Ready to Crush Your Content Marketing Game? Follow these 5 Tips!
Content marketing is becoming more and more important to businesses—which is no surprise considering it generates three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62 percent less. With that being said, you can’t just churn out any old content and expect to see those kind of results, you need to have a thought-out content marketing plan to ensure you optimize your content marketing efforts.
1. Conduct a Content Audit
When you are working on your content marketing plan, before you even start thinking about what content you want to create next, you should try to get a better understanding of how your current content is performing.
By auditing your previous content, you will start to notice patterns in its performance. For example, you might notice that long-form content works better with your audience than short-form, or that content with lots of images has the lowest bounce rate.
An audit will also help give you a more in-depth understanding of your foreign audiences. You can audit all your multilingual content and see what is working for each country or region. You may find that content that has been working really well with your home audience is not having the same impact abroad.
Don’t know where to start? Check out Quick Sprout’s step-by-step guide to performing a content audit.
2. Don’t Create Content for the Sake of it
One mistake a lot of startups fall into is creating content for the sake of it. We all keep hearing that Content is King and think that in order to keep up with competitors we need to be churning out content every day.
This is not the case; in fact, it can do more harm than good. With the sheer volume of content available online today, it’s not simply a case of creating content. Instead, your content marketing plan should make it clear that your content has to be of the highest quality and really add value to your audience.
You are much better off putting more time into creating one valuable piece of content that your audience will love, than ten average pieces of content that will have no impact on them.
3. Focus Your Content Marketing Plan on Your Best Performing Channel
From your content audit, you should have been able to figure out what content marketing channels are performing best. This could be your blog, your emails, your downloadable resources or any other online content.
Each audience has a different preference when it comes to content, but once you’ve put enough varieties of content out there, you will start to notice some work better than others for your unique audience. Once you know what channel that is, this is where you will want to focus your future content marketing plan.
Certain channels will work better with foreign audiences than others; you might find that your translated blog content works really well with your Spanish audience, but not with your Italian readers, so when you focus your content marketing plan of particular channels be aware that these may need to be segmented for your global audiences.
Learn More: Using Translation to Connect With and Engage Multilingual Audiences
4. Create a Content Calendar
All of us have busy workloads, it’s just part of the startup culture—you never feel like you have enough time to get everything done. This often means that your content marketing efforts are left by the wayside as an afterthought.
Creating a content calendar can organize your content marketing plan giving you a schedule to keep accountable to. Having a calendar means you will be able to better organize your content-marketing efforts and coordinate your team. For example, if you want to create an infographic, having it in your calendar means that you can ask your design team in advance to put time aside for its creation, giving them accountability and helping you keep to content deadlines.
Another helpful aspect of a content calendar, especially with foreign audiences, is that it can help you create timely and topical content. For example, public holidays and cultural days of celebration are different all over the world. It would be impossible to keep track of them all, so by adding them to your content calendar, you can create relevant content for the time, helping you build a more cemented relationship with your foreign audiences.
5. Review Your Content Analytics Regularly
Going back to point one, auditing content should be a core element of your content marketing plan. Therefore, once you’ve conducted your audit, you should continue to review your content analytics regularly.
65 percent of website users say content is hit or miss, this gives you a huge opportunity to retain customers just by creating consistently great content they really want to read. Regularly reviewing your content’s analytics will help you achieve this—by understanding what is working well, you can keep making small changes and updating content to optimize it for your audience.
By providing top-quality content your audience can rely on, you will establish yourself as a knowledge base for your industry, and users will come back to your site time and time again when they have questions they need answering.