Guest Author
You’re looking for content marketing tips because you’re either:
- A seasoned marketer who’s dealing with content marketing challenges you initially thought you could handle.
- Tackling a daunting content marketing project for the first time.
Marketing projects vary in goals, processes, timelines, and budgets. But there’s one common thread—you need to develop an effective content marketing strategy to help you accomplish business goals and address your audience’s needs.
Whether you’re starting a blog from scratch or you’re about to write case studies, keep reading to learn how you can achieve content marketing success and address and solve the biggest challenges plaguing both new and seasoned content marketers.
Get the guide for creating a social media marketing plan for your business.
Challenge #1: Create High-Quality Content Without Sacrificing Volume and Consistency
Creating long-form content such as microblogs, videos, and infographics is easy.
The hard part is making sure that each piece of content your produce meets your quality standards while having a constant supply of fresh, relevant, and hot-off-the-press information.
Let’s see how you can overcome this content marketing challenge!
How to Tackle This Content Marketing Challenge
Top 5 important content marketing tips for maintaining a consistent posting schedule:
- Assess your current resources
- Build a solid, effective content team
- Have a content backlog
- Create an editorial calendar
- Research and monitor your content strategy
1. Assess Your Current Resources
The first content marketing tip we will discuss today is: delivering quality content with consistency while fully understanding your resources and capabilities.
Ask yourself and your team these questions before writing a content strategy:
- How much time can your team dedicate to creating, reviewing, and distributing content?
- What is your budget?
- Are you going to hire content creators full-time, or will you rely on freelancers? Or maybe a mix of both?
- What type of content are you going to produce?
- Are you going to create content for every stage of the lead generation funnel every month, or are you going to focus on one stage per quarter?
2. Build a Solid, Effective Content Team
Take the time to find the content creators who are committed to creating content for your target market.
| Bonus trait to look out for: Assess for diligence and grit aside from creativity and stellar content creation skills. You want someone who will stick to deadlines. |
It also helps to work with multiple content creators on a project in case one of them has to go on emergency leave.
Some brands prefer to work with content agencies as a way to keep their content flowing. However, it’s worth noting that hiring an agency as a way to outsource shouldn’t be your goal.
Jimmy Daly, CEO of Superpath, shares this pro tip if you prefer to hire an agency to help with your content efforts:
“If you decide to go this route, be prepared to commit time in collaborating with the agency because they will need a lot of context about your goals, brand, and details about your business.”
3. Have a Content Backlog
The reality is you can’t keep content constantly flowing on your social media marketing channels, YouTube channel, or company blog unless you have a content backlog.
Get ready to prepare for at least a month’s worth of content. Whether we’re talking about videos or blog posts, the same principles apply.
It doesn’t have to be new content. For example, you can repurpose content from your blog and promote some interesting snippets on your social media accounts.
SocialBee can help you with this aspect. Import your RSS Feed to SocialBee and the platform will generate social media posts automatically for your new articles.
Create a special content category for your blog posts and share them with your social media audience.
Start your 14-day free trial today and test SocialBee’s RSS Import feature!
You also have the option to fetch up to 100 posts from your blog and promote them on your favorite social media platforms. In this way, you can increase your website traffic while building authority within your niche.
4. Create an Editorial Calendar
Now that you already have a team to help you make your content vision into reality and have a healthy backlog of content, schedule your content in advance for the next quarter or so.
Put all of your content schedules in a shareable calendar that everyone on your team can see. Once you put together this type of calendar, you can plan out your posts in advance and decide when is the best time for publishing content on specific marketing channels.
| Not sure how to get started with your content calendar? Learn from this guide to creating an editorial calendar in 10 steps plus a free editable template. |
Plan your content strategy effortlessly across multiple marketing channels.
5. Research and Monitor Your Content Strategy
To reach a wide segment of your target audience, you have to start by doing your research before creating content. This is, without a doubt, the most important step of the content writing process.
Why? Because if you don’t identify what your audience is interested in correctly from the start, you will waste time and resources on creating content they will never go out of their way to search.
Here are a few ways you can discover the best content ideas for your target market:
- Use keyword research tools to see what topics have decent traffic on different search engines
- Identify the content with the most organic traffic or search traffic from your blog and create more posts on those matters
- Borrow ideas from your competitors
The work doesn’t stop after publishing your content, from then on you have to keep track of your performance to see what works and what doesn’t. As a result, you will have a better understanding of your target audience, and you will know exactly what to do to improve your results.
Even if you can’t afford paid platforms, there are plenty of free tools online you can use to gather the data you need, such as Google Analytics, Matomo, Followerwonk, Facebook and Instagram Insights, and more.
Another budget-friendly solution would be to go with affordable analytics tools to monitor your content strategy.
For instance, with SocialBee, you can track your page growth post reach, and engagement and find out data about your audience demographics for just $29 a month.
Monitor all your social media platforms from SocialBee and learn how to improve your performance in real-time.
Start your 14-day free SocialBee trial today!
Challenge #2: Come up with Original, Unique Content
According to Ahrefs’ search traffic study, their Content Explorer tool discovers about 1.8 million new pages every 24 hours. This isn’t even the exact amount of pages created daily because Ahrefs only counts what their algorithm deems as “good”.
With these millions (and even possibly billions) of content produced each day, how do you ensure that your content is original and unique enough?
If you end up feeling discouraged and your team is in a content creation rut, that’s perfectly normal.
You’re also in a good position right now because the first step to creating original, unique content is to be aware that there’s too much content out there that looks the same—same idea, same format, same perspective. Aargh!
How to Tackle This Content Marketing Challenge
Here are some best practices that will help you develop an effective content marketing strategy:
1. Talk (and Listen) to Your Prospects and Customers
One obvious benefit of talking to your prospects and customers is knowing their pain points and challenges. As a result, you get yourself a list of good topics and ideas you can use for your content.
A not-so-obvious benefit to this is you get to understand your audience better than ever before. You will learn about their values, interests, and pain points—details that will help you improve your content marketing strategies and customize your communication to better resonate with your potential customers.
For example, if you’re an essential oils brand and your prospects are mainly women in their 30s and 40s, you might discover that this group values brands with a sense of social responsibility. From these findings, you can create videos that focus on your products’ sustainability—from sourcing to packaging.
| Here’s your action plan: Talk to at least 5-10 prospects and existing customers. Get a feel of the conversation and pay particular attention to the words and phrases they’re using. |
2. Publish Behind-the-Scenes Content
Not all of your content needs to be revolutionary or contain an original concept. We’ve all been customers at one point, and you’ve also probably wondered what’s going on behind the scenes of your favorite restaurant or shoe brand.
Take photos of your production facilities, record a short video explaining your company culture, share company anniversaries or write a blog post about your current website redesign.
Remember that people consume content not just because they want to learn but also because they want to be entertained.
3. Gather Experts and Conduct Interviews
One quick way to develop original, unique content is to ask thoughtful questions and run interviews with leaders and experts in your niche.
You can either invite them to your podcast or Zoom webinar. Using the best webinar software will enable you to record your webinars and send out thank-you notes to attendees.
You can also ask them to fill out a short survey. Once you have their insights and responses, write about it in an eBook or publish a video summarizing their thoughts.
This technique comes in handy for brands whose audiences are more interested in leadership topics and industry tips, such as B2B audiences.
Challenge #3: Prove Content Marketing ROI
As a content marketer, you can fully understand the challenge of proving a ROI (return of investment) report after finishing up a content marketing campaign.
When you can show proof of ROI, you’re also likely to get more stakeholders on board with your content marketing plans (such as increasing your budget).
In a series of tweets early this year, Ahrefs’ Tim Soulo tweeted about it, and many marketers were nodding in agreement when he said that the ROI of content might not be directly measurable, but it does benefit brands in a lot of ways.
He refers to these benefits as ten areas of return. These include building a solid reputation, fueling paid acquisition campaigns, and boosting customer retention.
Joe Lazauskas, VP of Marketing at Contently, also shares the same sentiment:
“The truth is that while content dramatically impacts a brand’s success across all stages of the customer journey, it can’t be captured in a simple, linear attribution model on Day 1. And it can’t happen all at once. Instead, sophisticated content measurement requires a series of interconnected steps that evolve as your content program matures.”
How to Tackle This Content Marketing Challenge
How exactly do you prove that content marketing works when, as Ann Gyn of Content Marketing Institute puts it—it’s nearly impossible to compute content marketing’s value in terms of traditional ROI?
What if your CEO wants to know how your content marketing efforts have helped convert prospects into customers?
1. Set Specific and Measurable Goals
Gyn recommends building specific digital marketing goals.
“Be specific: identify the goal, the target audience, the metric used to measure progress, the number you strive to achieve, and the timeframe in which you plan to complete it”, suggests Gyn.
Here’s an example she shared:
“Our content marketing goal is to increase awareness of the brand online by women between the ages of 25 and 45. We intend to achieve a 10% increase in unique visits to our blog from this group in each quarter of 2022.”
2. Invest in an Attribution Model
Now, if you want to go further into computing for content ROI, you need to invest in an attribution model, like Contently’s Content Measurement Maturity Model. The model lists ten steps spread across four stages of measuring content ROI: crawl, walk, run, and fly.
The charts below are from Contently’s Content Measurement Maturity Model and they highlight each stage and their corresponding marketing KPIs you can use.
Let’s take a look:
1. Crawl stage: Focus is on audience building
2. Walk stage: Focus is on lead generation
3. Run stage: Focus is on revenue generation
4. Fly stage: Focus is on revenue attribution
Wrapping It Up: Take It One Content Marketing Challenge at a Time
To recap, the following content marketing best practices and tips are a great place to start if you want to overcome one content marketing challenge at a time:
- Put in the work to listen and talk to your audience
- Build a reliable content team to back you up
- Have a content backlog
- Create original, engaging content by interviewing experts and publishing behind-the-scenes content
- Build specific and measurable goals
- Invest in an attribution model
Remember that with SocialBee you can simplify your content creation and distribution tasks dramatically. Create, post, and monitor your performance on all your social media platforms from one dashboard.
Start your free 14-day trial today and develop a successful content marketing strategy faster and easier than ever!
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Kai Tomboc is currently taking care of content at Piktochart, an easy-to-use design tool that helps you tell your story with the visual impact it deserves. She has written for various SaaS brands and publications like G2. When not engrossed in a book, she’s most likely taming tardigrades.
