Author: Evan Hoeflich

As digital marketers, we have all heard the saying “content is king,” and this is still relevant today in 2020. SEO can only get you so far in the search engines, but your actual content is what will increase your traffic and make visitors convert into customers over time. It’s no secret that billions of google searches are being made every day for informational content, but with thousands of new blogs being created every day, how can you stand out from the competition? Well, this is where having a solid content marketing strategy can help you get ahead of your competitors.

Content marketing works by providing opportunities to increase your website’s brand awareness, increase website traffic, and attracting new customers. First, you should have a reliable content management system to help you manage and adjust your content effortlessly, and then you can strictly focus on your content marketing strategies.

Content Marketing helps widen your audience to the billion of users who are actively on the internet. Still, it also provides a long-term solution for your company to continue growing organically. With that being said, let’s dive into four content marketing tips that can turn your blog into a traffic-driving machine.

1.) Create Content Tailored for Your Audience

To keep your audience engaged and coming back, you must provide helpful, unique, and valuable content that will help them grow, learn, and master the industry. By creating user-centered content, it will allow you to generate topics that will educate and provide value to the end-users.

But how do you create user-centered content? Well, for beginners, you want to put yourself in their shoes. Think about what type of questions could they have? What could they be struggling with? Or in what areas could they improve on? All these questions will help you create more interesting topics that your user will love and keep them coming back. You can find hidden questions by going to popular forums like Quora and Reddit to search for repeating questions that people in your niche might have. Then you could take 2-3 of these questions, assuming that they are related to the same topic and create a long-form blog about it.

2.) Get On Trends Early

In today’s digital age, most topics have already been covered online, and while you could still put your twist to it. Why not jump on some of the growing trends in your industry early on? Not only will this give you the credibility of being one of the first sources but also bring in tons of traffic when the trend reaches its peak. A great way to find keywords that are trending or on the verge of taking off is to use Google Trends. It gives you a clear indication of whether that keyword will continue increasing or decreasing over time. It also allows you to compare two keywords against each other so that you can further increase your chances of picking a hot trend to create content about. If you want to maximize your efforts with this technique, don’t just create a 1000 word blog. Instead, create an “Ultimate Guide” and make sure to answer every question that somebody could have on that specific topic. This way, your article will be the go-to guide for information on that trend.

3.) Track Your Performance

As many of you may know, “data doesn’t lie,” and it shouldn’t be ignored — your content marketing strategy need to be data-driven. The whole purpose of content marketing is to provide value and build relationships with your audience. If you’re not tracking your website’s analytical performance, then you could be creating content that your audience might not even be looking for. You want to look at specific KPI (Key Performance Indicators) such as engagement, traffic, and conversion rates related to your companies goals. Looking at your blog’s analytical reports by using free tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console, you can get a good idea of what blogs users are landing on and what they are immediately bouncing off. You can take all this data to find out which type of content your users are engaging with the most to increase your marketing strategies ROI.

4.) Include Relevant Visuals

In 2020 simple blog posts with just a block of text on it just won’t cut it anymore. The online space has become very competitive, and if you want to stand a chance, you want to include custom visuals were it makes sense. It has been found that 65% of humans are visual learners, and 90% of the information that transfers to the brain is visual. So considering just how important visuals are in the learning process, it only makes sense to include visuals in your next content marketing campaign that could help you attract more visitors to your website and also increase user retention rates. You could include custom images, screenshots, infographics, graphs, and videos to support your written content. So make sure to generate high-quality content along with visuals and watch your traffic start to pour in.

Author Bio:

Patricio Quiroz is a digital marketer for Code Authority that enjoys reading about the newest business and marketing trends. In his free time, you can catch him at the gym, playing sports or hanging out with friends.

What content strategies are you currently using for your blog?

This is a guest post written by Lauren Wiseman.

Every business’s marketing efforts revolve around good content because that is what, besides products/services a brand offers, keeps current and attracts new customers. Many people would be surprised that book writers don’t necessarily make good marketing content writers. Be that as it may, content writing is a discipline onto itself and if you wish to be good at it, take a look at some pieces of advice that content pros have singled out. 

Train your brain

Regardless of whether you are writing a book, a magazine article or a copy for a marketing campaign, creativity is one of your most essential skills. Everyone who has to produce a creative piece of writing knows how difficult it is to force creativity. Not everything you produce will be outstanding but you can make (almost) everything to be of quality.

The more you write, the more quality your writing will possess because, at one point, quality becomes a standard. If you want to get to this stage, although it sounds contradictory to the very notion of creativity, you need a routine. This routine means training your brain to write at a particular part of the day, for a particular time. The consistency brings structure and quality to your writing and this is what allows for certain pieces to shine brighter than others.

Read, read, read

Besides training for consistency, to sharpen your writing skills, you need to read as much as you can. Reading will distance you from the everyday abbreviations and slang that we use while communicating with our friends and (sub)consciously feed your brain with complex language constructions and extensive vocabulary. Even if it is a book or an article unrelated to the topics you generally write about, you can still benefit from reading. 

In addition to that, reading other marketers’ writing, as well as their pieces of advice on writing content is of immense importance. You can always learn a thing or two or get inspired in ways you haven’t expected. You can learn about the methods they use, put your own writing in perspective, and actively work on improving your approach to writing.

Look beyond

This piece of advice refers to those that are bilingual or possess exceptional knowledge of another language besides their native. You can brush up your knowledge of the local culture, revive some old friendships and allow all of those elements to become your everyday tools. Prolific writers who are experienced in marketing and have these additional skills can approach writing in other ways as well.

For instance, those language skills may come in handy if the company you work for decides to expand. Simply translating the content won’t do because marketing messages have specific intents that need to be preserved in the other version. This is why many businesses choose transcreation because their marketing content won’t be translated word-for-word but the style, emotions, culture, and intent of the original copy will be adapted to the target audience. With your specific skill set, you can expand your area of work-related interest.  

Take notes constantly

Inspiration is everywhere around us: in the conversation at the grocery store you overheard, as well as in the manner a puppy expresses happiness. Writers, as well as other people who use creativity to pay for bills, know this very well and even find themselves dreaming of engaging ideas they can use for their work. 

This is exactly why you should make a habit of jotting down any idea or situation that you find inspiring and interesting. Good content ideas can be elusive and as soon as you think: ‘Oh, that’s such a good idea, I need to remember it’, it will already be forgotten. A little notebook or your smartphone – whichever your weapon of choice is, just make sure you have it on you always, even on your bed stand. 

Make the headline pop

The first appraisal of your content by the audience will be on the visual level and they will check if the text is divided into readable chunks. This is because most people won’t waste precious time reading something whose composition is loose and hard to read. However, the first piece of, for instance, a blog article they will assess in the sense of the content will be the headline and if you don’t make it striking, you might lose them.

The best manner to prompt your audience to continue reading the content is to evoke an emotional reaction. So, you might try using emotional adjectives such as effortless, painstaking, fun, free, incredible, essential, absolute, and strange. Also, if you have some key takeaways that you would like to point out, you should consider adding numbers to the headline in combination with words such as reasons, principles, facts, lessons, etc.

Wrapping up

From training your brain to leveraging the power of a good headline, content writers have a lot of strategies at their disposal to take their writing to the next level. Whichever elements you decide to incorporate, what’s important is that you are consistent and hard-working because that is what brings about results. Read as much as you can, work on your style, and write down every single idea that pops to your head – and you will have achieved success.

Author Bio:

Lauren is a regular Bizzmark Blog author that has many articles published with the main focus on clients who want their brands to grow in the fast-changing and demanding market. Her personal favorites are successes of small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs. She goes through life with one strong moto – Kindness, always.