It's a new year, which means it's resolution time for most of us. The key to successful resolutions is finding goals that are actionable and then taking the action to complete them. Here at Spread Effect, we have our goals for the new year, but we wanted to give you a few content marketing strategy ideas that could improve your bottom line in 2013.
Between social media and blogs, nearly 80-percent of the active internet users in the United States are being reached on any given day. That's a lot of potential leads you are passing up by not sending out your proverbial message in a bottle. Here's how to remedy that.
Conduct a Website Audit
For most businesses, updates happen rather infrequently at best. Google changes way more than most business owners realize and with those changes we're forced to adapt to new requirements. Here are a few things to look for:
- Broken links
- Use of title tags, meta descriptions and alt tags
- Missing images
- Pages that 404
In addition, you should also do a quick search of Google Analytics to see which pages on your site are driving traffic. Optimize those pages for conversion by adding better calls to action, specialized opt-in forms, or better copy.
Learn Basic SEO
It's time to learn some SEO basics. The best content marketers are those that are utilizing an integrated content marketing strategy that includes SEO and social media as well as other inbound marketing techniques. You don't need to be Rand Fishkin, but you need to know enough to realize that backlinks, keyword selection and optimized titles and descriptions (amongst other things) are almost as important as the content itself.
Blog at Least Twice a Week
Blog more when you have something to say, but always shoot for at least two posts per week on your company or personal blog. Why? HubSpot reports companies that blog six to eight times monthly receive twice the leads as companies that don't and nearly five times the leads of companies that don't blog at all. Here's some food for thought: out of the top 100 Fortune 500 companies, 35-percent of them maintain an active corporate blog as opposed to only 14-percent in the bottom 200. If you don't know how to blog, find someone who does and get started.
Produce Content in Other Mediums
Content is king, but something most content marketing professionals as well as SEOs and business owners forget is that content isn't just written word. 2013 is your year to try your hand at video, or podcasting. Maybe you should be creating infographics to get your latest offering out there rather than another blog post.
Embrace Social Media
Social media is still very much a love or hate way to share content, ideas and conversate with like-minded people. It doesn't matter whether you love it or hate it, the fact of the matter is if you aren't using social media to connect you're going to get passed over by those who are. 62-percent of Fortune 500 companies have a Twitter account and have tweeted in the last 30 days. This is Twitter... something long considered a waste of time by most in the Fortune 500 world (only 4-percent of Fortune 500 CEO's have a Twitter account). It looks like they're adapting and if you don't you're quickly going to get left behind.
Give Your Content a Purpose
Each piece of content you send into the wild needs to have a purpose. Whether your goal is increasing awareness, conversions, bringing new subscribers to your list or blog or just getting your name on the tongues of those who matter - your content needs to be written with a purpose in mind. Content without a purpose is lazy content, and that's why your content marketing strategy doesn't work.
Mind Your Analytics
If you aren't checking Analytics at least weekly then you're missing the boat. If every piece of content we produce has a purpose, we need to be able to track its results. Not every piece of content is gold, but we need to be able to decipher those that are from those that are merely rocks. We need to be able to track conversions on a per-post basis. In short, you need to know what your audience wants and the only way to do that is to see what's worked in the past.
It's 2013. What steps are you taking to improve your content marketing strategy?