We’ve listed our top content marketing tips and tricks to help you strengthen your online presence, grow a loyal audience, and get the most out of the resources you invest in this space.
Content marketing is a great way to attract new customers to your business, but it takes a lot of time, planning and strategy to get it right. As content marketing specialists, we’ve developed a series of processes, tricks and skills that we use to make our life easier, and we’re sharing some of them in this blog post!
Check them out below, and let us know what you think – if you have your own content marketing tips and tricks that you’d like to share, then let us know in the comments below!
Content marketing tips and tricks for Better Results:
The Tips:
Tip #1: Don’t Rely on Social
We’re starting with one of the best content marketing tips in 2023 – don’t rely entirely on social media. Use it as tool, but make sure it is an expendable tool in your toolbox, not a platform that underpins your entire business.
Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are a great way to reach people, grow your audience and generate leads or sales, but they have one major drawback – you don’t own it.
If you invest thousands of dollars and hours into growing a nice big Facebook following and then Facebook goes out of business tomorrow, you will have a big problem.
Facebook has a lot of issues at the moment – the rate of young people signing up to the platform has slowed down significantly, there have been issues with data security, and people are starting to lose trust in the Facebook brand.
And this loss of trust could happen at any time on any other social media platform.
If your business currently relies heavily on social media to drum up business and sales then you need to start thinking about how you can push your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok or Instagram users off those platforms and onto a platform you own, such as your own website or an email database.
That way, if something happens to Facebook (or any other social media platform), you won’t lose the audience that you have invested so much time and money into growing and nurturing.
Tip #2: Tie Content Marketing in with SEO
A crafty content marketer can kill two birds with one stone by creating awesome, interesting and engaging blog articles or videos that can be optimised to perform well in Google and YouTube search engines. We call this SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation.
The trick is to listen to the types of questions that your audience are asking you or jumping onto relevant forums or other platforms to see what conversations are currently taking place around your product or industry. Then jump onto Google or a keyword research tool and start doing some keyword research to find a term or phrase that is receiving a lot of search traffic. Craft your blog around that term – it will perform well in Google, and it is covering a topic or subject matter that you know your target audience is interested in. Two birds, one stone!
Check out our blog article about writing SEO-friendly content for more tips and tricks on creating great content for search engines.
Tip #3: Create a Lead Magnet, Build a Database
Lead magnets are valuable pieces of content that users can download or access for ‘free’. We say ‘free’, because they are actually giving you their email address and name in exchange for the valuable piece of content.
The content might be a downloadable white paper, fact sheet, e-book, video, webinar or other piece of content that you have taken time and effort to create. The content needs to be high-value, containing information that they won’t find anywhere else, and which will help them achieve a particular goal.
This tip can tie in with our first tip – if you are looking for a way to drive your audience off Facebook and Instagram then your lead magnet could be it! Create the magnet, set it up so that users have to fill in a form with their email and name before they can access it, and then promote it on social media.
Email marketing generally has one of the highest conversion rates of all marketing channels – this is a pretty big generalisation as there are quite a lot of variables, such as your industry and whether you have a quality database, but if the users on your database consist predominantly of people who have been following you on social media and have willingly opted-in to receive the emails then you should find that you get a decent conversion rate.
Example of a Lead Magnet: Optimum Recoveries
Here is an example of a lead-magnet in the wild that we produced for our client Optimum Recoveries. The whitepaper provides their audience with high-value information that is relevant to Optimum Recoveries’ services. It educates them about the importance of having water-tight terms and conditions and gives them some tips to help them improve theirs.
With this lead magnet, they are using content to help build strong relationships with their audience.
Tip #4: Define your goals
Clearly outline your content marketing goals. Are you trying to increase brand awareness, drive more traffic to your website, reach more people, create more engagement, generate leads, or educate your audience?
Setting specific goals will guide your content creation process, from the content you create and publish, through to the platforms and channels that you publish it on.
Tip #5: Understand your audience
Research and understand your target audience’s demographics, interests, pain points, and needs. This knowledge will enable you to create content that resonates with them and addresses their specific challenges.
This in turn will drive greater engagement, which leads to more impact and reach for each piece of content.
The Tricks:
Trick #1: Repurpose Your Content
This is one of the best content marketing tips and tricks you’ll ever receive: savvy content marketers know how to re-purpose their content. This means creating one big, juicy piece of content and then flipping it again and again to create multiple pieces of content.
A great example of this would be to start by creating an information-packed 5 minute video about a really relevant topic in your industry at the moment:
- Once you have the video, create a transcript of the audio (try using a transcription service to save time). Uploading your video to YouTube with a transcription file will allow it to perform better in YouTube and Google search engines.
- You’ll then turn the transcription text into a blog post – it shouldn’t take too much editing as all of the information will already be there.
- You can then pull out specific facts or quotes from your new blog post and turn those small snippets of information into social media posts to publish throughout the coming week/s. Use Unsplash for free stock images if you don’t have enough of your own images, or jump into Canva to turn your words into pretty graphics.
- You can also use Lumen5 to create a second video using the blog article, which you can then post on Facebook and Instagram stories.
- Once you’ve done all of this, package all of it up into one awesome email that you can then send to your database!
Trick #2: Ask Questions, Get Engagement
Content marketing is all about building relationships with your audience, and you do that by having conversations with them. This is a really really simple ‘trick’ – if you want people to talk to you, then ask them questions.
If you are asking questions on your own posts and no one is answering you, then go ask questions on your target audience’s posts instead. Find where your ideal customers are hanging out on social media – Facebook groups, Instagram hashtags or Pinterest boards – hunt them down and ask them relevant, thought-provoking questions. This will make them take notice of you and they’ll likely check your account out and start talking to you.
Trick #3: Automation
WE LOVE AUTOMATION.
Good, constructive content marketing takes time, strategy, focus and more time!
But by using automation software and tools, you can make your life a bit easier by ‘batching’ your content. That will free you up to focus on engaging with your target customers on all of those social media platforms!
Some simple tools and techniques that we use to automate some of our content marketing tasks include:
- Instagram: We use Later to automatically schedule most of our posts on Instagram. This ensures that we are posting regularly and we use the extra time to create content for Instagram Stories or to engage with other accounts.
- Facebook: Facebook is one of the few social media platforms that has actually built a scheduling tool on the platform, and we love it! We batch our content and upload a week’s worth of content at a time to ensure that we are consistently appearing in our audience’s feeds.
- Blogs: The WordPress platform has a scheduling tool for blogs, so you can write a bunch of articles at the start of the month and then upload them all in one hit, scheduling them out so that there is new, fresh content being published on your site every week.
- Emails: Most email marketing platforms including Campaign Monitor and MailChimp have automation features to send automated emails like ‘Welcome’, ‘Happy Birthday’ or other special occasions. Furthermore, they will let you schedule your email marketing content in advance as well – we often schedule three or four of our emails at a time so that there is always an email sitting in there ready to hit ‘send’ if we are short on time.
Trick # 4: Incorporate visuals
Visual content, such as images, videos, and infographics, can significantly enhance engagement. Use compelling visuals to support your written content and make it more visually appealing.
Invest in creating high-quality visuals – don’t rely entirely on stock imagery, dodgy iPhone pics, and generic Canva templates.
The cost of creating high-quality visual content that is unique to your brand and business has reduced significantly in the past few years.
We recently organised an on-site photoshoot for our client Overseas Packers and Shippers. The shoot included drone photography, some videography, and staff/group still shots.
The whole shoot took 1.5 hours, and generated enough visual content to last us for the next 12 months.
This is a huge benefit for Overseas Packers and Shippers – to have real images (captured by a professional) on their website, social media channels, and marketing collateral, especially when a lot of the other players in their industry are still relying heavily on stock imagery to fill out their marketing channels.
Real imagery shows authenticity, which in turn builds trust.
Want More Content Marketing Tips and Tricks?
If you want more tips and tricks for content marketing then follow us on social media!
If you’d like to know more information about BeKonstructive Marketing or would like to book a free one hour consultation to discuss how we can help your business develop stronger relationships with your audience, then get in touch.
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