Content marketing has evolved into much more than a buzzword over the last couple of years, becoming a key aspect of marketing strategies for businesses of all sizes. A content marketing strategy can produce incredible results when carried out appropriately, and if you’re not utilizing one already, the time to get started is now. Take it from serial entrepreneur, Gary Vaynerchuk. More on him later…
First and foremost, it’s important to keep in mind that content marketers don’t just write, they write with a purpose. While this might seem like a minor distinction, it can make the difference between wasting your time and investing time in the creation of content that delivers search rankings, qualified prospects, and sales long after it has been published. What makes you content market like a boss, is leveraging data.
The most important data to consider that will help establish your content marketing strategy include the following…
- The most shared content by keyword
- The best days to publish for your market sector
- Find out how many words should be in a post for SEO
- Learning what kind of content performs best for your niche
- Understanding which post format consistently works the best, including how to’s, lists, tutorials, etc.
“The most effective B2B content marketers allocate a larger portion of their budget to content marketing: 42% of their total budget, compared to 28% for less-effective marketers.” (source)
Key Data You Should be Researching to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy:
Your Website Content
At the heart of any content marketing strategy is your website’s content. The best way to organize ideas is by using an editorial calendar, including everything that you want to study. Everything in your editorial calendar needs to be subjected to research, including factors like blog titles, authors, content categories, publication dates and times. You can use tools like Google Analytics to gather information as well as social media shares and engagements. Google “blog titles” to get help on creating catchy, compelling titles that make people want to click – but aren’t sleezy click bait.
Your Competitors’ Content
You can gather the same data by studying your competitors, it’s just going to take longer because it takes manual labor. You’ll need to read through their content, look for comments, shares, likes, etc. It will be worth the effort because you’ll be able to gather valuable insights. Seek out clues in the comments for ideas they got wrong or that may seem incomplete.
Social Media Content
Social data is incredibly powerful when it comes to driving a marketing strategy, helping you make a wide variety of decisions, ranging from what kind of content to create, which will be shareable and which won’t. You can gather key metrics from social sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, using their Insights function, supplying information on performance by post type, in addition to seeing the best performing posts and reach, as well as engagement rates, all information that will help you see how your content is being received. Take that information on the most engaged posts and “boost” them for more reach while simultaneously creating more of the same type – with a new angle of course.
Gathering Data Using Keyword Research
A lot of marketers make the mistake of just blogging and anticipating results, however the most important thing to understand is how keywords help define your audience. You’ll need to come up with phrases that are closely relevant to your niche, also keeping in mind that the majority of your content and link building needs to be focused on buyer intent relevant keywords and those closely related to what you have to offer. This works for both B2C and B2B applications. They both have buyers. Take note and understand that Google needs to associate every single page on the web with a theme or topic. By using good research you can “create the theme” of your content, making it easier for Google to understand and properly categorize it.
Once you’ve come up with your main keywords, type them into Google and check out the suggestions found at the bottom of the page. These suggestions are derived from actual searches by people using your keywords (or similar to). Also, look at the titles that come up on the 1st page of Google and make note of the titles and meta descriptions. Also, pay attention to the ads that rank high on the page (the ads with the most clicks always rank higher). The phrases used in these ads have already earned proven click through rates, so why not incorporate them into your content marketing strategy? Once you have a nice mix of buyer centric keywords together, come up with content ideas that harmonize with each keyword.
The Bottom Line
The more data you collect on successful vs. unsuccessful content, the better your content marketing strategy is going to be. Sure, it will take a lot of effort, but the end results will be profound.
BONUS #1
Use Coschedule’s blog title analyzer to help test different blog titles and their predicted effectiveness:
BONUS #2
Speaking of content marketing like a boss, no one does it better than Gary Vaynerchuk. If you have some time to kill, this video is worth it! Seriously, you should watch this video. You’ll learn a lot by the end and come away feeling reinvigorated, ready to create some killer content.
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