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.

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.

2. 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.

3. Promote your content through a .com domain as often as possible. 84% of top-ranking pages use .com as their top-level domain.

4. “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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. Never skip an opportunity to leverage email in your content marketing. 80% of businesses report that email is directly tied to their primary revenue.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. Syndicate your content to reach a new audience and drive referral traffic back to your site.

14. Always create a content strategy. The most effective content marketers are more likely to have a documented strategy in place.

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. 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.