The best strategies for maximising your content marketing performance

While many SEO consultants are shifting to content marketing to supplement link building efforts, the main question has been how to stand out. For many marketers, the focus of their content efforts is building links to improve the overall SEO performance. However, the approach falls short of getting the bigger picture of overall consumer needs and business performance. Therefore, how can they make their content marketing to stand out and work for them?

Here are some proven strategies you can adopt.

Define the content marketing strategy and Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

To engage your target audience and guide them to conversion, it is important to understand the purchase journey and methods of influencing it. For example, what type of information do clients need at every stage of the purchase journey? To be sure of success at every stage of the journey, you must draw a clear framework that separately looks all Key Performace Indicators (KPI).

• Social KPIs such as tweets, likes, and shares
• Business KPIs such as downloads, leads, visits, and conversions
• Owned KPIs such as domain authority and other engagement metrics

Precisely understand the target audience and the objective of your content

To come up with content that connects perfectly well with the target audience, it is important to understand their intent. It is important to create the right personas and augment them with emotional intelligence. A marketer should also define the aim of the content; is it for engaging the current audience or attracting new followers?

Having drawn the major KPIs, it is time to focus on the target audience to establish what they want and shape your ideas. Here, you should focus on understanding the issues that affect the target audience and provide solutions to them. Besides, the content should be entertaining, create experiences, and make the audience to easily associate with your brand.

Connect with your audience through various channels

To make your content helpful to the target audience, it is important to identify who and where they are. Besides, you also need to determine when they are available and best ways to talk to them. This way, you get an opportunity to repurpose the content and drive optimal engagement. To achieve this, it is important to have the marketing team operate on the same plan as opposed to silos. You can achieve this through content aimed at creating trust, to educate, and capture the target audience imagination. Remember to ensure that all campaigns are well connected via different channels and can add value to the target audience.

More is not always the best

Many consumers out there believe that about 60% of marketing content released by brands is clutter. To debunk this argument, it is important to take a consumer-centric approach by creating less content that delivers more value to clients. Here, the main focus should be walking with clients to understand what they need and answer them promptly. For example, as opposed to crafting lengthy posts, you can use the question and answer model such as the expert blog posts. Remember to test everything at all stages of your content marketing to be sure the SEO strategy is headed in the right direction.