Five Data-Driven Improvements To Your Content Marketing Strategy To truly master content marketing, you need to have a tried and tested strategy that will get your articles, videos, or podcasts in front of thousands of viewers.
By Abdullahi Muhammed •
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If you want to scale your business to new heights, publish viral content, and succeed in the world of online entrepreneurship, then you have to become a master at content marketing.
And to truly master content marketing, you need to have a tried and tested strategy that will get your articles, videos, or podcasts in front of thousands of viewers.
This is actually a lot simpler than you might imagine.
With these five simple improvements, you can instantly increase the effectiveness of your campaigns and grow your brand's reach beyond what you thought was possible.
1. Set crystal clear goals for your content
When I ask most business owners what goals they have set with their content marketing campaign, their obvious answer is: "More sales."
The problem is, there are few instances where a single piece of content will directly lead to an increase in sales for your company.
Instead, you should shift your focus towards goals that are just one or two steps removed from the actual sale.
For example, if you were trying to create a viral blog post, your goal could be:
- To increase traffic to your website, generating new leads and sales.
- To improve customer loyalty leading to more repeat sales, and more word-of-mouth marketing.
- To connect with influencers within your niche, opening up new marketing channels, and increasing your brand's authority, which, of course, means more sales.
Once you have defined your goal, you can develop your content marketing campaign around that target, instead of blindly boosting content with no definitive purpose.
Related: Seven Steps That Helped Me Increase My Income By 20x In Two Years
2. Track the right metrics
I am a big-on-metrics kinda guy.
No matter how emotionally invested you are in something, the metrics will never lie.
And this is a good thing.
Most people who become entrepreneurs end up making decisions based off of emotion instead of data which inevitably leads to loss of money, time or, in extreme cases, their business.
However, if you know which metrics to track and you can apathetically make decisions based off of the numbers, you will be able to operate your content marketing with a machine-like efficiency resulting in an increase in revenue and a decrease in risk.
So which metrics should you track?
Well, this will ultimately be determined by your specific marketing methods and goals.
However, there are five categories that you should track no matter what methods you use or what you hope to achieve.
- Investment Metrics: How much are you spending on your content marketing? How much of a return are you seeing on that investment and from what avenues?
- User Metrics: How many page views are you getting? How many downloads, visits, and likes is your content generating?
- Sharing Metrics: How many times and through what channels is your content getting shared?
- Lead Metrics: How many leads does your content generate through email opt-ins or social media subscribers?
- Sales Metrics: The most important of all of them, how many of the leads that you generate from your content actually become paying customers?
Just use the right tools and develop a system for tracking these metrics, and the rest of your content marketing becomes easy. You can quickly see what is working, what isn't, and what changes you can make to improve efficiency.
3. Focus your content on your customer's needs
The real secret sauce of effective content marketing is to focus on your customer's needs.
Why are customers coming to your content?
What is the need that your content can meet?
It is possible to have amazing content and an effective marketing campaign, and still fall face down, if you are not focusing that content on what your customers need.
A great way to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns is to use the power of customer surveys. Instead of guessing at what your customers need, ask them, and base your content (once again) off of the numbers.
Another great way to really know what your customer needs is to do keyword research. Say you want to write a book on how to raise funds for a startup. Instead of guessing whether that's something your target audience would bite or not, use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner to learn what people are typing into Google, or KDPRocket to learn what customers are typing in Amazon.
If you can create epic content that truly meets your customer's needs and create an effective marketing campaign that will get your content in front of more eyeballs, then success becomes inevitable.
Related: Seven Digital Marketing Mistakes UAE Brands Make (And How To Fix Them)
4. "Gary-V" it
In his book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, Gary Vaynerchuk talks about the importance of offering constant and consistent value before you ever ask for anything in return.
One of the quickest ways to succeed in content marketing is to start focusing on offering tons of value before you ever ask for a sale.
Give away amazing content that you could as well charge for, build loyalty to you and your brand, and then, the sale is all but guaranteed.
Want some examples? Here are three:
- 15 Surefire Ways to Boost Your Social Media Marketing in Under an Hour
- 101 Simple and Effective Ways to Increase Your Blog Traffic
- Google's 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List
What's common to these three posts? They're in-depth, insanely valuable and absolutely free. That's what you want to emulate.
5. Engage with your audience
The final step to improve your content marketing strategy is to get involved with your audience once the campaign goes live.
I know a lot of entrepreneurs are fans of the "set it and forget it" method of content marketing, but if you want to be truly effective, then you need to engage with your audience.
By getting engaged with the audience, viewers will start to see you as a real person instead of just an article or video on the screen.
This will lead to more fans, more loyalty, and ultimately, more sales.
Conclusion
By using these five simple steps, you can take your content marketing campaign from good to great almost overnight.
While it will not be easy, the process is tried, true, and as simple as can be.
If you are willing to put in the effort, you will see results, and your content will gain more traction than ever before.
Related: Five Essential Steps To Creating Content That Works For Your Business
