The content you produce for your business is an investment you should consider as an asset. The more effective it is, the more value it will bring your business.
Distribution is the key to content growth. In a recent survey by the Content Marketing Institute, 72% of marketers said they plan to produce more content and invest more in formats like video in 2022. Yet only a handful are using their best material in their most effective ways. So how do you maximize the value of your content? By making it work harder than ever before.
Content is vital to every online business. The right content can transform an anonymous business into a trusted brand by building an audience and community. You can make your best-performing content work harder by optimizing, updating, and repurposing it in new formats. Don’t stop after you have hit the publish button — keep distributing.
A great content marketing strategy can help you build your brand and increase sales. Your best content can grow your business exponentially. But you must know how to leverage it. The best way to get maximum value from your content is to create it for your ideal customer and target audience.
This means you need to plan out what types of content you will make and why you’re creating it. Determine if you’re only creating blog posts or if you’re also creating other content like videos, quizzes, or infographics. About 57% of the survey participants in a report have a well-documented content strategy essential for content marketing.
Content promotion is an essential part of a successful content development strategy. It helps you achieve your goals and objectives by being on the right path. With the content promotion plan in place, it enables you to determine what kinds of content you need to create, why they are essential, and how they fit into your overall marketing strategy.
Being strategic also makes it easier for you to allocate resources to focus on the right things at the right times. A good strategy will help generate leads and sales for your business. It will also help increase brand awareness and customer loyalty.
While creating content, understand whom you’re trying to reach. Where do they spend their time — are they on social media, prefer newsletters, or read blogs? Do they prefer long-form articles or short blurbs? This will help guide what type of content you create and how it should be distributed.
Once you know where your audience spends the most time and what kinds of content they like, create an editorial calendar that maps out what needs to be posted and when.
If you’re not measuring your content, you might miss some key opportunities to engage with your audience. You might also miss valuable feedback that could help improve your product or service offerings.
The best way to identify gaps is to reverse work your competitor’s top-performing content and find topic ideas that you haven’t covered. Create fresh content with a unique angle and focus on your brand style. This will help you drive more engagement and conversions. (steal your competitor’s audience with Ahrefs content gap analysis trips)
Neal Taparia, who runs the word game platform Unscrambled Words, leans on users to identify content gaps. “We always ask our users what kind of content they would want on our site. We even poll them to help us prioritize the content we create.”
Being data-driven will help you see which types of content perform best for you and which ones fall flat. Track how well each piece of content performs over time by measuring organic reach, engagement, newsletter subscribers, backlinks to blogs, leads, revenue, and content download. Social media posts like, share, comment engagement, and website traffic.
You can track your website metrics in Google Search Content, Ahrefs, and newsletter opt-in tools. To keep track of your social media accounts you can refer to the platform’s native engagement insights as well as tools like Crowdfire that help you create and distribute content across various platforms.
Let’s find out how to create content that helps your audience solve their problem and achieve their business goals.
First, look at the content that has performed well for you in the past. This could be blog posts, ebooks, videos, case studies, webinars, podcasts, Twitter threads, Instagram stories, or any other form of online content.
Have tracking metrics in place to determine how this content would have impacted your target audience. Analyze this with time spent on the blog, numbers of shares, and engagement on your social media post.
If a particular style of webinar or podcast is giving results in terms of engagement and value addition to your audience, double down on those. Bring more through leaders to your podcast and create more problem-solving webinars. You win if your customer wins with your content.
Pro tip: To get more registration for your webinar uses the SMS campaign. A SMS before the webinar would give a leap to your webinar attendees.
Content aggregation can be a great way to repurpose your best posts. Please look at 10 of your top posts regarding views and engagement and see what topics they have in common. Are there any patterns?
For example, if most of these posts are about social media marketing, it may make sense to publish an annual roundup post on this topic (including links to each of those original posts). If you are getting more traffic for a particular topic, create more content around that topic to support and help your readers get more value out of it.
Create a blog post that offers step-by-step instructions for using one of your products or services. This could be a step-by-step guide on how to use your product or set up and use a feature in one of your products.
You can turn this content into an ebook or even create a resource center on your website where people can find helpful information about their needs and interests. Online publishing platforms can help you create content in different formats and use them in various places in your content strategy.
Without further ado, let’s dive deep to find out ideas on how you can squeeze more value out of your best content:
If you can’t measure it, you can’t grow it. You need to know what’s working and what isn’t so you can focus on creating and promoting suitable content. Look at bounce rates, time spent on a page, traffic sources, and social sharing metrics. This will help inform where your audience is coming from and how they engage with your site.
Based on this information, consider how often you publish new posts and what types of content resonate most with your audience. Use tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Crowdfire to track engagement rates across platforms like website blogs, social media, and email newsletters to understand which campaigns are most effective for driving traffic back to your website.
Don’t let your best-performing content decay over time. Your website and social media feed should always feature fresh content that keeps readers engaged with your brand over time — but don’t let stale material languish on your site.
Make the content deliver what your user needs today, not something they wanted years back. Update the latest statistics, new case studies, a new example that resonates with recent trends, expert quotes, a unique introduction based on search intent, and shorten the product description (for better conversion). This would increase the traffic to your blog with a whole lot of new keywords with better intent.
Pro Tip: the updated content with more relevant data are more likely to drive natural backlinks organically.
A lead magnet is something you give away for free in exchange for contact information. This helps you build a list of potential buyers, so when it comes time for them to buy something from you, they’re ready and willing.
Offer it up as an incentive for people filling out a form or providing their email address to receive more information about your business or products/services in exchange for their contact information so you can communicate with them later via email when appropriate (this is also known as lead nurturing).
It’s essential that each piece fits into its category with its unique value proposition and offers something special to readers who have already bought into this topic. You can build trust with potential buyers by giving them more than one reason to come back for more information later down the line.
Create a plan around what you’re going to create and how it fits into your overall strategy. This could be as simple as making a list of topics you want to write about or as detailed as a full editorial calendar. It doesn’t matter if you use an online planner or pen and paper — make sure you have one!
Once you’ve written a fantastic piece of content, don’t let it languish on your website — share it on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You’ll increase its reach and get more eyes on your brand. Make sure that each post includes a site link so readers can find more information if they want it.
As per CMIs Benchmarks Trends 91% of businesses rely on social media and 87% on email to increase engagement and overall content reach. Focus on creating high-quality content that provides value beyond one platform. In addition to being entertaining or informative, your articles should also teach something of value or help solve a problem for your readers.
Your content marketing model should be — Create Once And Distribute Forever. Don’t let your content die on a single platform once you have hit the publish button.
The idea of evergreen content is to create content that will never go out of style. It should be able to convert into different formats and work in different marketing channels.
You will have to identify the content distribution process for your evergreen performing content after it is published or updated. A blog post can be converted into a Twitter thread, image carousels for Instagram and LinkedIn, Medium posts, Youtube, Reels, and TikTok video.
There is no limitation to your distribution, it all depends on your audience, and how and where they consume your content.
Whether it’s photos or videos, UGC can be a great way of adding value and creating an authentic voice within your community. Don’t forget that UGC also has great SEO benefits too!
Check out this video made by Slack customer, Sandwich Video. The customer talks about their pains and how Slack is helping them overcome their daily challenges.
UGC can be used as customer testimonials, product reviews, or customer feedback. It’s a great way to turn customers into content creators because they’re more likely to engage with and share content they’ve created themselves.
Steve Elliott, Franchise Owner at Restoration1 says “UGC can get the best of both these worlds because it works on creating community in an engaging way. Any potential customers will be lured in through the support of your current customers. Moreover, UGC is cost-effective and easy to procure so it can be an effective way to approach content distribution.”
First, take the top 10 pieces of content on your website and put them into an automated email marketing campaign. Make sure to add a link back to the original article or post so people can read more about it if they want to learn more or purchase.
About 85% of marketers agree that webinars effectively boost content marketing efforts. So schedule a webinar and include all ten pieces of content within that webinar as part of the presentation — infographic slides or video presentations. That way, anyone who attends the webinar gets exposed to all ten pieces of content and can choose which one(s) they want to read more about after watching the presentation.
Content syndication is an essential part of online marketing. It allows you to reach a wider audience without spending more time or money. Instead of creating new content, you repost articles, blog posts, and other content on other websites.
It works because it’s a win-win situation for both parties. The publisher benefits from increased traffic and social engagement from all the content syndication brands do. You get more exposure for your business without the need to create additional content.
Abdul Saboor, Digital Marketer at The Stock Dork says “Before investing time in creating new content, determine ways to repurpose the good stuff you already have out there. Enhancing and updating top performing posts helps you discover gaps in your content that you can fill with topics that dig deeper and offer more excellent value to readers.” Saboor further added, “Repurposing content also signals to search engines that your content is up-to-date, accurate, and relevant, which can raise their SERP rankings and direct more traffic to your site.”
Effective content creation starts with a thorough understanding of the goals you want to achieve. Once you understand your audience, you can create and distribute content that resonates across all channels, from social media to email to more traditional websites.
And in some cases, it might take more than one type of content to reach your goal. Pick the option (or options) that best suits your goals and audience, and get to work telling some stories.