6 Ways to Give Your Content Marketing a Boost

If you’re investing your company’s time and resources into blogging, social media, video content and other forms of content marketing, you will almost certainly need to have some form of strategy. Otherwise, it can feel like you are creating content just for the sake of it. With that in mind, let’s take a look at six ways you can give your content marketing a boost and get the results that your business needs to be a success:

Have a Set Plan in Place

Creating content without a plan will soon see your creative minds getting lost, and you could find yourself stuck for ideas as a result. There needs to consistency across the board, including writing and uploading blog posts on your website that is filled with insights, knowledge and helpful advice for your readers, which are then shared on your social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

These posts should be happening on a regular basis, and many should be planned out in advance, so you keep on message and ensure that you’re not repeating yourself. Your readers/subscribers will soon move elsewhere for their content if you’re not piquing their interest on a regular basis.

The same rules apply to your social media accounts. It’s great to have your fingers in all the social pies, but if you don’t have a plan in place, you’re just going to neglect these valuable and powerful tools and waste your time. Understand each platform, and this includes understanding what content works and when is best to post on each social network. This way you can start devising your content plan accordingly.

Know Your Goals

While it’s great to have a content marketing plan, the best way to boost it towards getting great results, including more newsletter subscribers, social shares, and blog comments, is to know your goals, and then plan and focus your content towards achieving those goals.

If your end goal is to boost the number of book sales, offering your subscribers access to discount codes and advance copies is the kind of content marketing method that will help you achieve this goal. Sit down as a team and talk through your individual goals, before making a wider decision on the content and the marketing methods that are going to help you achieve those goals.

Measure Your Success with Tracking

Whatever your content marketing goals, you need to be tracking them in order to know for sure what methods are having success and which ones need tweaking in order to achieve more success. Tools like Google Analytics will help you keep tabs on your web traffic- including where the traffic is coming from (emails, social media, Google searches, etc.) and which of your posts and/or pages are bringing in the most traffic. If you have product pages on your site, it will also highlight how people find them, and if there are any holes in the navigation of your website that is preventing them from finding them quickly and making a purchase.

Every social media tool will have its own insights feature, which means you will be able to see which posts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and co. are getting the most likes, shares and most importantly sales, as a result of following links to your products and services pages.

Encourage Collaboration in Meetings

While it’s great to have access to the best plans, tools, and platforms, what really matters is having the best team around your business, in order to create the best content for all of your channels. Some businesses have set creative teams for these tasks, whereas others believe that content marketing should be a collaborative process that everybody should be a part of, and this is why meetings are so important.

Many businesses have forgotten the power of face-to-face meetings because of the access to technology that makes remote working more affordable and easy. However, there is nothing more creative and rewarding than getting a bunch of people together, getting the whiteboard out and brainstorming ideas as a team. For a great post about the importance of the whiteboard in the office, read more here. You will have more content, more ideas, and a more collaborative environment if you take the time to have regular meetings with your team.

Find the Ideal Home for Each Piece of Content

Ask any social media expert, and they will tell you. It doesn’t matter if you have the great written blog post, the most epic photo or the most informative video content. If it’s in the wrong place, nobody will see it, and it won’t get the results and rewards it deserves.

Knowing where to place your content is essential to reaping the rewards it can bring. For example, Instagram is perfect for photos and short video content, so put your best content in these forms to that account. For blog posts, stats and insights, try Twitter, which is more of a conversational social platform. Facebook is the best place for your more sales-oriented posts, and is great for placing news, discounts and offers because it’s wide reach.

If you’re not sure what to post and where to post it, test your content on different mediums and track the results with Google Analytics. You’ll soon see what works and what doesn’t.

Have Both Free and Premium Content Available

Customers like to feel like they’re being rewarded for their loyalty to businesses, and you can grant this to them via your content marketing by giving them access to plenty of free content, including blog posts and special offers via email. However, to give your content marketing an extra boost, try the addition of premium content.

This could come in a variety of forms, including e-books, paperbacks, podcasts, audiobooks, one-to-one consultations, advance warning of tickets for events you might be running. Whatever you decide to do, make sure that you track the success of the premium offers, and get something in return, which in the vast majority of cases, is contact information. These details could be very useful when you have new products and services to offer, and could massively boost your sales as a result.