Develop a Unique Content Marketing Strategy through These 14 Tips

Your business could be about anything; but the centre point of your digital content marketing strategy has to be your target audience. If it is not so, it just won’t work.

Take for instance Hub Spot which has managed to position itself as a market leader in content marketing. It generates a million visitors and more than 60,000 leads per month, through its website.

There is now another player who has started creating waves in the world of content marketing – TED.

Although not a provider of marketing services like HubSpot, TED has still managed to achieve the leadership position by leveraging in-person events and making accessible, high-quality educational material for all.

Making its way through data collection and analytics, KISSMETRICS has also emerged as a leader that supports businesses in their content marketing systems and strategies.

Many marketers have managed to drive 7.8 times more traffic to their websites through content marketing. They have also increased their conversion rates by 6 times.

Did you know that content marketing can help you generate 3 times more leads than traditional marketing?

The best part is that it costs 62% less than any of the traditional marketing methods.

Now that should be a good reason to start developing a content marketing strategy.

Here are a few things you need to keep in mind, if you wish to make your online content marketing strategy stand out from the crowd:

1. Give your audience what they want

The main mantra of a successful content marketing strategy is to give your audience what they want. You can do one of the following things to find out how to go about creating a content marketing strategy:

• Do a keyword research, check out the demographic data in Google Analytics or try Google Trends to decide on topics that are in demand.
• Conduct an online or an offline survey to understand the needs of your audience.
• Check out a few trending #hashtags on Twitter
• Go through a few Forums or support pages that are relevant to your products
• Read some customer reviews and comments on ecommerce websites that sell similar products

It doesn’t matter what tool you are using, you have to aim at building something that seems useful to your audience. From active seniors, to job seekers and to health-conscious readers, every one seeks content that matters to them. So whether you are creating videos, blog articles, or a highly niche content platform, your focus has to be on giving your audience the content that they need.

2. Analyse your competitors’ efforts

However unethical this might seem, you won’t be able to create any unique or differentiated content if you don’t analyze the content created by your competitors.

It is not about copying their content marketing strategies. It is about learning where you are falling behind when it comes to creating engaging and differentiated content. The aim is to always stay one step ahead in content marketing by using the efforts of your competitors to your advantage.

Once you have a list of your competitors in SEO content marketing, here is what you need to do:

• Take stock of all the content that your competitors are creating
• Evaluate the quality as well as the quantity of that content
• Analyze the topics of the content and see how well they are doing

3. Brainstorm ideas and do keyword research

If you need to create fresh content you will need new content marketing ideas. The best way to do this is to brainstorm ideas related to your niche and make a note of them.

Here are a few things you may want to keep in mind while doing your keyword research:

• Focus on the search intent (the main purpose behind the searches for content) and figure out the exact requirements of your audience.
• Select and incorporate relevant keywords
• Perform a thorough keyword research, exploring the search volume as well as current competition.
• Convert keywords into headlines that are both clickable and SEO-friendly.
• Use synonyms or variations of keywords to boost your LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing)

You can check out some of the keyword research tools such as Google Adwords, Mangools, SEMrush, SECockpit, and Keyword Snatcher. Choose the tool that fits into your marketing budget; but make sure you consider the points mentioned above.

Here is a snapshot of a Keyword Research using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool:

Include a long tail keyword (that contains the medium tail keyword) in the title.

You can target any two keywords in your page or post, as per the targeted list.

Whenever possible, make sure the key phrase you include contains at least two keywords. For instance, you could include “digital content marketing strategy” in the first paragraph of your blog. This is a combination of two keywords – “content marketing strategy” and “digital content marketing.”

You can boost your LSI by including the keywords “digital content marketing” and “online content marketing.” Since the meaning of these two keywords is the same, it will increase the relevancy of your content.

Create maximum opportunities to capture more prospects and drive better sales for your business.

4. Come up with a strong but enticing title

The headline is the one that either draws or pushes away a reader. In fact only 2 out of every 10 readers would be interested in reading what you have written; the other 8 will just read the headline.

Here are a few things you may have to keep in mind while writing the headline of your content:

• Tell your reader what’s in it for him. Unless the headline seems really useful no reader will go through the content that comes below it.
• Choose something that will pique the curiosity of your reader
• Make sure the length of the title is less than 70 characters.
• Do an A/B testing to find out which title works the best

Source: Coschedule

Recommended: The Incredible Power of Interactive Marketing

5. Make sure the content you create is unique and of high quality

Creating content just for the sake of it would do you no good. You may only end up losing your potential customers by publishing second-rate content.

Quality surely counts and if you want people to remember and recommend you, you will have to publish not just good but extraordinary content.

Copying content created by others might seem easy. But it can attract penalty from Google, thereby crushing your bottom line.

What you need to do instead is to publish original content that is accurate and trustworthy. There should be something to back up or substantiate everything that you write about. Answer the questions of your audience, but in an easy way. Organize your content and make it simpler and faster for your readers to pick up what matters to them.

6. Create evergreen content

The best thing about online content marketing is that once you publish content, it is going to be there forever. It can keep generating traffic for as long as it there, provided it stays relevant.  Here are a few tips to make sure the content you publish remains evergreen:

• Experiment with different kinds of content such as videos and infographics instead of just publishing articles.
• Focus oncreating case studies, definitions, how-to articles, reports, as well as non-technical articles that relate to behaviors, attitudes, and personal characteristics of people.
• Always display the date when you published the content.
• Update your content regularly to keep the freshness factor intact.
• Include a note at the top of the article that explains that your content has been updated
• If your article can’t be spruced up make sure you include a link in your note to a new article that has the latest information

7. Add some data to your content

Including well-researched specific data in your content is a very effective way to showcase your expertise and build your credibility in the industry. Apart from giving a unique perspective of your industry, data also offers value to your readers.

Here are a few ways to gather the data that you would need:

• Conduct interviews with customers or industry experts
• Create questionnaires and post them on your social media channels and website

You can also think of including some tables and charts to make it easier for your readers to interpret the data.

8. Tell stories & be yourself

There is probably no one who wouldn’t like to read an interesting story. That said you will have to figure out what your readers would like to hear and share, before telling them your stories.  You will have to make sure your stories make them feel connected to your brand.

Here are a few tips you can use:

• Use real life examples
• Include customer experiences with your brand
• Understand the psychology of story telling
• Focus on cultivating relationships with your readers

Stories, if told the right way, can be very inspiring. They have the power to live on forever. If you can achieve this depth while telling stories through your content you can be sure of receiving a lot of likes and shares that can do wonders to your brand.

Source: Echostories

9. Make your content easy to read

Digital Content marketing is all about keeping your visitors on your page. It can do wonders to your Google Rankings. It is only a 100 words that more than 50% of your readers go through if your headline seems catchy enough to them. This has a lot to do with the readability of your content. Here are a few ways to improve the same:

• Write in short sentences
• Restrict your paragraphs to about 3 to 4 sentences
• Use headings with h1 and h2 tags
• Include images, videos, and bullet points

Improving the readability of your content will not only make your readers go through the entire content, it also increases your search engine ranking. You can use tools such as Yoast SEO to analyze the readability of your content.

Source: Stnsvn

10. Use some visuals

65% of the people in this world are visual learners. They trend to process, comprehend, and retain information in a better way if it is visual. That said pulling out images from Google search may hardly work when it comes to making your content engaging, memorable, and effective. You will have to create your own diagrams and infographics to explain your theories, communicate your points, and present data in interesting formats.

Source:Business2community

Here are a few things you can do to create your own killer visual asset:

• Do some research on the topics, data, and content for creating your diagram or infographic
• Use free tools available on the internet, to create an infographic on your own. You should however, make sure you follow all the infographic design best practices.
• If you don’t have the required skill or experience in designing infographics, you could hire some talented artists to create the same for you.

Recommended: Is Email Marketing Dead?

11. Try out A/B testing

About 83000 blogs are published every hour. This means your target consumers would be bombarded with marketing messages from multiple sources.

Creating a content marketing strategy through effective A/B testing can help you cut through the clutter and convey your message to the right people.So, make use of A/B testing, understand what works, and take the guesswork out of your strategy.

Source: Softwaretestinghelp

The elements that you will have to test include:

• Your headlines
• Featured images
• The length of your content
• Opt-in or sign-up forms that you include towards the end of your post
• Your CTAs (Call-To-Actions)

You will have to interpret the results of your A/B testing through the likes, shares, responses, and the other actions that your readers take after reading your content. These things would give you an insight into the type of content you should be creating in the future.

12. Share images on Pinterest or Flickr

Sharing your images on sites like Pinterest or Flickr can help you achieve some quick conversions, without having to put in much of efforts. They can drive tons of traffic to your website.

You can go in for paid account options if you wish to use some of their more sophisticated functions.

You can embed the links in the images that you have used on your posts and then share them on your social media sites. If you wish to draw people from third-party sites you can do so by connecting with other Pinterest or Flickr accounts.

13. Go through answers to questions on Reddit and Quora

Going through the questions and answers onQuora and Reddit can help you recognize trends that you can incorporate while developing a content marketing strategy.

With tons of user-generated content, these sites are gold mines that you can use for your SEO content marketing. You can use these sites for:

• Keyword Research
• Finding high volume topics
• Content gap analysis
• Figuring out what your content should look like

Used well, Quora and Reddit can become excellent digital content marketing tools that can boost your productivity.

14. Promote your epic content

Creating epic content and publishing your blog will not drive the desired traffic to your website. You will have to promote your post. And to promote your content you will need to adopt a few SEO content marketing techniques that can help you build long-lasting lucrative backlinks to your site. A few such techniques are explained below:

• Use broken link building: Look for broken links on sites that are relevant to your niche and strike up a conversation with the site owner, informing him of these broken links. You can then suggest them to add a link to your epic content on their site.
• Try guest posting: Apart from driving traffic to your site, guest posting also helps in establishing yourself as a brand and promoting your industry expertise.
• Leverage social media: Once you publish your content and share it on your social media page, you can use that platform to boost your content. You can select the demographics of your readers and make sure your message reaches the right kind of people.
• Email marketing: If you have built an email list through your website, you should be able to promote your content by emailing the link to your subscribers.

Ideally, you need to spend the same amount of time that you spent creating your post on promoting it. After all what is the use of creating such an epic content if you cannot show it to the world.

Kapil Vaishnani

Founder - Chairman, Litmus Branding Pvt. Ltd.
Kapil Vaishnani founded Litmus in 2001 to water his passion for creating brands. Kapil’s a creative brain hitched at business. He firmly believes that focused communication is the key and it must carry a purpose that serves both brand and business. Simplicity is Kapil’s power gear that has shaped some of the prominent brands in India and globally. His passion-filled sportsmanship with multi-disciplinary talent is brimming with experience of 20+ years. Talk sense and he is all ears.