Better content marketing is easy when you know how and this article is there to provide you with the tips you need.
Tip #1 – Be Trustworthy
Never outsource your content writing project to a writer who doesn’t know much about your industry, doesn’t cover the topic deep enough, or doesn’t align with your brand. In fact, trustworthy content is authentic and helps attract highly targeted traffic to your website. Your content should explore a topic that is familiar to you and your potential customer and explore it fully. It’s really disappointing to click on a link to an article that the customer thinks might be useful to him/her and to find a 300-word blurb that doesn’t provide any useful information on the topic. It’s worse when the blurb offers just a sales pitch for a particular product or service.
Your reader should feel that he or she is in good hands and that you fully understand his/her needs. They should feel that you have the right solution to their problem. The content you share should be just enough to the potential reader that you don’t give away your intellectual property but provide value at the same time. There should be a fine balance between these two aspects in your article. If you notice a sharp increase in your unsubscribe rates or a decreased engagement, you will know that you have made a mistake. Make sure you have the ability to track that.
Tip #2 – Be An Industry Influencer Or Borrow One
Everyone cannot be an industry influencer. Industry influencers are the people who are considered knowledgeable and trustworthy on a subject. They have the necessary experience or pedigree to support their claims. These people provide high-quality content and monitor the brand so that they provide highly valuable content to their clients. If you don’t have such a person in your company, try to get someone from outside to promote your brand. Borrowing an influencer is easy when you look at the partners or suppliers who do business with you. You may consider a joint webinar or article that combines the influencers. Simply find a topic that both of you can explore and run with it. Here’s a good guide.
Tip #3 – Think Big
The days of the 300-word blog are gone. In fact, you need to take the time and the word count to explore your chosen topic more deeply to add value to your potential client base. Some topics can be fully explored in 800 words and are blog-worthy while some topics may need 5,000 words. An experienced content marketer should know the difference in this regard.
Tip #4 – Think Mobile
The necessity of being mobile-friendly has been emphasized for many years. In fact, Google will penalize websites that are not mobile-friendly. That is why you need to take steps to make your website or blog mobile-friendly to rank higher in the search engines.
Column formats are quite difficult to read on a mobile device when designing your content. Hence, you need to use the whole page in your design and break up long-form content with headers or images to make scrolling easier. Make sure you avoid pop-ups that ask the reader to register or sign up for your mailing list at that moment. But you can do it elsewhere on your website. Make sure the “call to action” button is big enough to see on a mobile screen.
Tip #5 – Set A Realistic Budget And Spend It
The Content Marketing Institute’s “B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, & Trends In North America 2019” report shows that the average percentage of total marketing budget on content marketing was 26%. As these organizations begin to see results, they tend to up their game. For example:
. Start-up companies spend 19% of their marketing budget on content marketing
. Companies in the adolescent phase spend 25% of their budget on content marketing
. Mature companies spend 33% of their budget on content marketing
Over 50% of companies have said that they planned to increase their content marketing budget in 2019. In fact, 36% of these companies said the budget would remain the same while only 4% said they expected to decrease it.