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Content marketing optimization is all about quality, quantity, relevance, value addition, accessibility and timeliness. Achieving all these requires hard work, concentration and efficient handling of the tools of the trade.
This blog post lists 14 tools that can help you optimize your content marketing; some of these are commercial and some are free.
But what does content marketing optimization mean? Different thing to different people but basically, it means
Creating content using the right keywords
Knowing the trends so that you can leverage them
Properly using analytics to streamline content writing, creation, distribution and targeting
Knowing user behaviour
Knowing your bounce rate and creating sticky content to bring it down
Measuring performance of content marketing and taking corrective measures accordingly
Scheduling social media updates
Content curation using automated tools
Knowing what your competitors are up to and what sort of advantages they enjoy vis-à-vis your online presence
Your website structure and markup validity
Search engine optimization
As I said, content marketing optimization can mean different things to different businesses and individuals so you can go on adding and removing items from this list.
Influencers play an important part in your content marketing. They are the ones who often promote your content, share your links and talk about your products and services to their friends, families and colleagues. They take interest in your insights, reach out to you and talk to other influencers in your niche. If you want your content to go viral on the Internet, you need a big team of influencers constantly engaging you and paying attention to your blog and social media updates. A big part of content marketing is attracting as many influencers to your business as possible and then keeping them engaged.
Decide who are your influencers from the onset of content marketing itself
As described above, influencers are people who would be interested in hearing from you and spreading your message voluntarily. They don’t always have to be your customers and clients. Even if they never buy from you or do business with you, they can be highly beneficial to your content marketing strategy. They are like evangelists, but unlike evangelists, they may not always use your products and services.
So who might be your influencers?
People who have an active social media presence
People who have lots of followers, connections and readers
People who show interest in your updates and what you have to say
People who write blog posts and articles in a field that relates to your business interests
The main attributes should be their unwavering interest in your own field of interest, their ability to communicate convincingly and regularly and their reach. These are the people that you have to target through your content marketing.
Targeted content marketing for your influencers
You need to publish content that caters to the interest of your influencers and then use the channels that enable you to broadcast your content to your influencers.
Decide your channels first because you will be creating and publishing content based on the dynamics of your distribution channels. For example, the content that you publish on Twitter will be totally different from content that you publish on Facebook and the same goes for LinkedIn. On Pinterest you will be posting visual content. On SlideShare you upload slides. There is a website where you can upload PDF documents. On YouTube you upload videos. So define your strategy that reaches out to your influencers according to the publishing and broadcasting channel that you’re going to use, and then start creating content.
Creating content for influencers
In order to target influencers, you need to create content that is entertaining, captivating and useful. Remember that influencers not only go through your content, they react to it, which is very important. People who simply consume your content are not your influences. Your influencers leave comments on your blog. They write blog posts in response to your blog posts and articles. They respond to your social media updates. They post links to your blog posts and articles on their own timelines. They broadcast your videos and images using mobile apps like WhatsApp and Instagram. So you must create and publish content that interests them and makes them feel that sharing your content would be useful to their family and friends and even if not useful, it will be cool to share it.
Most of your influencers are high-performers and this is why they are influencers. They themselves influence people. People pay attention to them. They become influencers because when they talk about you, people pay attention. This is why it is important you create high-quality, relevant content that they can appreciate. Remember that they will pay attention to your content only if it suits their purpose – it provides value to their audience. They don’t necessarily have to agree with you. Even if one of your influencers publishes a blog post as a rebuttal to what you have written it is going to benefit you (unless you have written something totally crappy). Your content must move them to take an action. You should create and distribute content that is
Original
Thought-provoking
Relevant
Packed with information
Helpful
Well-written
Uses references from highly reputed sources
Created/written in a friendly tone
Easily shareable
Finally, there is no hard and fast rule – you just need to be regular, persistent and quality conscious. It will take some time before your influencers begin to notice you. You need to interact with them as and when opportunity strikes (don’t just butt-in for the sake of it). Write them an email if you have something genuine to say. Connect with them on Twitter and Facebook (or whatever channel you are influencers prefer). And once again, persistence is the key. Most content marketers fail here.
Content marketing – mostly B2B – is usually considered to be a very serious affair but it doesn’t have to be that way. There have been many instances of content marketing where businesses try to make their prospective and present customers and clients laugh.
Everybody loves humour. Back in the late 90s I was writing course material for computer training centers that were sprouting everywhere in India. The For Dummies books were my inspiration. I applied their style while preparing lessons on DOS, dBase, COBOL and FoxPro (many of you haven’t heard of these, right?) and some of the training center owners loved the way I wrote (and so did their students). I was also known to use humour in my journalistic writing for quite some time. Sadly, I lost this touch but I’m trying to regain it and hopefully within a few days you will be able to see it on my blog and elsewhere.
Humor has a relaxing effect. No matter how tense a situation it is, when people are exposed to funny anecdotes, jokes and situations, they forget about their troubles and shift their focus to the funny thing that is taking place in front of them. According to this Forbes article,
Dozens of surveys suggest that humor can be at least one of the keys to success. A Robert Half International survey, for instance, found that 91% of executives believe a sense of humor is important for career advancement; while 84% feel that people with a good sense of humor do a better job. Another study by Bell Leadership Institute found that the two most desirable traits in leaders were a strong work ethic and a good sense of humor.
You may think what amusing you can write for a, let us say, plumping website, or a refrigeration spare parts website, or even a church website. Well, here is what I came across while reading “writing bloopers” in The Sense of Style (the writing guide I’m reading these days):
The sermon this morning: “Jesus walks on the water.”
The sermon tonight will be: “Searching for Jesus.”
This was written on a church noticeboard somewhere.
Here is another one
The patient has been depressed ever since she began seeing me in 2008.
This was written by a psychiatrist probably in a case study.
These are just examples of how humorous material can appear even at least expected places.
Various industries are mistakenly categorised as “boring” and “exciting”. For example, according to popular perception, you may categorise fashion, cookery, modelling and music as “exciting” industries (just to name a few to give you an idea). On the other hand, you may consider healthcare, automobiles, accounting, legal and real estate as, according to the convention, “boring” industries. Of course, something that makes you money, something that is your livelihood, cannot be termed as boring but here I’m not writing this from your perspective – the business owner who runs an accounting firm – I’m writing from the perspective of your clients. How do you keep them interested in your content without boring them with numbers and concepts that they may come across only on an annual basis while trying to file their returns?
Here is an exceptional example of using humor to educate people even when it’s a matter of life and death:
Dumb Ways to Die is an Australian public service announcement campaign by Metro Trains in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia to promote rail safety. When my 10-year-old daughter mentioned the video I was sort of pissed at what sort of videos she was watching on YouTube. Then I saw it, did some research and to my pleasant surprise, found out that it is an awareness campaign.
As you can see by the number of people who have watched the video and a slew of video games and proceeding videos that have been uploaded onto the Internet what a hit the campaign has been. Safety is a life-and-death matter but it doesn’t have to be very serious.
Content marketing has been evolving extremely fast and the year 2016 isn’t going to be an exception. Contrary to what many marketers think, content marketing isn’t something exclusive to the Internet. It has been used since time immemorial. Some call even the cave paintings by the ancient human beings as good examples of content marketing. In the modern age, the soap operas were telecast to promote soap. Highly captivating and engaging stories were run on television sponsored by the soap companies and this is how the term “soap opera” came into existence.
Another example is the GI Joe comic book that gave a big thrust to the toy industry.
Why on the Internet content marketing has caught on with great zest is because the Internet brings the benefit of content marketing even to the small business owner. It sort of, in proverbial terms, levels the playing field. A marvellous thing about content marketing is you don’t need to be a big business in order to compete with the big business. Your success does not depend on how many blog posts, articles, infographics, videos and images you can publish – although I’m not saying that your budget and your brand recognition don’t matter when it comes to content marketing – but it is more about your ability to target the right audience, publish and distribute the right content and respond in a timely manner when your target audience reaches out to you.
In 2016, content marketing is no longer going to be just SEO
So says this Medium blog post, rightly. Improved search engine rankings – organic rankings – are a big reason why people indulge in content marketing and they are not entirely wrong if the success of their businesses depends on their search engine rankings. But if you’re using content marketing just to improve your search engine rankings, you are not making its full use. Remember that an increased search engine ranking can although be a good metrics of success for your content marketing efforts, in itself it is not success. What is the use of getting traffic if that traffic does not convert? As rightly said, different types of content are being used to gain brand recognition and consequently, to generate more leads and improved conversion rate. People have realised that merely good search engine rankings no longer help.
Trying to implement a content marketing strategy meant to deliver results without documenting the various steps you take and the results that you get is like driving around without knowing where you want to go. Whereas it is fun to drive without knowing your destination you aren’t actually reaching somewhere. You are just burning fuel and if your time means anything to you then you are wasting precious time. The same goes with content marketing. If you don’t know what you’re doing, and still you are doing it, you’re wasting time and money and worse, you might also be harming your business by publishing content that you shouldn’t be publishing.
They have a clear understanding of what successful content marketing looks like
They have a well-documented content marketing strategy
They have a clearly-defined editorial mission statement (and they stick to it)
There is a smooth flow of communication between different content marketing team members
The focus of this particular blog post is documentation and I’m going to stick to that for the time being.
Why does content marketing documentation matter?
According to the report mentioned above, fewer B2B content marketers are documenting their content marketing compared to the previous year (32% vs 35%) despite the fact that 79% of respondents among the successful attribute their success to documentation.
A big reason for the decrease is that content marketing is going mainstream and when a particular trend goes mainstream, even people with, let us say, less expertise, start using it either because of herd mentality (it is working for them so it should also work for me) or they have an idea what they are doing but they have no idea how they are doing it and hence, documenting their steps seems either cryptic or waste of time.
Content marketing is still taken as a publishing activity (strategically placed marketing is missing big time). Keep publishing blog posts and articles that should be “search engine optimized” and then keep posting them on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google +. This is the basic approach that more than 90% B2B content marketers follow. There is no content marketing editorial calendar. They just have a rough outline of what they should publish in order to cover their keywords.
Is it bad?
It is not as bad as not pursuing content marketing but yes, a lot more can be achieved with little bit of documentation.
What is documentation? Preferably, it is real-time recording (noting down) of events and actions that are happening, how they are happening, what results are being obtained, and what are the changes being implemented based on the results.
Documentation helps you keep track of what needs to be done, how it should be done and what should be done in case the results are not what you expect. Without documentation you lose track of what you’re doing and exactly what you’re trying to achieve.
Is content marketing documentation important only for big businesses?
In order to understand this, you need to first understand what exactly is documentation vis-à-vis your business. Even if you create a small note in Google Keep to schedule your weekly postings and content marketing success metrics that you can observe, it is documentation. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an elaborate document consisting of scores of pages and notes. The entire purpose of content marketing documentation is to help you reach from point A to point B without losing direction and objective. Documentation can be done in writing, by voice recording, by drawing, by taking photographs and by creating videos. The purpose is to help you.
