4 Tips to Boost Your Content Marketing Strategy

More and more businesses are learning the value of content marketing, but many still aren’t sure how to make it work for them. The thing to remember is that content marketing is more like a marathon than a sprint. You can’t expect to see great results immediately, and you can’t run with your content marketing as fast as possible for a few months and then let it drop. You need to create a strategy and keep plugging away at it again and again over time. But if you’ve been plugging away for a while and still aren’t seeing the impact you had hoped for, these four tips should breathe new life into your content marketing strategy.

Take a look at what you currently have on your website. You should be able to answer yes to the following questions. If not, you may want to reevaluate how you are doing things.

• Do you have individual pages for each product or service?
• Do you have unique content that is thorough, persuasive, and easy to read?
• Do you publish new content (such as a blog) on a regular schedule ? If yes then do you have a blog feed on each product or service category page that serves up only relevant posts for that page?
• Do you offer a variety of content formats such as text, video, images, and infographics?

Link building is the process of getting your website connected to other websites through the use of hyperlinks. Google’s PageRank algorithm uses links to evaluate the quality of a web page. Link building as a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is a key component to driving traffic and must not be overlooked. Outbound Links Outbound links - A.k.a. outgoing links, outlinks, or outward links – are pretty straightforward. Let’s say you’re a dentist, and you’re writing a blog about the benefits of electric toothbrushes. In that blog post, you use a statistic from the American Dental Association’s (ADA) website and include a link that would take readers to the ADA’s website (preferably in a new tab so that when they close it they return to your website). That’s an outbound link. Backlinks Backlinks are much harder to get and are highly valuable for boosting SEO and driving traffic. Backlinks – A.k.a incoming links, inbound links, inlinks, or inward links – are links on other websites that send their readers back to your website. At one time, you could simply reach out to other websites and ask for links. Unfortunately, as fake news has become more commonplace, people have become more skeptical of what they’re reading online, and the policies of many high-quality websites have changed. Therefore, getting incoming links isn’t as easy as it once was. However, a good digital marketing agency like ours has the connections to help you acquire these valuable links. Today, a smart link building strategy is to create great content that stands out and is linkable. That means creating well-written, thoroughly researched content with compelling visuals and a strong hook.

Many of the traditional push marketing strategies don’t work anymore because people today don’t like to be sold to, so if you can provide value and become a trusted advisor and provider of value, people will be drawn to you. They’ll become loyal, and they’ll share you with their friends. When they need services like yours, you will be top of mind if you have been creating and distributing quality content all along. Therefore, it’s essential to create content that provides value to the reader. Of course, what is considered to have value is subjective, so your goal should be to provide expertise and insight that helps your prospects in some way so that they are drawn into your content and eventually your solutions, and if done right, compels them to share it. In his book Epic Content Marketing ., Joe Pulizzi offers "six key principles of epic content marketing":

• Epic content fills a need
• It communicates consistently
• It requires you to find your unique, and human voice
• It expresses a point of view
• It is devoid of “sales speak”
• It’s recognized as the best of its breed (ok, that's a tough one but do your best!)

People are looking for someone to help solve their problems. The only way you can help do that is to acknowledge and address those problems. Here’s an example: Let’s say that you sell email marketing services. You know that email marketing still provides one of the highest returns on investment when it comes to marketing, but you also know that it can be a real challenge to get people to open marketing emails. Why not address that problem in a blog post and offer solutions to that problem? The post title might be something like “Why Isn’t Anyone Opening my Email” or “5 Reasons Why your Email isn’t Getting Opened.” Try these tips, and you should begin to see better results from your content marketing strategies.

Not every business has the time, talent or staff to develop consistently strong content on an ongoing basis. If you’re not happy with the results of your content marketing or need help in any way, give Power Marketing International a call at 484-297-6395 or contact us online. We can help you develop a winning content marketing strategy, create quality content, and connect it to the right online channels. Contact us today to learn more.

This post is adapted from “ 10 Ways to Refresh a Stale Content Marketing Strategy .”