7 Content Marketing Tips

Updated January 10, 2023

98% of Marketers Create Content

According to a recent study 93% of Marketers now carry out some kind of content marketing. But only 42% of those marketers actually think that they do it well.  As we create our own content, and help clients create their content, we see numerous places where marketers can improve the material they share by using one of these seven content marketing tips.

Our Best Content Marketing Tips

Let’s look at each of the seven content marketing tips that will help you if you’re worried about your content marketing:

1. Content should be useful – don’t waste time with sales copy or promotional material. Your content has to be valuable on its own even if they never purchase from you. Remember searchers are asking Google and other search engines questions. Focus on educating your readers, answering their question(s), telling them things they don’t know or giving them new ways of looking at their problems.

2. Don’t just create content for the sake of it –  You need to 1) have a plan, 2) a basic idea of your buyer persona, 3) know what your sales funnel is, and 4) what content you already have. If you’re writing blog posts about home remodeling for a construction company, make sure you cover topics customers actually want to learn about (DIY focused content, for example, would not be as good a piece on “how to interview a contractor” because people would not be on your site looking for DIY tips).

3. Don’t get stuck with just a blog – content doesn’t have to be a long essay. You can do video, images, infographics, tweets, and much more. Move past the thinking that says everything has to be a blog post. Blogging is good for SEO and can create good content, but it isn’t the only answer for your business. Also, don’t neglect your static website pages. Have enough content available via your main navigation so your reader can find the generation information (like services or locations) easily.  We would suggest you put aside time every month to update pages on your website. Just as you would for creating blog, or social media, content.

4. Writing isn’t enough – Promote and push out your content. Writing a good blog post is brilliant, but if you’re not promoting it on social media, sharing it with customers, or getting it out there, it’s not serving your business to the best of its ability. People need to read what you’re writing for it to have value.

5. Don’t forget SEO (also don’t focus solely on SEO) – SEO is important, but it shouldn’t dictate everything about your content writing. Write for the human reader, not the Google crawler. You’ve probably noticed that our content marketing tips guide you to cater to your customers and potential customers. As you optimize, it’s tempting to keyword stuff blog posts so it gets “ranked” with Google. However, readability suffers and therefore the material’s sharability. In essence, see tip #1.

6. Pace yourself – If you look into content publishing best practices you’ll see that you should be blogging regularly, multiple times per week, while also sharing other people’s content on multiple social media platforms. Keep things simple at first. Post once or twice a week and work up to doing more. Don’t run before you can walk. Get into the habit and then remain consistent. Now we’re posting content four times a week, but it took us two years to build up to this pace.

7. Rome wasn’t built in a day – In all likelihood, your blog posts will not get much traffic at first. You might post them regularly for a while and see very little response apart from spam comments selling NFL jerseys or name-brand pharmaceuticals. Don’t lose hope. It takes time to build a readership. You’re also in the process of developing a real voice for your brand. Remember that SEO is a long-term marketing strategy and even if you aren’t getting readers now, you are helping your sites SEO by regularly publishing quality content.

Have a content marketing tip to add to our list? We’d love to hear how you keep your content machine rolling.

This post was originally published in 2016 and updated on 8/28/18.

Photo credit – Top: Joe The Goat Farmer
Photo credit – Bottom: Pixel Creatures