25 Content Marketing Tips Every Marketer Needs To Know

Content marketing has become a big part of consumer engagement and attracting the attention of the right audience online. That means that a lot more companies are doing it, and it’s getting harder to stand out amid the sea of audio, video, images, documents, blogs, and more.

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To make matters worse, virtually every marketer and business owner have found themselves in a rut trying to create enough content, get the desired engagement, and find interesting ways to innovate.

They’re not alone. Research shows that that 70% of B2B marketers are creating more content than they were the year before, and 54% find it difficult to produce engaging content.

There’s a distinct difference between B2B and B2C marketing, and each comes with its own unique challenges. Despite that, you can still benefit from these tips to get out of that rut and start to churn out something new and exciting.

Here are 25 content marketing tips you need to know in order to be successful:

  1. Use your content to gently guide your customers through your buying cycle. Don’t treat it like a speedboat, full-throttle through to conversion.
  1. Use social ads as a way to amplify the reach of your content marketing when you push it out through your social channels. A $10-20 boost on Facebook can go a long way.
  1. Promote your content through a .com domain as often as possible. 84% of top-ranking pages use .com as their top-level domain.
  1. “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing,”says Tom Fishburne of Marketoonist. If you have to force your audience to see the value in the content, or hard sell it, it won’t work. Build content around a takeaway for the audience.
  1. Don’t write short posts just to get the job done and over with. Write long-form content of 1,000+ words to help improve your search rank, traffic, and value to the reader.
  1. Create a buyer persona before you start planning or producing content. That way you have a better understanding of who is reading it and the answers they’re looking for. That leads to much higher conversions.
  1. Guest blog on popular industry sites and put a link back to your site within your byline or bio. This builds traffic as well as personal brand authority.
  1. Avoid verbose headlines and go with short, simple, optimized titles that get the point across. The closer you get to looking like click-bait, the more wary your audience may become.
  1. Never skip an opportunity to leverage email in your content marketing. 80% of businesses report that email is directly tied to their primary revenue.
  1. Blog consistently, not sporadically. In a Hubspot survey, 82% of marketers who blogged daily reported acquiring at least one customer via their blog, compared to 57% who were only blogging monthly.
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  1. Share your own content and use the social sharing buttons next to your content. You can use a plugin to make this process even easier.
  1. Repurpose old content in a new way to bring something fresh to users who may not have seen it. “In the end, the repurposed content needs to provide some level of unique value to people, or it’s not worth doing,” says Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing.
  1. Syndicate your content to reach a new audience and drive referral traffic back to your site.
  1. Always create a content strategy. The most effective content marketers are more likely to have a documented strategy in place.
  1. Create a strategy for content promotion. Use a checklist for each post that lists all of the social channels and applications you’ll use to promote your content.
  1. Always have a plan for building your audience. Use time-saving content marketing tools like Narrow.io that work with you to help organically grow your following.
  1. Make reference to influencers by linking to their content or quoting them within your content marketing. Then reach out and let them know when you’ve mentioned them, either through manual social notifications, via email, or with a tool like ContentMarketer.io.
  1. Sometimes the best type of content marketing is a genuine thank you email or letter. At When I Work, the team sends out handwritten thank you cards to all new customers. Nearly 70% of the time, the cards get shared on social media, and referrals are up by 23% as a result. It’s such a simple thing, but it’s a win-win for both the business and its customers.
  1. Don’t generate one-off pieces of content. Create series pieces to drive repeat traffic. A great example of this is Neil Patel’s $100,000 Challenge series.
  1. Remember to use the basic principles of conversion optimization so that all of your content, on every channel, has a higher chance of generating leads and sales for your team. Think about headlines, visual engagement, content layout, and call to action, just to name a few.
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  1. Pay close attention to your analytics so you can keep track of the most popular topics and content types that are bringing in or driving traffic to your site. Do a lot more of what works, and cut the dead weight from your strategy.
  1. Trending content is important, but remember to include evergreen content that will continue to produce traffic month after month, year after year. One excellent example of this is this comprehensive guide to lawn care by LawnStarter.
  1. Always keep the focus on your audience when you produce content, no matter the type or channel. “Don’t focus on having a great blog,” says Brian Clark, Founder of CopyBlogger. “Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.” Need help building the right audience to promote content to on Twitter? Try using Narrow.
  1. Talk and write as if you were having a conversation with a friend. Your audience is far more likely to relate to and engage with content that is conversational in nature. Speak on their level. You’re not a textbook.
  1. You can’t force good writing. Try different conditions, influences, and times of day for writing. Find the conditions that are most conducive to your creativity. If you can’t manage, you can always turn to freelancers to help you produce the content that your audience is hungry to find.

Do you have any tips in your playbook to make content marketing easier? Share them in the comments below.

Entrepreneur & Digital Marketing Strategist

I build and grow SaaS companies.

“When it comes to marketing, Sujan is the best. I’ve never met someone with such creative tactics and deep domain knowledge not just in one channel, but in every flavor of marketing. From content, to scrappy guerrilla tactics, to PR, Sujan always blows my mind with what he comes up with.”

RYAN FARLEY Co-Founder of Lawn Starter

Comment (14) - Cancel Reply

Jakob 102 months ago

Hi Sujan,

Great list. One note on point number 5. This reminds of the old days when bloggers tried to indoctrinate their peers that daily blogging was a requirement for success. Sure longer posts might equate to better SERPs and more traffic, but indicating a link between post length and value, is just wrong. Justification is the missing ingredient. If an article is written based on being:

– long
– seo optimized

I will, in majority of situations, bore the reader to death. It reminds me old school assignments, where projects had min. page requirements, simply because the school didn’t have better ways to go about things. But making papers long didn’t automatically guarantee a good grade. The same is true with blog posts…

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Alex Barshai 101 months ago

Agree and disagree. Statistic says that in average longer posts bring more traffic and show higher in SERP. But I agree that if a long post doesn’t have a value it’s just nonsense.

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Rajeev Sharma 102 months ago

Hi Sujan, I agree with point no. 11 share content on social media will help increase traffic.

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Lana Pavkovic 102 months ago

Great stuff Sujan. Thanks for sharing.

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Kathy Davies 102 months ago

Great post, Sujan. #17 really resonates. Inclusion of links and connections to other tools, supporting research and helpful content increases the content value. The post is also then located in the larger ecosystem and highly credible. You’ve done it here, and that makes this list a resource I will return to repeatedly. Thank you!

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Sujan Patel 102 months ago

Thanks Kathy!

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Russel 102 months ago

Video marketing trends coming soon. I really love video marketing. thanks for sharing nice article.

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Danish 102 months ago

Wow Sujan, thanks for sharing wonderful tips.
Was wondering for point #18 about sending handwritten postcards, like how effective it could be in real time. This seems to be out of the box hack for building relations with customers.

Danish!

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Bican Valeriu 99 months ago

Build your email list from day one would be #1 tip.

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amandeep 96 months ago

Wow Sujan, thanks for sharing wonderful tips.
Was wondering for point #18 about sending handwritten postcards, like how effective it could be in real time.

I really love video marketing. thanks for sharing nice article.

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Sujan Patel 96 months ago

the timeframe is very important.

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Rahul Chawla 94 months ago

Hey Sujan,

Recently we did the handwritten notes as well.

It went pretty well, and few clients did share the image on social media.

I guess the trick it to ensure that you are making it as simple as possible for the end user to share the pic on their Facebook page and also doing a couple of follow-ups.

Some users are juggling with so many tasks, and few follow-ups will help you achieve the desired outcome.

HINT – If you can get the image to be shared by some other groups, then the reach just amplifies – e.g., https://technowand.com.au/six-tips-for-getting-influential-facebook-groups-to-share-your-content/

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Rahul Chawla 93 months ago

Wow Sujan – We actually started getting some visitors off this page – I checked in google analytics and was surprised to see referral traffic from https://www.sujanpatel.com

You are one wise man Sujan.

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Sujan Patel 93 months ago

enjoy the traffic and keep up the great work 🙂

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