TL;DR: Content marketing is a multifaceted discipline that requires more than just creating content. Success comes from understanding your audience, using data to guide decisions, optimizing for search and user experience, promoting strategically, and continuously testing and improving what you publish. Follow these content marketing best practices for better results.
Introduction
There’s a lot to know about content marketing. You’ve got the content creation part, the social media part, the SEO. The audience growth, the influencers… Sometimes it seems like it just goes on and on.
That’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good because it means there’s always more to learn. There are always new techniques to master, new technologies to try out. It keeps things interesting, and keeps your skill sets sharp and growing.
The bad part? Well, if you’re the type who’d like to just learn something once and then keep doing it the same way forever … that’s not going to work very well.
To give you a broad view of the content marketing best practices used in the industry, we thought we’d package them up like ABCs. Odds are good you’re already doing most of these. But maybe there’s one or two you could add to your quiver. Keep reading to find out.
Know Your Audience
You know how real estate is about “location, location, location?” Content marketing is about audience, audience, audience. That’s because the whole point of content marketing is to attract and engage an audience. It’s “owned media”, as the agency folks would say.
Besides being the most important of the content marketing best practices, your audience is also a factor in persona marketing – the technique of breaking up your customers into different profiles, and then creating content and a sales funnel that’s tailored to each group.
Master the Blog
The anchor of many content marketing programs. Use your blog as a content engine by reformatting what you publish there into ebooks, infographics, SlideShares and more. Also make sure you’ve got your blog set up for maximum lead generation. Blogs are particularly effective for that.
Use a Call to Action
And its sister best practice – conversion optimization. Every piece of content you publish should have a call to action. Even if the call to action is just to like, comment or share. Using the call to action to lead people to another piece of content works well, too.
The Importance of Quality Data
As in data-driven marketing. Smart marketers are data-savvy. They know when to trust their data and when to question its limits. They are genius at shifting it for maximum actionable insights. They obsess about data quality. Their data wisdom gets applied to every aspect of their content marketing, from strategy to choosing a blog post title.
Engagement Trends
It’s the thing we’re all focused on. Unfortunately, engagement rates appear to be in decline. Especially since the arrival of AI tools and zero-click environments. To stay ahead of that trend, apply what you can from these best practices.
Facebook and Social Sharing
Say what you will of the social Goliath. It’s the master of sharing. Facebook drives more referral traffic than even Google for the top 400 digital publishers.
Optimize for Google
Google’s a pretty big deal for content marketers. Sure, the Google+ thing didn’t go so well. But many of us live and die by our search engine rankings. We also love our free Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts. And then there’s YouTube, owned by Google. And then there’s Google Drive, which some companies use instead of Microsoft Office.
Write Better Headlines
They matter. A lot. Great headlines can double, triple and even quadruple your content’s reach. The wrong one can kill it.
The editors at the viral powerhouse Upworthy would have us all write 25 headlines for every piece of content. Why? ‘Cause somewhere in all those words will be a killa headline. It just takes some work to find it.
Tool for the job: CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer, which will rate your headline on multiple fronts, including SEO length, emotional zing, and how it measures up to their database of headlines and their sharing stats.
Don’t Neglect Images
They’re not just pretty pictures. Having at least one image on every page helps with SEO. And as many of you know, adding images to social media posts is pretty much essential. Social posts with images get much more engagement.
If you’re not a graphic designer, don’t sweat this. Tools like Canva can help a lot. And there’s dozens of places online to find free images.
Joe Pulizzi
The founder of The Content Marketing Institute and probably one of the top ten most influential people in the industry. So it would go without saying that it’s worth reading everything he writes. Find it on his Content Marketing Institute blog, and on his Twitter feed.
Monitor the Right KPIs
As in Key Performance Indictors – another term for “metrics.” This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of results. Trouble is, KPIs can get complicated. There’s lots of them, for starters. And they come in several flavors:
- Lead generation metrics
- Content consumption metrics
- Sharing metrics
- Sales metrics
- Retention metrics
Focus on Lead Generation
It’s the bread and butter of B2B content marketers. Most everything they publish is at least in part a lead generation effort. Usually that lead generation happens through content downloads (aka “gated content”) and landing pages.
Think About Mobile First
There’s more Internet traffic on mobile devices than on desktops now. This has a lot of implications:
- Your website and all other content formats must be mobile-friendly, if not completely responsive.
- Mobile users are especially allergic to slow sites. So speed matters more all the time. Witness the new Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It’s already influencing your search rankings.
- App marketing is rising rapidly.
- Video does particularly well on mobile.
Don’t Forget About Newsletters
You know the old adage: “The money’s in the list.” Even if you’re not in retail, the money’s probably in the list. Newsletters – and other email marketing messages, like welcome emails, surveys, lead nurturing and more – are extremely affordable and a fab way to stay in touch with your audience.
And guess what: Emails are still the preferred channel of communication for marketing messages.
Avoid Common SEO Mistakes
As in search engine optimization. If you want results from your content marketing work, you’ll need the help of the search engines to get there. But don’t worry – SEO is not rocket science as long as you avoid common SEO mistakes along the way. You can learn the rudiments of it in an afternoon. Then leverage tools like Yoast SEO (for WordPress users) to get the basics done.
Promote, Promote, Promote
When you hit “publish”, the work has just begun. Millions of blog posts are published every day – getting your post (or any other content format) some exposure requires a bit of finesse.
Promotion (also called “amplification”) includes working with influencers, sharing on social media, announcing the content to your email subscribers, and even… gasp… advertising.
Yes – consider advertising your content.
Leverage Quizzes
These interactive content formats are fab for lead generation, engagement rates and as a clever way to repackage content from other formats. Try one!
Repurpose Your Existing Content
Aka “reformatting.” This is a must-use content marketing practice, especially if you’re struggling to keep up with content production. Everything you publish should be repurposed into another content format.
That can mean taking something text-based and making it into something visual. Or it can be grouping text-based content like blog posts into ebooks – or even full-length books. Think post-Thanksgiving turkey here. How many delicious leftovers can you make out of your content?
Build a Strategy
The way to avoid “random acts of content.” Strategy should be an iterative process, in that you’re always reviewing how your strategy is working and you’re always checking the data to see how it could be improved.
Test Everything
Test headlines and calls to action. Test email subject lines and landing pages. Test ebook covers, best times to post on social media, and even which social media platforms to be on. A/B test it all!
Improve the User Experience
This applies to everything from how you handle customer service to how easy it is to sign up for your emails. It’s also about how easy it is to navigate your site, and how you craft your messaging through the sales funnel.
This is the age of the customer, after all. Their needs (and how consistently you meet them across channels and stages) should shape every aspect of your marketing and your company.
Video is No longer Optional
It’s big and getting bigger. Remember: The second-largest search engine isn’t Bing. It’s YouTube.
If the idea of getting in front of a camera terrifies you, or if you’ve got no idea how to develop a video marketing strategy, check out our post on video marketing benefits.
Webinars Are Great Too
While they take a bit of work and promotion, webinars are an excellent way to build your email list, position your company as a thought leader, and give your audience and in-depth view of important topics. If doing one on your own seems too hard, consider partnering with another company for a co-webinar. Or hook up with an influencer. The extra payoff there is the influencer is usually very willing to promote this webinar to his or her audience.
Another powerful W best practice: White papers. They even beat out videos and blogs in the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs’ report.
The X Factor
We couldn’t wrap up our list of best practices of content marketing without talking about the X factor, a mysterious secret sauce that causes a piece of content to “go viral.” Despite a lot of studies and a lot of tools and a lot of really bright people trying to crack the code, it’s still a mystery why some things spread like wildfire and why other things – apparently similar things – flop.
Use the Right Words
One of the most powerful words you can use in your content. ‘You’ is a magic word – it’s a spell to build intimacy and trust with your readers. It does particularly well in headlines.
Summary
Content marketing works best when it’s treated as an interconnected system rather than a collection of isolated tactics. From audience understanding and strong calls to action to SEO, promotion, analytics, and user experience, each practice plays a role in attracting the right people and keeping them engaged. As platforms, technology, and behaviors change, marketers who continuously learn, test, and adapt are the ones who turn content into a reliable growth engine.