Follow These Content Marketing Tips to Improve Your Content. The best content on the internet can often get overlooked simply because the effort invested to attract interest either was ineffectively employed or neglected altogether.
If you feel like your online content is somehow missing the mark in capturing the attention of your desired audience, there are a few great content marketing tips you can follow to help put it where it needs to be - both in terms of being in front of those who need to see it and gaining better positioning in search results.
Passive Content Marketing Tips
Passive marketing steps to promote your content properly can help more than you realize, and may involve actions you may not have known could make an impact. The three content marketing tips listed below are considered passive strictly because they are either actions taken before you publish your content online, or they are actions you have little control over once you have published your content.
- Emphasizing valuable and in-depth content is always vital to creating (and promoting) your message, no matter what you are offering to your audience. Search engines have become more savvy in evaluating how valuable quality content may be to a searcher's interests, needs, and intent, which means your content must become equally savvy in conforming to those interests and needs. Creating and publishing evergreen (always relevant) content is an excellent way to offer high-value content to your audience.
- Focusing on organic search by choosing keywords more carefully can make a big difference in where your content shows up on search results. Search engines are able to interpret natural language and conversational queries more accurately, which gives content creators and publishers a wider range of options when it comes to what keywords and phrases may work best. This does require a word of caution, however. You need to understand exactly what your audience is seeking and what words and phrases they are using to find it. Diligent keyword research can offer a lot of assistance in this area.
- Increasing your reputation and authority online, as well as awareness of your content, is something you have little control over after you publish your content online. Because you cannot influence these factors, it is essential that your content meets the needs of your audience and is distributed to them in the most optimal way. Doing so will provide you with the positive impact you need to satisfy this particular passive marketing step.
Active Content Marketing Tips
Active marketing steps are those you can directly control or influence after you have published your content. Your control or influence is also not limited to a single action or single period of time. The three content marketing tips listed below are active steps you can take to market your content after publication.
- Notifying subscribers and followers with targeted content, via email blasts or recipient-selective messages, gives you the opportunity to tell your audience (in whole or part) that you have published content that is of interest to them. You can acquire email lists by adding appropriate calls to action soliciting sign-ups or subscribers, and you can use options or features on social media networks to notify followers who meet certain demographic characteristics.
- Speaking of social media, it is essential that you use it correctly if you want it to work effectively. There are several social networks on which different members of your audience reside when they are online. You need to know which networks they use, how often they do so, when they are most likely to view their desired content, and what type of content most appeals to them. Not everyone uses every social media network - know your audience so you can know where (and how) to reach them most effectively.
- Providing cross-channel support for your content via backlinking gives you the opportunity to put your content in front of as many interested eyes as possible. When you publish content online, don't stop there. Advertise it on your website, landing page, through an email message, on your chosen social media networks, and on your blog. Include a link to the content so your audience can easily reach it and read it - and hopefully act on it.
There are many other tips, tricks, and content marketing methods you can employ to market your online content more effectively, but these six content marketing tips will provide you with a solid foundation for your efforts. As with all other marketing strategies, make sure you devise a plan to market and promote your material that syncs with and supports your overall marketing strategies and efforts. To learn more about creating a digital content strategy, check out our white paper, "What is a Digital Content Strategy? Any Why You Need One!"