Content Marketing: Tips & Best Practices

Whether it’s a website, a social media account, or even a Google My Business profile, if your business has something published online, you have the ability to use content marketing to grow. Blog posts, YouTube videos, your website’s “About Us” page — these are all considered pieces of content, and there are ways to craft this content to help convert website visitors to loyal customers.

Locate Your Target

Before you write one more blog post or create a custom graphic for social media, ask yourself this: Who are you hoping to reach with this content? If you’re not sure, it’s time to create a persona (or several) that outline who your ideal customer would be and how they would travel the journey from first contact with your business until point of purchase. This is the blueprint of your marketing messages for content; use it to craft your strategy.

Bet On Your Blog

It doesn’t matter how big or how niche your industry or business may be; there needs to be a blog on your website. Updating it frequently sends a clear signal to search engines like Google that you care about keeping your business website relevant and informational. Blog posts also become a library of resources for customers searching for solutions for their pain points. The better and more often you share these solutions, the more likely they’ll be to choose you over the competition.

Consider Your Copywriting

While your blog should contain the bulk of the content marketing copy on your website, it’s not the only copy that you need — or need to optimize. The pages on your site with explanations about your products or services, your testimonials, and even your social media updates are all important pieces of copy. Use SEO keywords to optimize that copy and help customers move from research toward a purchase.

Help Them Decide

Producing quality marketing content for the buyer’s journey is the first step, but helping customers understand what to do with that content is imperative to help with website conversions. These phrases are called “calls to action” and they are a smart psychological trick to push shoppers towards a purchase. Add these CTAs to your content:

• “Sign up now”
• “Try for free”
• “Click to purchase”
• “Like and comment”
• “Share this post”
• “Call/email/message/stop by today”

Reuse & Recycle

While some of your content is time-sensitive, a good portion of it should also be evergreen. This means that it’s always relevant without mentioning specific dates or holidays, and this makes it easy to reuse. For example, you can create a short how-to tutorial blog for one of your products with a description on the site, which can then turn into a video and a week’s worth of social media posts. Getting the most out of your content offers serious ROI on your marketing efforts.

Keep The Process Sustainable

Content marketing is easier to maintain when the publishing cadence matches the team’s available time. Document the audience, reuse durable source material, and review results periodically instead of adding channels that cannot be supported consistently.