The Best Practices of Content Marketing for 2016
Everyone automatically thinks of blog posts, newspaper articles, and other such written content when they hear the phrase content marketing. But that’s a very narrow view of looking at this strategy. Content marketing best practices is much more comprehensive and effective than most people assume. If you really want to get the most out of this strategy, you should consider all aspects of including videos, podcasts, infographics, and other similar media.
With search engine updates and increasing competition, you need to up your content marketing game in 2016. If you really want to see any positive results from your campaign, you should consider the suggestions written below:
Establish a Connection With Your Audience
People online can be very picky. They have abundant sources of information so they don’t really need to read or view content that isn’t engaging. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to create absolutely unique content that doesn’t exist anywhere else. After all, you need to publish content in a significant volume to see any results. Hence content marketing best practices…
You’ll go nowhere in this competitive world without if you post an article or a video once a month. But that’s how long it usually takes to come up with some absolutely unique content. So, what’s the alternative? Personal connection- you need to create content that’s engaging and connects with your audience.
For example, there are several technology reviewers on YouTube. All of them review the same products and the same gadgets, and almost always make the same observations. Despite this, they manage to garner significant amount of following. That’s because they connect with their audience. They use their personality and style of expression to gain attention rather than just writing unique content.
So, for a successful content marketing best practices strategy, you should insert some personality into your content, give them glimpses of your hard work, and show them the human side of your business. Your audience will be able to relate to this and will be more inclined to buy your products or associate with your company.
Creative Marketing of Your Content
This industry has become so competitive that even your content needs to be marketed well to gain audience. You want to expand your reach and get more people to read, hear, or see your work. The best way to do this is to engage people on social media, give them snapshots of your content, and drive traffic back to your website. You can also start contests and offer freebies to draw more audiences.
You need to develop a following and to do that you need to put an effort into marketing your work. You should have clearly visible CTAs in your content, and should encourage your audience to subscribe to your blog for prompt updates. You should also include your links in your social media profiles. When you take these steps, you boost your visibility.
Don’t Limit Your Resources
Audiences want content that’s comprehensive, authoritative, and showcases different perspectives. For example, if you want to review a movie, you could get the opinions of different audiences. Some would love the movie; others would hate it, while a few would be on the fence. There are different perspectives regarding the same subject matter.
When you showcase all those diverse perspectives in your content marketing best practices, you attract the attention of your audience. For them, such content would be much more interesting and engaging. If you want to create unique podcasts or video content, you can invite experts or just people with an opinion on the matter to discuss the topic. This becomes a dialogue and such dialogues are always interesting.
If you’re short on ideas, you can research what kind of content marketing best practices that are trending in your industry and add your own spin on it. You should ensure that it offers a unique perspective on the subject matter. That’s something which would draw the attention of your audience.
Give Your Audience What they Want
As a business owner, you must be aware that if a product addresses an urgent customer need, it’s more successful. This rule applies to content marketing as well. Pieces of content that address urgent audience questions will always be more successful. You can create this by understanding what their common questions and concerns are. There are many different ways to go about it.
Research questions that customers of your industry frequently ask, and write detailed answers to them. Once all common questions are addressed, you should actively ask your audience if they have they queries or doubts. This can be a rich source of content for you. You can write an elaborate and detailed answer to that question on your website and send the link to the person who asked the question.
Create an entire FAQ section that has comprehensive information about your products, services, and answers to all related questions. This is evergreen content, as the need for such information never really diminishes. All you need to do is update the information regularly to ensure it stays current and fresh.
Tailor Your Content for Your Audience
It’s not uncommon for experts to use industry jargon and technical terms in their content. While these terms might be perfectly comprehensible to you, they would only confuse your audience. Not everyone who reads the piece is going to be familiar with the industry, or an expert on the topic.
You need to tailor your information according to your audience and simplify it as much as you can. This would allow your work to reach a diverse audience. Of course, you can create some content that’s specifically designed for experts amongst your audience. It’s important to understand who is going to read the posts.
Frequency of the Content
It’s impossible to churn out interesting and informative content on a daily basis. In fact, it’s very likely that you won’t be able to. Every marketer seems to face this dilemma. They want to maintain their visibility in front of their audience, but they want to publish high quality work as well.
It’s important to strike the right balance between these two conditions. You should give yourself some breathing room to come up with good quality content. In the end, quality is always better than quantity. It won’t matter if you publish content less frequently to maintain its quality; it will still get viewership.
The Size of the Content
There has been some debate over the size of content in this industry. For a long time, it was believed that good content is short and sweet.
Experts believed this because they knew that people online had very short attention spans. However, this theory was recently debunked. Now, most marketers believe that good written content marketing best practices should have over 1,000 words. However, you need to choose a topic that would be able to stretch to that length. You won’t be able to keep your audience engaged if you’re just writing filler content to reach that 1,000 words mark.
Similarly, your podcasts and videos should also have some length to them, but they shouldn’t be too drawn-out. For example, if you have an hour long video tutorial, it’s a good idea to break it down into four parts. It would be easier for your audience to view the content.
If you want to stay ahead of the competition in 2016, you need to plan your content marketing best practices carefully. If you keep these suggestions in mind, you can create content that’ll be a hit with your audience and gain you considerable visibility.
