If you’re looking to level your content marketing this year, then you’ve come to the right place.

We surveyed 165 content marketing experts to find the very best content marketing tips for beginners, as well as seasoned content marketers.

After going through all those responses, we’ve selected what we believe to be the very best of the tips for you below.

Here’s to making your content marketing KPIs this year!

Plan a Strategy

This is owing to the target audience’s preferences.

To return to the audience, your material must meet their needs.

Address their content marketing funnel level.

A person’s journey from awareness to conversion may be laborious.

Possible improvements. If your target audience likes it, it will increase engagement and purchases.

First, make sure that your content is high-quality and relevant to your target audience.

Additionally, be sure to use a variety of formats to keep your audience engaged, and use social media to share your content widely.

Finally, always test and measure the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts.

Focus On Your Customers

Amateur marketers often make the mistake of creating a campaign that primarily revolves around the product.

This may seem harmless at first glance, however, doing so makes it unrelatable to the customers.

Rather than focusing your campaign on the product, refocus on to the customers.

Instead of saying this is an eyeglass that has an anti-radiation, it is better to say this will keep your eyes safe from computers.

At the end of the day, customers are not attracted by descriptions alone.

You need to relate how these descriptions improve their life.

This is how you make effective marketing campaigns.

Know Your Audience’s Personality

If you’ve never polled your audience, you might want to start now.

This will show you if the people you’re trying to reach are following you, as well as who your genuine followers are.

You need to craft your content so that it is easily understood by those you are trying to address.

Not too high where the beginners can’t understand, but not too simple so that experts are bored.

Understand why you’re generating content

Content is great but it needs to have a purpose in order to work.

There are many reasons why businesses create content, from lead generation to market education.

What’s your goal, and how can content help you get there?

Create The Best Content In Your Industry

The best way to maximize return on content is by creating evergreen content.

Now more than ever, business owners need to understand how to turn their businesses into sources of information more than just product-hubs.

Build organic traffic to your website through informative and engaging content creation based on keyword research, and revenue is sure to follow.

We frequently use original research and data in our content.

The data is fact-based and usually displayed in visual charts that tell a story.

This makes it easy to convey the findings and it is differentiated from normal text.

The uniqueness is the key and it must add distinct value.

The key to great content, regardless of whether the goal is marketing or entertainment, is to understand your narrative.

How should the consumption of your content marketing make your targets feel?

What actions should the assets inspire?

Knowing, ideally with data, how different groups of people react to your brand, learn your value proposition, and are motivated to take action is the best lesson I’ve learned.

Deep dives always garner the most attention so we aim to provide readers with comprehensive, in-depth knowledge on our blog topics.

A recent article of ours unpacks the typography design trends for 2021.

We were able to earn 89 referring domains pointing to this article.

Throughout the article, we use a lot of visual guides to complement our in-depth coverage of each design trend.

This is a topic that a lot of people are searching for, and a lot of websites want to link to it as a resource.

Ahrefs is a great content tool.

It helps nail down your target audience and does effective backlink analysis.

It can be overwhelming at first, but once you get the hang of the site, it’s an essential tool.

Another tool is Clearscope, which helps with high-quality content.

Its artificial intelligence is a great asset and helps you optimize content effectively.

Promotions and Quality Content

Producing high-quality content is critical if you want to build a loyal audience for your company.

It is critical to keep your stuff up to date in order to establish a relationship with your audience.

Using an editorial calendar, remind yourself to produce new content on a regular basis.

As a content marketing strategist, you must be able to think on your feet and continually learn new things.

While content marketing isn’t rocket science, it does need tenacity, ingenuity, and a critical eye.

A successful strategy involves a lot of analytical thinking, but it doesn’t have to be a one-size-fits-all approach.

To be successful, you must only upload the best content you can come up with.

Instead of five mediocre blogs every week, strive for one amazing one.

Unless you get your content in front of the proper people, it will go overlooked.

To get your content out there, you’ll need to do at least this much, and if you’re a new site, a lot more.

Check your content’s performance and run regular audits

It’s a competitive world out there and content may get stale fast, so you need to make sure yours is up-to-date, optimized, and providing users with a good experience.

That’s why it’s so important to plan regular performance checks and make the necessary updates.

Quantity and frequency are really important for your content strategy, but quality is even more.

Instead of focusing too much on publishing new content, spend more time on improving the content you already have.

Also, make sure that your multiple pages are not fighting each other on search engines.

Analyze the Sites That are Outperforming You

Look at your page and compare it to the pages that are ranking higher than you are if you don’t number one for your major keywords.

Even better, have someone who isn’t affiliated with your company do it for you.

Ask them to respond to the following question: If you could only land on ONE page from this search, which of these would you choose?

When we ask clients this question, they frequently respond, Our website is the most comprehensive on the subject.

We’ve answered every question a potential searcher would have.

We discovered that the brief and to-the-point articles of numerous of our clients who improved after the May core update fared well.

This is frequently the preference of searchers. It will be exceedingly tough to rank well in that SERP if you are trying to rank a transactional page but Google is only presenting informational sites with no calls to action.

Set Long Term and Relevant Goals

Setting up campaigns for your website requires certain aims.

A lot of people set up campaigns focused on pricing and keywords, not long-tail keywords.

To create effective advertising, you need a lot of data on your target audience.

Focus on terms utilized in searches while using keyword research tools.

These are the keywords to utilize while creating content.

A strategy’s success requires a calendar.

A content calendar, like an editorial calendar for a traditional newspaper, may assist steer your approach over time.

You’ll want to include important dates like holidays and industry-related events.

You should also leave some “blank” areas for unexpected but pertinent events or hot subjects that require last-minute content creation.

This keeps everyone on the same page.

Both the editor and the contributors know where they are, when the deadline is, and what is next.

The ultimate goal of SEO is to drive more traffic to your money pages in order to generate more income for your business.

However, building backlinks, which is vital to SEO, is difficult for most of these pages because, in order to secure a high-quality backlink, there must be some kind of value exchange.

The issue is that most pages that businesses want to have rank don’t provide much value to other site owners that would be able to give them a backlink.

Introducing the middleman method.

In order to get around the difficulty of attracting backlinks to homepages or product pages, website owners can publish informative content on their blogs that provides value to other site owners, thus attracting backlinks.

The link equity added to these informative articles can then be shared to money pages via internal links.

And voila! Your money pages will now begin growing in authority and climbing in rankings.

There are a couple of practical content marketing strategies that are extremely efficient at building backlinks.

The first is called broken link building.

Broken link building involves finding broken pages that have a high amount of quality backlinks pointing to them, writing an article that serves the same purpose (ideally even better than the original), and reaching out to all of the sites that are linking to the broken page to ask them to update their links to point to your article.

The best way to find these broken pages is to use a tool such as Ahrefs.com because it allows you to find all of the broken pages related to a given keyword and filter them by the number of domains referring to them.

A similar content marketing approach is what is known as the skyscraper technique.

It is very similar to broken link building, except the articles that you are replacing are not broken but outdated or mediocre.

To build links this way, you must find pages with a high number of good backlinks pointing to them even though the pages themselves are lackluster.

A good way to find these pages is to filter by when they were published since this will reveal many outdated articles. This can also be accomplished using Ahrefs.

Improve Relevancy

Google will tell us that the purpose of most core upgrades is to increase relevancy.

For example, when I searched for mask two years ago, the top-ranking pages were dictionary pages and IMDB (talking about the movie The Mask).

Today, the organic results show me largely news pieces and articles on wearing masks to avoid virus transmission from official government websites.

The pages that are most relevant to users searching for mask are those that discuss stopping the spread of Coronavirus, according to Google’s algorithms.

With the May 2021 Core update, we believe Google has gotten even better at determining which types of material are the most useful to show the user.

During our review of the update, we found a few key points:

  • Google became better at surfacing sites that were not always the longest of their sort but did the best job of clearly answering the searcher’s question in many circumstances.
  • We discovered that many of our clients’ articles that improved as a result of the May core update were those that discussed the first-hand experience.
  • Some of our clients experienced a drop in their rankings. Some of the pages that lost rankings were those that had whitehat link building done on them (prior to working with MHC). We don’t believe Google penalized these pages because of these links, but we do believe Google improved its ability to determine if a link was actually a recommendation for a page or was simply there for SEO purposes.

Don’t Neglect Multi-distribution

You can’t just push publish and leave.

You must let people know your website exists and is worth reading.

There are numerous distribution and marketing avenues.

Gather your team and discuss the best ways to reach new audiences and what has worked in the past.

Try Podcasting

I’ve found podcasting has been a tremendous help in audio brand building the past few years, and is very affordable, hence a good fit for businesses of all sizes.

We’ve learned a good deal as we’ve built out additional podcast strategies for ourselves and our clients.

Podcast best practices we recommend:

  • Start small. The basic equipment is very low cost (existing laptop and Internet connection) to modest cost (digital microphone and editing software). As you gain comfort and an audience, increase your investment by upgrading your mic, mixer and editing software, as well as consider a dedicated studio space.
  • Market aggressively. In terms of promoting the podcast (outside of your own marketing channels and network) the techniques are similar to promoting YouTube video content:
  • Optimize podcasts to rank in related searches
  • Syndicate across podcast channels like iTunes, Stitcher and SoundCloud
  • Buy targeted advertising on podcast networks, Google and social platforms

How to Get Started Podcasting

The best way to get into podcasting is to leverage your network to secure interesting content and interviews (makers, sommeliers, customers, retailers, etc.).

The bigger the names, the more likely they are to generate interest and a following and provide further leverage to secure future high profile guests.

Industry influencers are also likely to have their own following and market the podcasts to their networks for added reach.

Final Word

Content marketing is a long-term strategy that needs to be nurtured and maintained.

As you continue with your efforts, remember to:

  • Figure out what content formats work best for your industry and target audience and then make those the focus of your content marketing;
  • Try various ways of distributing your content (e.g., social media, newsletters, etc.) so you can reach as many people as possible;
  • Regularly test and measure what works and what doesn’t work in order to determine which content pieces are effective at reaching new prospects and getting them to engage with yours;
  • Constantly go back to the drawing board to keep trying new strategies that will improve on or replace less successful approaches.

Since there isn’t one single magic bullet, it is important to experiment and find out what works best for your company.

Our expert contributors: Kent Lewis, President & Founder Anvil; Mark Valderrama, Owner and CEO, Aquarium Store Depot; Alex Williams, Content Strategist, Active Weekender; Zane Landers, Telescopic Watch; Jordan Fulmer Real Estate Investor, Momentum Property Solutions; Sally Johnson, Content Strategist, Improve Summer; Eddie Bye, Founder of Physio Flex Pro; Gerald Lombardo, Co-Founder of The Word Counter; Brandon Bland, Audio Listed; Cady Brown, founder, Horses Arizona; Kevin Miller, Content Marketing Expert and Serial Entrepreneur; David Farkas, founder and CEO, The Upper Ranks; Matteo Rossi, founder, Bartending Barista; Shawna Newman, SEO consultant, Skipblast; David Johnson, founder, Aquarium Ahoy; Zaeem Chaudhary, Architectural Draftsman, AC Design Solutions; Lucas Jones, founder, Castle Harbor; Gerrid Smith, Founder of Corporate Investigation Consulting; Rand Lawrence, co-founder of National Wildlife Council; Michelle Henry, founder, Outdoor Dog Fun; Dan Wilkes, Marketing Coordinator, Geeky Matters; Susan Parker, PhD, Dreams Research Council;

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