videos’ searchability. Incorporate your keywords to make it search-friendly. Furthermore, when you include transcripts below every video, you successfully cater to people with hearing impairment and those with a slow internet connection. 

Benefits of using videos

• Encourages social shares
• Boost conversion rates
• Builds credibility and trust
• Enhances SERP ranking

Example:

https://youtu.be/JhNVb7Gp0MQ

In the above video, notice how Squarespace nails the storytelling task with help from Oscar-winning actor Jeff Bridges. The video ends with a CTA urging viewers to take the desired action. 

That’s how you should use videos to boost your business.

Whether you’ve embraced it or not, video marketing is here to stay – leverage all social media platforms to stay on top of the minds of your customers.

Interesting fact: According to a Cisco report, 80% of all internet traffic will be video by 2021, which means making video a part of your content strategy could be a game-changer for your online business. 

2. Develop pillar content

As rightly said by Lee Odden, “Content is the reason search began in the first place.” That’s why you should focus on creating pillar content. 

Pillar content is content providing a complete answer to a question a user may be searching. Apart from providing insightful information to a reader, pillar content ranks high on search engines. Such a content marketing strategy primarily focuses on topics instead of keywords. 

You create valuable content around one particular theme or pillar. 

Pillar content is also a foundation for smaller content pieces like blogs, social media posts, and infographics.

Benefits of pillar pages

• Provides better Google ranking
• Increases engagement
• Longer session durations
• Earns more backlinks

With Google changing its algorithm frequently, comprehensive pillar pages appeal to search engine algorithms and provide authoritative information to the readers. 

Example: Moz creates a pillar page that is rich with information. 

Interesting fact: With the average blog post length being 1,447 words, pillar pages are usually above 2,000 words. 

3. Pay attention to content formatting.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is one of the most cost-effective techniques (except email marketing) to increase conversions. You may spend hours researching, writing, and promoting your content. But, if you offer your readers blocks of content, they are likely to turn away. 

That’s why you need to master content formatting. 

You can make a stunning first impression with your blog formatting. The digital customer loves to scan content, and you can make your content scannable by using proper formatting. 

Make an impressive video to impress the audience. Tell a story through the video about how you value your customers, and you have quality products. Optimize the videos and add the right keyword that is used by the audience. On top of that, you can also try adding natural-sounding voiceovers using a text to voice generator, as it makes your video more engaging.

From using bullet points, lists, and subheadings to creating content with an inverted triangle in mind, formatting your content increases readability. You can weave your content in blockquotes to emphasize a unique idea or add images to give meaning to your words. 

Benefits of formatting content

• Increases readability
• Ranks higher in search engines
• Help emphasize important points
• Increases conversion rates

Example: Notice how Readdive uses headers, links, bullets, and images to increase readability. 

Interesting fact: 

H1 and H2 header tags improve readability and help your blog rank better on SERPs.

4. Perform a content audit

Are you familiar with the Pareto Principle?

“80% of your consequences come from 20% of your causes”. For content marketing, you can tweak it as “80% of your website traffic comes from 20% of your content.”

That’s why you need to perform a content audit to understand which 20% of your content is bringing customers to your website. 

An audit is a process in which you organize and analyze all content you have produced to date. Based on the performance, you can either delete, update, redirect, or consolidate the piece. It helps you chalk out a strategy for keeping only high-performing content on your website. 

A content audit will bring a paradigm shift in your governance strategy and help you uncover the truth about your content marketing efforts. 

As a business, you cannot afford to overlook the content audit.

Benefits of a content audit

• Identifies content repurposing opportunities
• Discovers content gaps
• Evaluates the quality of content
• Improves information on your website

Interesting fact: With 60% of B2B content sites unused, a content audit could help you create content that resonates with your customers. 

5. Use compelling and attractive visuals

Since your childhood, you may be hearing the phrase that a picture is worth a thousand words. 

This saying holds even in the marketing world, where businesses try hard to win a customer’s attention. 

Breaking up large blocks of text with compelling visuals increases the readability and shareability of your content. From using infographics and diagrams to GIFs, screenshots, and memes – visuals are a go-getter and help increase customer engagement.

According to research, the human brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text, making visuals a must-have in all your content.

In short, for engaging customers and boosting your business, words alone are not enough. You need to include a variety of visuals in your content to make it stand-out. 

Benefits of using compelling and attractive visuals

• Enhances brand recognition
• Increases web traffic
• Enhances customer engagement
• Improves conversion rates

Interesting fact:  According to eye-tracking studies, readers pay more attention to content with images, and they spend additional time seeing images than reading the text. 

6. Repurpose your popular content

With millions of blogs being published daily, getting your content noticed in this clutter is an uphill battle. Coming up with new and fresh ideas isn’t always possible and can prove overwhelming. 

That’s why you should repurpose your popular content. You can reuse the content in a different format to expand your reach. It’s a great way to save time without upsetting Google’s search 

algorithm. 

As Google prefers dynamic and fresh content, repurposing helps you keep the information updated, thereby ranking higher on SERPs.        

Focus on content that has previously received maximum engagement and repurpose it to create a SlideShare presentation, infographics, social media post, content for Quora, and email series. 

Benefits of repurposing content

• Expands your reach
• Connects you with a new audience
• Increase online presence
• Reduces content creation time
• Helps in cross-promoting content

Example: ProBlogger converted their blog series ’31 Days to Build a better Blog’ into an ebook. Even today, the book is one of the most used online courses for blogging. That’s the power of repurposing content. 

Interesting fact: By simply updating their old post, Backlinko saw a whopping 118.91% increase in their organic traffic to that page. 

Conclusion

Content marketing success mantra 2021: Best practices for content marketing keep evolving. If you don’t want to fall prey to digital Darwinism, your business should be open to changes. 

When creating your content marketing strategy, you need to strike the right balance between user satisfaction, content creation, and conversion. You can always try and test different strategies, but the six tips mentioned above are paramount for accomplishing your business goals. 

Businesses that focus on their content marketing strategy are the ones that make a difference in their customer’s life. While it’s easy to create content, it’s creating quality content that differentiates success and failure. 

By implementing the right set of content marketing strategies, you can effortlessly raise your business’s reputation and searchability. Use these actionable content marketing strategies to reach your target audience and grow your business in the coming years. 

Which content marketing strategy are you using? Do tell us in the comments section.