No matter how long you’ve been in the entrepreneurial game, you probably know that content marketing is the foundational pillar of success in the modern business world. There are many ways that investing in regular content output can benefit your business.
From grabbing the customers’ attention to lead generation and higher conversions, all the way to optimizing your online presence for visibility and awareness, content marketing can help you take your business forward on numerous fronts. That said, there is no denying that content creation is a resource-intensive process, and that creating quality, optimized content regularly requires time, talent, and effort.
Needless to say, if you don’t organize your content marketing strategy and optimize your content creation process, you won’t be able to achieve the results you’re after. So, let’s take a look at the top hacks you can introduce into your content strategy right now that will make your content creation process more efficient and effective in 2022.
Here’s what you need to do.
It all Starts with Clear and Attainable Goals
First and foremost, it’s important that you give a clear structure to your content creation strategy, and that means setting clear and attainable goals. It’s important to set your goals early on in order to work your way back through the tactics and processes necessary to achieve them, allowing your team to develop an effective workflow.
Taking a look at any comprehensive content creation guide that outlines the key steps, you will find that setting goals is always the first task on the list. This should come as no surprise, especially when you consider that content creation can have a number of high and low-level goals.
To put things into perspective for your content team as quickly as possible, simply start by setting SMART goals. The SMART model is a reliable tool you can use to give structure to any process by making your goals specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound.
A specific content goal would be to generate an X number of new qualified leads. Measurable means that you do it in a specific timeframe, compared to a previous period. To make it attainable, you need to have the right content creators and tools, and you also need to choose goals that are realistic.
After all, you can’t hope to rank first on Google within the first month of publishing quality content – it takes time and continuous optimization. Finally, always set a deadline for your goals so that you and your teams can make daily incremental progress and keep the process moving forward.
Source: Hydrate Marketing
Let Your Marketers Work Closely with Sales Experts
Many modern businesses suffer from a common problem that hinders productivity and holds the innovation process in place – department silos. Marketing teams are used to working on their own, sales experts are doing their own thing, and everyone thinks that support reps are just there to handle customer complaints.
This kind of company culture is setting you back and is preventing you from creating engaging copy that converts. Whether it’s copy for your site or your new landing pages, your blogs or your social media posts, it’s important for these teams to work together.
Sales and support can provide invaluable data and expert insights to your content creators, driving forward a powerful content ideation process that will engage audiences and generate qualified leads. Sales experts can also help marketers identify customer intent and optimize content for every stage of the customer’s journey.
This means capitalizing on all leads, whether they are just looking for quality information, comparing their options, or if they are ready to make a purchase.
Source: CRM Software Blog
Create Engaging and Clickable Blog Titles
It should go without saying that without an engaging title, you can’t maximize the potential of your content. It doesn’t matter if it’s a case study for potential clients to analyze or a new landing page for your flagship product – poorly optimized titles can drive customers away for good.
Your goal should be to capture the attention of your audience in the first second with a catchy title that delivers value, clarity, and a concrete promise. To do this, you can analyze the popular title formats, or you can use a blog title generator that will use these parameters to give you interesting titles people will tant to click.
The key is to leverage the increasingly popular AI tools to generate content titles fast so that you don’t waste time trying to come up with interesting topics. A smart tool will help you come up with title ideas that are relevant to your industry, audience, and brand, but most importantly, it will allow you to focus on the more important task of creating quality content.
Source: TechNet
Leverage Visual Collaboration and Concept Mapping
We mentioned earlier that it’s important to eliminate the department silos in your business and empower all your teams to work together. When you’re trying to create content your audience will love, share, and act on, you need to combine the talents and expertise of your sales, marketing, and support professionals.
However, it’s not just enough to get your people in a room and let them work together on a content project, nor is it enough to schedule a weekly Zoom call. You need a dedicated tool that will allow you to visualize your content projects in order to make the process more efficient and effective for all.
Visual collaboration is the key to effective concept mapping and brainstorming, but it’s also crucial in piecing together a content strategy that will achieve numerous key goals. After all, you can’t just create content geared towards brand visibility if your sales department is desperate for content that converts.
Likewise, your support department could benefit greatly from content geared towards customer education, but also upselling and cross-selling opportunities.
Source: XMind
Use Interactive Content to Drive Leads and Engagement
There are many ways to take engagement to the next level with content marketing, but it’s important to note that interactive content is one of the most popular content types in the online space. Why? Because modern customers crave more meaningful interactions with their favorite brands, and they’re far more likely to interact with a company that engages them in meaningful conversation.
Traditional content such as optimized articles should still be at the forefront of your strategy, but even that kind of content needs to engage the user and inspire them to take action. To achieve this, you need to complement written storytelling with visual storytelling to elevate your brand’s engagement.
You also need to understand how interactive content can boost your lead generation on different platforms, and start creating a plan for each. Here are some interactive content ideas to consider:
- Calculators.
- Quizzes.
- Assessments.
- Contests.
- Giveaways.
- Surveys and polls.
You can weave these types of interactive content into your social media posts and images, your videos and live streams, and of course, your landing pages, website copy, and long-form articles. This leads us nicely into the topic of content diversification.
Source: Google Images
Diversify Your Content Offering
Diversification is an important part of a winning content strategy, because it’s important to note that different online platforms thrive on different content types. What’s more, keep in mind that different audiences and users enjoy different content formats.
One of the common content marketing mistakes business leaders make is focusing too much on a single customer touchpoint and a single content format. Some people might have the time and the willpower to read through long-form articles on your site, but some would like nothing more than to get the information they need in a concise explainer video.
You need to cater to all audience groups.
That’s why you can’t just rely on articles and blog posts, and in fact, don’t forget that video is the future of content marketing in many ways. With that in mind, be sure to come up with various types of content that you can publish online to keep things interesting and generate more leads across all customer touchpoints.
Source: Medium
Focus on Effective Content Dissemination
You can have the best content on the web, but if there is no one to see it, it might as well not exist. One of your goals, aside from writing content for killer engagement, should be to create an efficient content dissemination strategy that will get it in front of the right audience, at the right time.
To do this, you need a detailed content schedule for every platform, including your website and all social media channels. Next, be sure to find the best email automation tools for your needs and budget and start automating your content dissemination by sending emails to your subscribers and customers whenever you publish something new.
This will help you save time and money, and will instantly notify everyone on your email list that you have a new blog post, video, an interesting infographic, or a new quiz they can check out. Make sure to personalize your emails and include a call to action that will incentivize the recipient to go to your blog page, a new landing page, or a product category.
Source: DevOps School
Monitor Performance and Optimize
Content marketing is not a set-it-and-forget-it type of deal. If you simply start dishing out content on every platform without monitoring the performance of everything you post, you won’t be able to achieve your long-term goals. In fact, you might even jeopardize your brand’s authority and image in the competitive online market.
People want to see content that is relevant to them and the current market and socio-economic trends, so it’s important to stay on top of the latest developments in your field. This will allow you to update your content with new information to help it rank higher on Google, but it will also allow you to come up with new content ideas that will keep pushing your business forward in the online world.
With that in mind, make sure to keep monitoring the performance of your content on every platform.
Source: BridTV
Wrapping Up
Content creation is the cornerstone of sales and marketing success nowadays, and it’s imperative that you optimize this process in order to achieve your long-term goals.
Make sure to implement these hacks in your content strategy and start dishing out quality content that will build brand exposure and authority, generate qualified leads, and help you drive conversions forward in 2022 and beyond.
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