Do you want to get more traffic and conversions from your content marketing initiatives? Are you struggling to understand whether your campaigns were successful or not?
If your answer is yes, then don’t worry because you are not alone. Many content marketers face these challenges that can be easily overcome by following certain best practices.
Follow these content marketing best practices and get the most out of your campaigns.
1. Create Targeted Content
All content that you create needs to be in accordance with the preferences of your target audience. You should know who you’re writing for, to be able to attract and engage them better.
Therefore, your content marketing process should start with identifying and defining your target audience. Once you know who your target audience is, you should also understand their content needs and preferences.
You can do this by gathering audience insights from your current audience and seeking feedback. You can also use analytics to understand what kind of content works well for your audience.
Targeted content has a higher likelihood of driving traffic and conversions than generic content. So, you should start creating content only when you have e a fair understanding of your audience and their preferences.
2. Post Regularly and Consistently
Another content marketing best practice that you should follow is to be regular and consistent in creating and posting content. Websites that get the most traffic are the ones that consistently post good-quality, targeted content for their audience.
To ensure that you do this, create a content calendar. This should include all types of content that you create for different platforms like websites, social media, etc.
You can decide the frequency at which you can post and the topics that you would like to cover. Other things that you can include in your calendar are topics, keywords, date/time of publishing, distribution channel, etc.
Ideally, you should have at least a week’s content ready in advance. This ensures that in case of any problems you can still maintain your frequency of posting.
3. Optimize for Search Engines
All your content, irrespective of type or platform on which it is posted, needs to be optimized for your target keywords. This helps you attract the right people to your content.
This is especially important if your goal is to generate qualified leads for your business from content marketing. The longer and more specific keywords you use, the more qualified leads you will get.
Wondering why that is important?
By attracting people who are interested in a specific topic, you are attracting potential customers to your website or content. This can be a chance for driving sales conversions and not just driving irrelevant traffic to your website.
4. Guest Post on Authoritative Websites
One of the most effective content marketing best practices to drive traffic is guest posting. It focuses on getting relevant referral traffic from other authoritative websites in your niche.
All you need to do is find authoritative websites in your field and see if they allow guest posts. Build a list of websites that do and the kind of topics that they accept.
Start creating content for these just like you do your own website. You can also include guest posts in your content calendar to ensure that you post on other websites regularly.
5. Use Analytics to Fuel Your Content Strategy
The most important best practice for running successful content marketing campaigns is using analytics to track and measure their performance. This helps you determine whether you met your goals or not.
It also helps you understand what works best for your audience. You can use this to optimize your future content marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Follow these best practices and run successful content marketing campaigns that help you achieve your marketing goals.
Also, don’t forget to define your goals and identify KPIs to help you measure your campaign’s performance on these goals. Check out this infographic for a comprehensive list of KPIs that you use.
Author Bio:
Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in influencer marketing, content marketing, and SEO. He is the co-founder of Attrock, a digital marketing agency. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities.
