6 Killer Content Marketing Steps That Can Get You More Customers

If your business is going through a ‘dry spell’ when it comes to generating traffic or sales through content marketing, you might want to consider changing up your strategy a bit.

Most marketers and bloggers have little or no clue about increasing leads or traffic through content. In most cases, they use it as a hit-and-miss tactic where some days it produces results and others don’t.

Fortunately, there are six easy steps you can take to hack the performance of your content marketing strategy and produce more substantial results.

The Goals of Content Marketing

When you’re working on improving your content marketing campaign, you’ll need to keep in mind the following goals to help keep your campaigns on the right track:

• Boost brand awareness
• Improve search engine performance
• Increase customer conversions
• Create content engagement
• Grow traffic

The five goals above require that you pay close attention to the data from your current content marketing efforts, such as where your current site traffic is coming from.

One way to do that is to use online tools such as Google Analytics or SimilarWeb. They’ll help you finetune your current campaigns and create more effective ones.

Step-By-Step Guide to Improving Your Content Strategy

1. Prepare your website for traffic.

If we’re talking about improving content marketing campaign, that will likely involve increasing both paid and organic traffic that comes into your site. But is your website even prepared to handle that?

Having a slow website can really kill the potential of your business. For this reason, it’s best to optimize your pages’ loading speed so you can give visitors a good experience.

And here are several ways you can do that:

• Optimize your high-quality images to reduce the file size.
• Get a reliable CDN (content delivery network) to reduce latency.
• Cache your pages just in case your site goes offline.

2. Focus on better headlines.

Headlines can be powerful, but only if they’re created well enough to grab the attention of its intended audience. At its essence, the goal is to lure readers into the body of text. And this can be often done by promising some reward or benefit in exchange for the readers’ valuable time.

If you’d like some basic inspiration for headlines, especially when coming up with blog posts or newsletters for your email marketing campaign, check out SEOPressor’s Blog Title Generator. From there, it should be easier to adjust the title to fit your industry or make it more catchy.

Another approach you can take, and one that requires more creativity from your part, is to jot down a list of title options from the top of your head. Don’t filter yourself and just write.

Once you’ve come up with about 10 of 15 different headlines, you can choose a favorite and focus on refining that one. Make sure it’s catchy enough for people to want to check out the body or make them want to share it with friends.

3. Make content more visual.

There are different types of visual content available to the modern marketer, and some of them are incredibly effective. Here’s a list of the popular options you can try out:

• Infographics – data-driven images with pleasing design.
• Gifographics – basically infographics on steroids.
• Videos – great for advertising or instructional material.
• Screenshots – the easiest way to add visuals to posts.
• SlideShare presentations – delivers info in manageable chunks.
• Photos – must add value to the other content.
• PDF – a great lead-magnet tool.

Enhancing your content through visuals is a great idea to catch and keep the readers’ attention. It also increases the wow-factor of your brand and creates a positive impression, making them more likely to share your posts.

4. Improve your calls-to-action.

Creating better calls-to-action (CTA) not only applies to content, but to your entire business. But the challenge for marketers is that CTA can be done in a lot of ways, which is also why it’s difficult to get it right.

Here’s a couple of tips you can use to create more effective ones that can get people to do what you want them to:

• Address a clear, pressing need
• Add a sense of urgency
• Use power words
• Be specific

Sometimes the best CTA doesn’t just suggest people what to do — it clearly tells them what to do with clear immediacy. Common examples are the following:

“Browse our courses now”
“Join FREE for a week”
“Talk to a consultant now!”

Bear in mind that there’s no one-size-fits-all method of creating the perfect CTA. Every business is different, and it’s important to test different CTAs to find out which ones work best for your brand.

5. Offer something unique (or take a unique approach).

Remember, you’re facing stiff competition and you really can’t afford to offer the usual run-of-the-mill types of content if you want to stand out.

Don’t be afraid to invest more time in creating more valuable content, such as interviews or beautiful infographics. While making them is definitely more time-consuming, people also know they offer a wealth of information they won’t easily find anywhere else.

Don’t just think about unique types of content. Consider taking a fresh perspective on an old, frequently covered topic. Instead of writing on “The Importance of Machine Learning in the 21st Century,” add your own fun twist like “What Iron Man Can Teach Us About Machine Learning in the 21st Century.”

6. Use tools to make social media sharing easier.

If you haven’t used social media managing tools before, you’re clearly missing out. There are dozens of different ones available, and some of them are even free to use.

If you’re looking for a powerful and reliable social media management tool, however, we suggest using Buffer, Hootsuite, or Agorapulse.

The benefits of using these tools make whatever price you have to pay for the service worth it. That’s because they eliminate a lot of the tedious manual work such as opening different platforms and posting updates one by one.

Also, it’s a great way of managing customer relationships and replying to comments in a streamlined fashion. Another advantage you also get from it is the ability to track relevant keywords quickly and easily.

Tying It All Together

Improving content marketing campaign doesn’t have to be a pain. In fact, the steps are simple enough, especially if you do them in a systematic manner. We suggest creating a checklist for everything you feel you need to do to make sure your content really speaks to your target audience.

Just bear in mind that not every business is the same. Your checklist probably won’t look like next business’ checklist, and that’s alright.

Don’t be afraid to try out different approaches and gather actionable data. From there, you can then implement what works best and creates the best results for your brand.