Content marketing is the art of generating valuable, relevant visual and written material on a consistent basis for a digital audience. In other words, it’s the practice of creating beautiful a beautiful website, writing interesting email campaigns, and being active on social media, among other things.
The world of content marketing is full of various resources and marketing hacks that all businesses can use to their advantage. The secret is to find the best tools for your business model before your competitors do, then to keep improving your campaigns little by little in.
In time, a bit of content marketing knowledge here and there turns into a full-fledged, strong and successful digital strategy. If you want to speed up the process, though, use the five content marketing hacks to help you out.
1. Write Guest Blogs
It’s no secret that blogging is one of the best digital tools out there. Having a blog creates a substantial amount of reach and depth for your website.
Instead of just having a few basic landing pages, your website becomes a go-to resource for customers to read up on the latest trends and innovations in your industry. This works for large industries with many competitors as well as for niche markets – like these content marketers you can click to read more about.
But, to truly get the most out of this tool, you have to write guest blogs, too. What’s the difference? A blog is something you write on your own website, a guest post is something you write to be posted elsewhere.
In other words, you’re writing a feature to be published somewhere outside of your domain. This increases the level of authority you have in your market and guides more users back to your domain. That is, it brings such traffic if you’ve included a link for people to click!
Links placed on other websites develop a link building strategy. This is a system of links distributed all around the internet that take potential and current users from other pages straight to your homepage (or another landing page).
2. Work with Influencers
As you’re pitching guest blogs, try to develop relationships with the industry publications and other sites you’re posting on. This will help you place more and more links around the internet and it provides more value for the other party, too.
Another mutually beneficial relationship worth making is partnering with an influencer. Online influencers are people who have large, loyal audiences either on their social media accounts or personally-owned website. They’re celebrities as well as everyday people who happen to know a thing or two about content marketing as a whole or a popular niche like fashion, travel, cooking, and credit card points.
The right influencer for you depends on the kind of industry you’re in and the audience you want to reach. The more your individual target markets match up, the better. Still, the results are roughly the same – working with an influencer significantly expands your audience.
Think of this like when musicians get their “big break” on the radio or when a celebrity wears a new designer’s clothing line. If an influencer mentions your brand or even a specific product, you’re hip! You become the next big thing and many of this person’s audience members naturally grow an interest in who you are and what you do.
3. Do a Site Audit
Regardless of how you’re generating traffic, you need to make sure there’s something worth looking at when online users get to your website. Do a site audit to get a better idea of how traffic is coming in and where it’s going once people are on your site.
Which of your landings pages gets the most views and clicks? Which pages could use a bit of extra exposure? Also, how are your conversions looking?
Every little design detail adds up to create the user experience. Your site audit has to think of things in terms of practical SEO tools as well as which visuals and graphics are the most compelling.
Run A/B tests or do an entire digital rebranding if you have to. Such efforts take a significant amount of time and money up front, but in the long-run, they’re well worth the investment.
4. Pay Attention to Your Bounce Rates
When you do a site audit, take a particularly close look at your bounce rates. Sometimes, pages aren’t doing well because users haven’t clicked on them; they aren’t performing because your audience doesn’t find them interesting enough.
The latter is much worse than the former. Try out a different layout, check your load times, and make sure everything is mobile responsive. The sooner you fine-tune these things, the better.
5. Make Your Calls to Action More Engaging
Last but not least, always create exciting CTAs. Your audience should be totally bought-in to the free course you’re offering, the book you’re launching, the clothing sale that’s going on, or the new storefront opening soon.
Whatever your industry and no matter what you’ve got going on, the CTA is what turns site visits into revenue. This isn’t always about the “checkout” or “sign up” button, either.
CTA’s appear in the copy under a social media post and in email campaigns, too. Instead of always focusing on the buy, break things down into the next step of the buying cycle. Ask yourself how you can bring people a little closer to making a purchase rather than trying to sell your product right off the bat.
Also, stop using generic action words. Talk about specials and discounts and use more engaging terms to get people to do what you want. Bonus points if you can make CTA’s time-sensitive.
More Content Marketing Hacks, Tips, and Tricks
Are you in the works of launching your very first startup? Did you just reach the top of your career ladder by finally entering the C-suite?
These are two entirely distinct situations to be in, but one thing is clear among all business leaders and executives. Without the right content marketing hacks and overall strategy, you’re out of luck. The world has gone digital and you need to be right on-trend to engage with your audience and control your market share.
For more business insights to help you do so, click here.