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10 Content Marketing Best Practices to Boost Your Brand
Julia McCoy
Monday, 12th Feb 2024Imagine pouring your heart into your content, only to hear crickets. It’s not just about writing; it’s about crafting messages that resonate and reach the right ears at the right time. This guide dives deep into content marketing best practices, so you can stop guessing and start growing.
Discover the art of developing a plan that not only meets your objectives but also satisfies the desires of those you wish to engage. From mastering keyword research to measuring success accurately, we’ve got you covered.
Plus, we’ll explore how AI can give your content creation a cutting-edge advantage.
If you’re aiming to enhance your search presence or connect more intimately with your audience, this piece provides distinct guidelines to ensure your content consistently resonates.
Table Of Contents:
- 10 Content Marketing Best Practices to Boost Your Brand
- 1. Create a Robust Content Marketing Strategy
- 2. Master Keyword Research for Content Creation
- 3. Align Content With User Intent
- 4. Set a Sustainable Publishing Schedule
- 5. Optimize for Search Engines and Readers
- 6. Diversify Your Content Portfolio
- 7. Leverage AI in Content Marketing
- 8. Update, Refresh, and Repurpose
- 9. Track Results Against Benchmarks
- 10. Stay Ahead of Algorithm Changes
- Conclusion
10 Content Marketing Best Practices to Boost Your Brand
Where your content appears matters greatly. Even if your content is fantastic, your efforts will fail if your content does not appear on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Conversely, if your content ranks but fails to meet search intent, readers will likely bounce to better options, leading to missed conversions.
To ensure your content achieves its maximum impact, we’ve compiled some of the best practices in content marketing to help you form a winning strategy that boosts visibility and drives more traffic to your website.
Whether you’re a savvy marketer or new to the business, these content marketing tips can help elevate your strategy, engage your audience, and boost conversions.
1. Create a Robust Content Marketing Strategy
A solid content marketing strategy is like the blueprint for your online presence; it guides every piece of content you create, ensuring it serves your business goals and meets your audience’s needs.
How do you create a winning content marketing strategy?
Start by understanding your brand, your target audience, and your products or services. Your content should consistently:
- Establish clear connections to your products or services.
- Maintain cohesive branding across copy and design.
- Stay relevant to your target audience.
Take a close look at your offerings and customer demographics to identify several content categories that will resonate.
If you’re unsure how to begin your research, consider exploring different terms related to your products or general topics on AnswerThePublic. This tool generates a range of related terms and phrases.
From there, you can further develop your ideas and proceed to the next step.
2. Master Keyword Research for Content Creation
To get started, think about what your audience might be typing into Google. Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner can help shine a light on those queries. Remember, it’s not just about volume; relevance is key.
If you’re already using an AI tool like BrandWell to write your content, you don’t have to leave the app to do your keyword research. Right beside the AI writer is a keyword research tool that can generate hundreds of topics to fill your content pipeline.
Beyond keyword research tools, online forums and social media can also reveal hidden gems that people are talking about but aren’t necessarily flooding the search engines yet. Adopting this forward-thinking strategy propels you to the forefront of emerging trends.
Sometimes, the best inspiration comes from checking out the competition. Use tools such as Semrush to see which keywords are bringing traffic to their sites. Don’t copy them outright though — look for gaps that they’ve missed or areas where you can do better.
By adopting this three-pronged approach, you can uncover niches where your articles could outshine others by addressing queries that are insufficiently explored or by offering a deeper analysis of popular topics.
3. Align Content With User Intent
Crafting content that nails user intent is like being a mind reader, but you don’t need psychic powers. You just need to understand what your audience is really looking for.
If someone searches “how to make French toast,” they want more than a recipe. They’re likely looking for tips on choosing bread or how to avoid soggy slices. So, give them what they crave in your content.
This approach makes sure people stick around because you’ve given them exactly what they were after — maybe even something extra they didn’t know they needed.
Seeing your content become a hit with the audience signals Google to boost your spot in search results, offering you an upper hand.
4. Set a Sustainable Publishing Schedule
Finding the sweet spot for your content publishing schedule is like balancing on a tightrope. You want to keep your audience engaged without overwhelming them or burning out your team.
Understanding Your Team’s Capacity
Your first step is getting real about what your team can handle. A common mistake is setting goals that look great on paper but are unrealistic in practice. Take stock of everyone’s workload and be honest about how much time you can dedicate to creating quality content each week.
This might mean starting with one blog post per week on your content calendar, then gradually increasing as you streamline your processes or grow your team.
Gauging Audience Appetite
Recognizing your own boundaries is equally crucial as learning the expectations of your followers. It’s not merely about the subjects that pique their curiosity; it extends to striking the right frequency of your communications with them. Too much content can overwhelm them, while too little can make them forget you exist.
Analyze engagement metrics on existing posts or run a survey directly asking them about their preferences. These insights will guide you towards a balance that leaves your audience craving more, ensuring they’re neither swamped nor starved for content.
Making Adjustments Over Time
The only constant in digital marketing? Change. What works today might not work six months from now, so be prepared to adapt by regularly reviewing performance analytics and feedback.
This adaptability ensures the long-term sustainability of your content marketing strategy.
5. Optimize for Search Engines and Readers
Landing on Page One of Google feels a bit like striking gold. But it doesn’t just happen by chance. Optimizing content to hit the perfect spot on search engine results requires a blend of tactical planning and an arsenal of SEO tools.
One of the first steps to optimize your content is to make sure it loads fast. Speed matters because if your page takes too long to load, chances are visitors will bounce faster than they came. Tools like PageSpeed Insights can help you gauge where you stand.
Next up, let’s talk mobile-friendliness. With more people browsing on their phones than ever before, having a site that looks good on any device isn’t just nice — it’s necessary. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can show you how well your site plays with mobile devices.
Last but not least: content quality counts for everything. Keywords matter but stuffing them into every sentence won’t cut it anymore. Instead, focus on creating valuable content that answers questions and solves problems for real people — because at the end of the day, that’s who we’re all writing for.
6. Diversify Your Content Portfolio
Picture your content as a stock portfolio. Just like diversifying investments can reduce risk and increase returns, mixing up different types of content marketing does the same for audience engagement.
Varying your content keeps things fresh and caters to different preferences. People have varied tastes; some are drawn to thorough reads while others enjoy quick infographics or captivating videos.
To truly stand out, experiment with podcasts or webinars. These mediums not only deliver insights but also elevate your status as a visionary at the forefront of industry trends.
Source: Semrush
7. Leverage AI in Content Marketing
AI has already taken its place in the present, utterly transforming the landscape of content marketing with its innovative capabilities. By harnessing AI, marketers can create more personalized, engaging content that resonates with their audience.
One way to use AI is through predictive analytics. This lets you analyze data on how your audience interacts with your content. You get insights into what they want before they even ask for it.
Chatbots have seriously changed the game, offering real-time assistance either by responding to inquiries or navigating visitors around your website — ensuring they find what they need without delay. But remember, a chatbot should complement human interaction, not replace it.
AI content marketing automation tools like BrandWell not only help with research, outlining, and the actual writing itself but also suggest topics based on trending searches. What used to take hours (or even days) to create content is now down to minutes — all without sacrificing quality.
Email marketing has seen a boost from AI too. It helps segment audiences and personalize messages at scale which improves open rates and conversions.
Social media management also gets easier with AI analyzing when your audience is most active online and suggesting optimal posting times to increase engagement rates.
Last but not least, SEO optimization benefits greatly from AI’s ability to sift through vast amounts of data quickly identifying patterns that human content marketers might miss — making sure your content gets seen by those who matter most: your target audience.
8. Update, Refresh, and Repurpose
Updating old pieces isn’t just about dusting off the cobwebs; it’s about finding new veins of gold in familiar tunnels.
Why let great ideas languish? An experiment by Ahrefs showed that refreshing old posts can more than double your traffic. That means diving back into those archives could be the most productive thing you do this week.
To start, audit your existing content for gems that could shine brighter with a polish. Look for high-performing pieces that have started to drop in rankings or evergreen topics that need a 2024 update.
But why stop there? Transforming blog posts into video content, infographics, or podcasts not only reaches new audiences but also caters to different learning styles. Repurposing content revitalizes your approach, offering audiences diverse avenues to connect with your narrative.
BrandWell makes it easy to repurpose your multimedia content into a long-form blog post. As you can see from the screenshot below, there are six different ways to do this:
With a wealth of firsthand experience and numerous successes across different industries, this approach is extensively proven. Repurposing content goes beyond simply recycling old articles — it’s about reshaping it to align with the changing preferences of contemporary audiences.
9. Track Results Against Benchmarks
To measure the success of your content performance, you need to know if it’s hitting the mark.
First, it’s crucial to establish solid starting points. This could be your current website traffic, engagement rates on social media, or email open rates.
Tracking progress then becomes key. With Google Analytics, you can really get into the nitty-gritty of tracking your content’s performance as time goes by. You can see which pieces drive the most traffic or engage readers the longest — and which ones flopped.
The real magic happens when you use analytics to inform future strategies. Gaining insights into successes and failures allows for the refinement or complete overhaul of strategies to enhance outcomes.
Pro tip: don’t just focus on vanity metrics like page views; look at conversion rates and customer feedback for a holistic view of success.
10. Stay Ahead of Algorithm Changes
Search engines like Google are always tweaking the rules. Think of it as a game where the goalposts move occasionally. But don’t worry, staying ahead isn’t as tough as it sounds.
To keep your content on top, you need to pay attention to these changes. For instance, when Google announced its Page Experience update, savvy marketers took notice and optimized their sites accordingly.
Staying ahead in the game means studying the current preferences of search engines. Quality content that answers user questions will always be in demand. But how do you know if you’re hitting the mark? Tools like Google Search Console can give you insights into how well your pages perform under current algorithms.
Last but not least, never put all your eggs in one basket. Diversifying traffic sources ensures that even if one algorithm change hits hard, your site’s overall traffic won’t tank overnight.
Conclusion
There you have it, our 10 content marketing best practices.
Create a robust content marketing strategy so you don’t veer away from your business goals.
Hone your keyword research skills while tailoring your content to what your audience truly seeks.
Publish content that answers real questions, and publish them consistently.
Master SEO techniques to boost visibility, diversify formats for broader reach, and refresh/repurpose old posts to stay on top of SERPs.
Finally, supercharge your entire content marketing strategy with automation tools like BrandWell while balancing it all out with a human touch.
Remember: Building connections takes time. Start by understanding your audience deeply. Use every tool at your disposal wisely. Measure what matters.
Let these insights guide you as you refine your approach to resonate with audiences more effectively than ever before.
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