Hacking Your Content Strategy: 21 Tips and Tricks to Improve Efficiency

Killer, epic content is critically important to your business’s marketing strategy, but you know as well as I do that creating it takes time. And whether you’ve got a target audience that doesn’t know you exist or a C-suite breathing down the back of your neck to prove ROI, you need results faster than that.

Marketers in every industry and vertical are under skyrocketing amounts of pressure to the enormous amount of content needed to reach their goals. It isn’t surprising to hear, then, that according to the Content Marketing Institute, 69% of marketers cite lack of time as one of their biggest challenges.

Fortunately, there are a number of ways that you can streamline your content marketing strategy. Here are 21 hacks that can help you execute your campaigns more seamlessly – possibly even increasing your ROI at the same time.

Ask for Free Feedback

Sometimes, it feels like one of the hardest parts of creating content is simply coming up with new ideas in the first place. In fact, there have been plenty of times in my career where brainstorming the topic of the content piece I’d go on to create took longer than building out the content itself!

You can speed the process up by asking others to participate in your ideation process. Most people will be happy to provide free feedback on your content, particularly on the topics they’d like to see you cover in the future. The most obvious benefit of this is that you can use their input to speed up your execution process. However, an even more valuable benefit is that your readers will be more likely to eventually share your content with others, since they’re already interested in the subject matter.

Use Focus Groups to Generate Content Ideas

On the other hand, where are you supposed to start if you don’t have an existing audience you can query? If you don’t have followers you can poll, you can simulate the experience with paid focus groups.

Many companies use traditional focus groups to better understand their customers. But beyond using these groups for the classic pursuits of improving your products and customer service strategy, use them to find out what kinds of content your customers are interested in reading and sharing. Patrick Shea from Hubspot also recommends asking focus group participants about your competitors, how they use your products and their take on industry trends.

Use Social Analytics Tools to Schedule Social Posts

The success of your individual content pieces comes down to a number of different factors (and a whole lot of luck), but one thing is certain: if your followers don’t see the content piece, it won’t generate any buzz.

That’s why you need to choose the time that you share posts on your social profiles very carefully. There are definite “sweet spots” when your audience is most active and your content will gain the most traction. Matching your publishing schedule to these peak engagement periods helps you get the most out of your content pieces, so look to social analytics tools such as FollowerWonk and BufferApp for insights on the best time of day to share content.

Reward Social Followers

Outside of your creation process, the success of your content marketing strategy hinges on the efforts of your social media followers. And if they go out of their way to help your business by sharing your content, you should absolutely consider rewarding them for their loyalty – consequently encouraging them to make additional posts in the future.

There are plenty of great examples of companies out there that have thought up highly innovative ways to repay their followers. Virgin Atlantic, for example, delivered 100 cupcakes to a loyal blogger and gave a free ride to a Twitter follower that was struggling to get a ride to a business meeting. Making somebody’s day with a simple – or complex – reward is an easy way to generate more buzz than you can with content pieces alone.

Use Short and Witty Posts to Engage Followers

Lengthy posts can be very impressive and add a lot of value to your website, but they aren’t always necessary. Sometimes, a much shorter post would suffice. You may even find that a simple meme can be used to communicate a powerful message.

Obviously, your blog shouldn’t consist entirely of images and a few sentences. However, when done correctly, short posts can be refreshing and effective – especially when you don’t have the time or budget to create longer pieces of content from scratch. And hey – if it works for Seth Godin, it might just work for you too.

Curate

Don’t have time to create your own content? Curate great posts from others!

Using content from other sources can be a very effective way to streamline the content creation process. Here’s how:

• When you curate content, you’re able to execute your content marketing strategy much more quickly. The time you save can be used to improve other areas of your business, or to invest in the creation of the pillar content pieces that will form the cornerstones of your campaign.
• Since you’re basing your content off of popular posts that other experts have already written, you’ll find that many of these experts will be willing to share your content with their audiences, leading to additional exposure for your business.

Create Automated Visual Content

Another strategy to adopt when you’re running short on time is making use of online tools that help you generate automated visual content. For example, Visual.ly’s Twitterize Yourself can create visual graphs depicting the activities of your social followers, while Storify can turn your series of tweets into visual stories. Once you’ve run these tools, you’ll have access to great content that required a minimum amount of effort to create.

Write Longer Posts

Now, let’s get this out of the way right now… I’m obviously contradicting myself, since I said earlier that shorter posts can help you get a handle on your editorial calendar without losing contact with your followers.

But interestingly, the inverse of my previous recommendation can be true as well. Although lengthier blog posts take longer to write, they can actually provide more value over the long run (as long as you choose the right topic and create content that’s truly valuable to your followers). Moreover, there are many AI content writing tools that can be of great help for writing long form articles faster and better.

Think of it this way… If you created a killer long-form blog post that was shared virally throughout your industry, there’s a good chance that you’d receive significantly higher traffic and social shares than you would on an engaging, but short post. Say you spent 10 times longer creating a long post than you would a short post, but earned 20 times the traffic and shares. In this case, your efforts have paid off – you’ve effectively spent less time reaching followers than you would with a series of shorter posts.

Start Headlines with the Number “2”

This may be a surprising piece of advice, but if you want to hack your content marketing strategy, consider creating list posts with headlines starting with the number “2” (for example, “21 Tips and Tricks to Improve Efficiency”). One poll found that 36% of users prefer blog posts that start with the number “2” over any other number.

Tweak Thank You Pages to Groom Customers for Future Conversions

Most marketers feel that their job is done after they’ve closed the sale. However, established customers are often willing to make additional purchases. You’ll be able to scale your marketing campaigns much more easily if you take the time to requalify existing customers for new purchases, rather than trying to source new leads.

One of the best ways to do this is to make some simple tweaks to your “thank you” page to convince customers to consider making future purchases. As an example, your “thank you” page could recommend other products that go well with the ones your customers recently purchased, in addition to providing instructions on how to purchase them.

Always test the information you include on your “thank you” pages, but don’t be surprised if referring customers to further products or content pieces boosts your conversion rate.

Leverage Popular Older Content

If it’s been a while since you’ve done a content audit, set aside some time to go through all of the content on your website to see whether or not it’s still contributing to your conversion goals. Chances are, as you do this, you’ll find some posts that were popular when they were first published – these can be leveraged to create new content (or simply be republished) without requiring you to start from scratch.

Depending on the past popular posts you find, you may be able to get away with just a few tweaks, such as increasing the length of the piece or updating it with recent information. Since the posts were popular before, there’s a good chance they’ll gain traction again with your new followers after you share them on your social profiles.

Simplify the Sharing Process

If you create something truly great, your followers will want to share it – but they aren’t going to jump through a ton of hoops to do it. Your content will receive much more visibility if you make sure that it can be easily shared – a process that typically takes the shape of installing modern social sharing buttons on your website. The Flare app is an easy way to get started, while Hubspot offers a great tutorial on how to integrate more specific buttons into your site’s content.

Segment Emails Based on Both Preferences and Behavior

Email marketing can play a huge role in the success of your content campaigns, but you can’t just send the same message to every member in your list, as everyone subscribed for different reasons. Fortunately, Hubspot, Aweber and other email marketing tools provide solutions that allow you to segment your list by user preferences and behavior.

Take advantage of these tools to ensure you’re sending the right emails to the most appropriate customers. Once your segments are in place, you can use email marketing to notify customers when you create and deploy high-value content pieces, all while making sure your messages hit only those who will find the content relevant and interesting.

Use Analytics to Identify Audience Demographics

Want to know one of the biggest ways you can waste time on your content campaigns? Creating content that falls flat with your audience – all because you didn’t take the time to get to know their demographics and interests.

You can’t create content that resonates with your viewers if you don’t know who they are. To prevent these types of missed opportunities, take advantage of tools like Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, Alexa, Compete.com and other analytics programs to better understand your users. This will allow you to build the content your followers actually want, rather than relying solely on potentially-costly trial-and-error.

Learn Google Search Hacks

Google is obviously one of the most popular tools out there when it comes to researching new content ideas. But while Google does an exceptional job finding content, it can’t read your mind. To improve your efficiency, brush up on the different Google search commands that can help you find results more easily. Google provides a helpful overview of its filtering commands on this page, as well as a discussion on search commands that will help you put this hack into practice.

Use Note-Taking Applications

I’m on the go constantly, and if I didn’t have a system in place for recording great content ideas when I had them, I’d forget half the pieces I want to create. There are tons of different note-taking applications out there that can help you record your ideas – Evernote and Simplenote are two of the most effective. Learn to use these tools as effectively as possible, and you’ll cut down significantly on the amount of time you have to spend brainstorming content ideas.

Create Content that Can Be Easily Repurposed

As I’ve mentioned already in this post – and as you probably already know from practice – creating new content from scratch can be extremely time-consuming. So instead, why not try to leverage the content you’ve already written by repurposing it into other formats?

Let’s look at an example to see how this could play out… Suppose you’ve written a popular article in the past titled, “22 Easy Stock Trading Tips Most Beginners Don’t Know.” Without having to research a new blog post topic, you could transform this article into all of the following content pieces:

• A 22-part series covering each tip in more detail
• A downloadable guide featuring examples of each tip put into practice
• An audio recording of you reading each tip
• A video recording of you showing the tips in action
• A follow-up blog post titled “22 More Easy Stock Trading Tips Beginners Must Know”

Find What’s Working… And Do It Better

Here’s one strategy I use all the time when brainstorming content ideas… Instead of coming up with my own topics and hoping for the best, I use BuzzSumo to research the specific content pieces that have performed best for my competitors in terms of social shares, as well as those that have performed best related to specific keywords from within the industries I’m working in.

As I look at these lists of top posts, I’m trying to find pieces that have been shared widely, but that still have room for improvement. As an example, I might see a blog post that covers ten tips on a given subject, but doesn’t go into much depth in terms of showing readers how to implement these tips. That’s a perfect opportunity for me to create a better guide that will provide readers with more actionable advice, all while virtually guaranteeing social shares.

Use Markerly to Share Portions of Content

If you’ve done your job right, you’ll find that visitors are often moved by a particular section of your content. Instead of forcing them to copy and paste the section into their social updates to share the piece, you can use Markerly – an awesome tool that lets visitors easily select and share those snippets with their readers, rather than using the headlines of your pieces.

Get Others to Promote Your Content for You

Say you’re a small tech company trying to reach new prospects through content marketing. Do you think you’ll get faster results if you a) pound the pavement all day, every day, cranking out content on the hopes that one piece will go viral, or b) get an editor from Mashable or TechCrunch to share one of your content pieces with their vast audiences?

It should be pretty clear that leveraging those with existing audiences is a much faster approach than building your own brand. That’s not to say that you should ignore the importance of brand building, but if you’re looking to hack your content marketing strategy, you’re going to drive results much faster if you’re able to harness the power of the audiences current authority figures in your industry have already cultivated.

Use Google Alerts to Monitor Industry Trends

Finally, if you want to hack the content creation process, one quick way to get your content to stand out is to be the first to report on a new topic or news story affecting your industry. And the easiest way to get up-to-date information is with Google Alerts, another excellent tool for generating content ideas. Simply subscribe to alerts for keywords related to your industry, and set your preferences to deliver alerts as they arrive (rather than in a daily digest format).

You may want to set up a rule that automatically filters these messages to a folder to prevent clogging up your inbox, but once enacted, you’ll find that these messages can save your hours of time looking through different sources to find relevant information for new posts.

Got another hack that you think deserves a place on this list? I’d love to hear it! Share your recommendations by leaving a comment below.