Started a business? Then you ought to know about the content marketing best practices for 2022. If you have great content but don’t know how to use it, the secret to success lies in following the best practices of content marketing.
Content marketing is centered around creating, publishing, and distributing curated material by focusing on your specific target audience. However, just knowing is not enough. You’ve got to know how to implement your ideas more efficiently. Let’s take a look at the best content marketing practices to get you started.
Organise, Strategise and Plan
Content marketing is one of the most essential and effective forms of marketing. Doing it right will fetch positive results for organisations, big and small.
Figure out your objectives
The first and important step is to set your goals and objectives as part of content marketing best practice. Understand and focus on your content goal. Do you want more traffic to your firm’s website, or do you want more conversation with the audience, and thereby, more sales? Goals form the foundation of your content marketing plan. You can carve your content strategy based on your goals and objectives.
Target audience
You need to identify the people who are most likely to buy from you, depending on your product or service. This is your content strategy best practice. Get a clear understanding of the message you want to relay to them. Content always needs to be audience-specific. The most compelling content in the world will not attract customers if there is no conversation. Content should be your USP in your marketing best practices.
Buyer personas
The very nature of content marketing is to package information with a particular kind of person in mind. Creating audience personas will further narrow down your target group. Personas are fictitious profiles that outline a group of similar individuals in a target audience segment. These representations are based on behavioral data and the knowledge you gain from dealing with supporters or followers of your brand.
A select group of people with faces, names, and backgrounds, is much more beneficial than just knowing a vague list of data. You will have one specific person to represent what you know about each of your main audiences – this only serves to personalize your content and you know exactly who you are talking to.
Market analysis
Generally, a market analysis would mean a qualitative and quantitative assessment of a market. Observe and analyze the size of the market you are working in, study the various target customer segments, their buying patterns, the economic environment, and competition.
However, in best practices of content marketing, market analysis is different. We will essentially be looking at and making note of the market, target audience – update personas as we go, shifting focus to their backgrounds and the kind of content they would prefer. Alongside, the varying difference in content as the media consumption habits vary across age groups. The content and medium preferences of 18-22-year-olds will be different than those of 30-40-year-olds.
Reaching into the communities where your target audience is present and observing their behavioural patterns is one of the best ways to make sure that your content is authentic and attractive. A thorough market analysis will also give you a fair idea of your competition.
Scout for competition
While conducting market analysis, one important thing is to scout for competition. Observing your competition helps you learn from their best strategies and worst mistakes. Your competitors will most likely have a product that is similar to yours. By observing them, you are getting an understanding of what will make yours better.
Research your content and keywords
You might think that because you have your audience down pat, you understand what your audience wants to read, see or hear. However, you might be wrong. This is where content research steps in. By researching, you understand the following:
- The forms of content that are most popular within your audience segment. For example, one group might prefer blog posts, while another might prefer infographics, and so on.
- What topics and kinds of posts get the most traffic, shares and likes?
- Which are the topics or subject matters that your audience actively seeks out by themselves.
There are certain applications available on the Internet to make your content research easier, such as Feedly. The other content research tools, such as Buzzsumo and Ubersuggest, offer more detailed research. During keyword research, you will learn about the topics that interest your audience and also boost your SEO and search engine ranking. You could start by:
- Making a list of keywords relevant to your content.
- Get the hang of keywords that your niche audience is using through keyword research tools, such as Google Trends.
- Observe the keywords being used by your competitors for better ranking, and the ones that get them the most traffic and shares. Now put them together in your content.
Creating Evergreen Core Content
Irrespective of your content, there has to be one particular structure that provides consistent evergreen content to your audience. This strategy retains value for the audience, keeps driving traffic to your website or social media, months after the content has been published. However, you need to promote, promote, and promote regularly.
The value of a good article can be invaluable as there are high chances that your rank for that subject may go up on a topic that is not seasonal and has relevance all year round. This strategy is also time and resource-efficient because you don’t need to keep spending money on new content all the time. You can just focus on updating your content and promoting it.
Personalise
Personalisation has become very important in the sphere of marketing. There are just so many adverts out there that people invariably block things not relevant to them. To catch the audience’s attention, you need to get them to open your emails and read them, visit your blog, check out your content as it comes. For that to happen, you need to feed them content made specifically for them. We like experiences tailored just for us – the audience feels the same. For example, Zomato sends personalized emails and even customises mobile app notifications for members. Spotify is another company that personalizes content for their users. Their algorithm creates personalized playlists for every user. There are daily mixes, an ‘on-repeat’ playlist which houses your most looped tracks, and so much more. All these playlists contain songs that you have either listened to or are based off your music taste – which they decipher from songs you have been listening to, and the artists you have been following, among others.
Content Marketing Best Practices
Strategies are ever evolving as you grow and learn along the way. Here are some content marketing strategies to last you a lifetime:
Publish your best and be consistent
Create a content calendar which is easy to implement and is consistent. Make sure to keep it real. Setting goals that might seem impossible to meet within a particular time frame is disastrous. The frequency of publishing content depends on the resources you used, the marketing goals, and audience preferences. Make sure the audience is fed their regular dose of content to keep them satisfied and engaged.
Be bold and think out of the box
Competition is cut-throat. You might think you are being original but some research might show that your idea was already implemented by some other business organization. In such cases, think out of the box and refrain from being boring – nobody wants boring, monotonous, and predictable content that does not serve any purpose. Any good content should inform, educate, or enlighten the reader.
Always keep a fresh mindset
A great content marketing strategist will have the ability to continually solve problems and learn new things swiftly. Take things as they are one by one, and keep your mind open to new possibilities. A strategy may need an analytical mind, but there is still plenty of room for creativity and experimentation. Times are unpredictable, so be on your toes and think different.
Treat your content as data
A good content marketing strategy needs to always engage the target audience. To do this, you need to know how your content is working. When you go through the analytics and traffic behind your content, you can use this information to make your content more effective and efficient.
Back up content with data
Infomercials or simple videos which tell a story should also back up what they are saying with hard numbers and explanatory graphs. Such kind of content is a hit because you are not only putting your content out there but you are also trying to establish a sense of trust between the audience and yourself. It is almost as if you are saying that ‘this-is-who-we-are’ and ‘this-is-what-we-do’, ‘here-are-the-results-trust-us’.
Bonus tips on Content Marketing Best Practices for 2022
Create exclusive content
While maintaining a steady distribution of core content, you should also cater to the demands of your audience and offer exclusive content. By this, you ensure continuity and variety but will also boost your business and make the best use of your resources. One good example would be a business offering season-specific exclusive content, such as a skincare brand offering a winter-specific skincare collection and marketing it as ‘Winter Wonderland’. Similarly, whenever films are released on DVDs, there is behind-the-scenes content and extra DVD-only scenes for the audience.
Use different formats to distribute your media
Content is not restricted within the limitations of text alone. Today, people consume various forms of media. Therefore, trace your target group’s media consumption patterns and consider photographs, videos, gifs, podcasts, and all the other formats for your content to ensure maximum exposure.
Explore autocomplete suggestions
While doing a market analysis, many people focus on market analysis tools and overlook the easiest and most exhaustive sources of people’s questions, queries, and problems. Exploring autocomplete suggestions on social media platforms can offer crucial data about your audience.
Be SMART
While working on your content marketing plan, be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relatable, and time-bound.
What are you waiting for? Still have some questions? You could check out our content marketing FAQs. Once satisfied, let us know about your business requirement, and we will customise the content strategy that works for you! Contact us now.