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11 things that make your content marketing successful

11 things to make your content marketing successful

In this blog post you’re going to learn about 11 things that can make your content marketing successful.

Content marketing success is not a random phenomenon.

The approach to success is very scientific and methodical.

Just like in any business or any strategy, you have to be persistent and you need to have a clear idea of what you’re doing and through what you’re doing, what you intend to achieve.

If you are clear about that plus, if you are persistent, success can never be random. You are bound to plunge into it.

Why use content marketing to promote your business?

I have written a lot about the benefits of content marketing and why you should use it to promote your business. Some of the links I could quickly find are

Some of the reasons why you should use content marketing to promote your business include:

It provides useful information to your customers and clients (and shoppers) that they can then use to decide whether they will need to do business with you or not.
It definitely improves your SEO, especially organic search engine optimization.
Helps people use your products and services in a better manner once they have purchased from you.
Gets you more leads and attracts prospects and customers to your website or blog.
Builds your brand.
Establishes your reputation.
Keeps your prospective customers and clients engaged.
Helps you maintain a positive buzz on social media.

Why content marketing sometimes doesn’t work?

There are many reasons content marketing doesn’t work. In this blog post I have listed the mistakes that you should avoid in 2019.

But this blog post is not about why content marketing doesn’t work. It is about the 11 things you can do to make your content marketing successful, and here they are:

1. Create/write useful content

Create useful content for content marketing success

Useless, aimless content is neither useful to you nor to someone else. And if your content is not useful, why should someone appreciate it?

The entire purpose of having an operational content marketing strategy is that you promote your business on the strength of your content.

Your content derives strength from people.

When you are writing content (or when you are getting it written by a content writer) make sure you publish only useful content. It must help your visitors in one way or another. It must solve problems. It must provide solutions.

Why is it important that you publish useful, high-quality content?

Your content marketing success solely depends on how people react to your content. Even your search engine rankings these days depend on how people react to your content.

Drab, uninspiring, useless content is not going to get any attention.

Useful content, on the other hand, grabs people’s attention. People react to it. They share it on their timelines. They link to it. They spend more time on your website, bringing down your bounce rate that in turn, improves your SEO.

2. Publish original content

Publish original content

If you are publishing what everyone else is publishing, there is no motivation to come to your website or blog. People will come to your website or blog only when they find something that they cannot find somewhere else.

Constantly coming up with unique topics can be a problem.

But your opinion is always unique.

For example, I am constantly writing about content writing and content marketing and there must be thousands of other individuals doing the same.

Still, what I am saying here is unique because I’m using my own “voice” and my own writing style to express my own opinion.

Even when you are curating content – linking to external content – give your own take, the way I do sometimes.

These days when I don’t have time to write a completely original blog post, I link to an external article or blog post and then write some words on my own. I present my only unique view on the topic, even if couple of sentences.

3. Be consistent and persevere

Persevere and be consistent for successful content marketing

I don’t know about other people, but this is a big drawback that I have experienced in my own clients. They initiate their content marketing with great enthusiasm, even have the clarity about what sort of content they need to get written and publish, but then, within a couple of months, and sometimes even within a month, they lose track and no longer want to publish new content.

Now, you may say that being their content writer I should be able to convince them that content marketing success cannot be attained without consistently publishing high-quality content, but the problem is not with clients who hire me as their consultant (and hence, would heed to my suggestion), the problem is with people who hire me just for my content writing services.

Though, I give them my unsolicited advice, and then it’s up to them.

Anyway, the point is, they pursue content marketing for a couple of months, don’t see results, and then abandon content marketing midway.

Content marketing is an ongoing process. New content is constantly being pumped into the World Wide Web.

Unless you publish new content, your old content is going to be pushed into oblivion by your competitors and even by those who are not directly competing with you but are constantly publishing new content that can be remotely related to your content category.

People mostly abandon content marketing because they think it is an extra expense whereas, it is a necessary expense, running expense, just as you continuously have to spend money on running your infrastructure.

4. Make your content accessible for content marketing success

Create mobile accessible content

People these days are not just using PCs and laptops to access your content. They’re using all sorts of mobile devices.

They may access your content on their mobile phones, on their tablets and even through smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Home.

Your content should also be easier to read. Avoid creating long sentences and thick paragraphs.

5. Maintain a content publishing calendar

Maintain a content publishing calendar

The lack of a content publishing calendar can also derail your content marketing. Constantly coming up with new content writing and content publishing ideas can be a difficult task after a while.

Whether you are writing and publishing content on your own or your content writer is doing it, you definitely need to maintain a content publishing calendar so that you have things in the pipeline for the foreseeable future.

You can use an Excel sheet. You can use Trello. You can also use a mind mapping tool (which I use).

6. Learn to repurpose your existing content

Repurpose existing content

Backbone of a successful content marketing strategy is publishing content on an ongoing basis and sometimes, it becomes difficult to publish totally unique, original content even from the perspective of your own website or blog.

What do you do?

You repurpose your existing content.

Here is an older blog post you would like to read: How to repurpose old content.

Repurposing your existing content means creating new content out of your old content.

You can do this in the form of a weekly or monthly recap – creating summaries of all the blog posts you have written in the month of January, for example.

If you have been researching and gathering data to write and publish multiple blog posts, perhaps you can use this data to create infographics.

You can create podcasts from your existing blog posts, web pages and articles.

Similarly, you can create slides, animations and YouTube videos.

7. Try to improve your search engine rankings to ensure success of your content marketing

I always write on my blog that your search engine rankings should be a natural outcome of your quality content and you shouldn’t focus much on it aside from taking care that the search engines can easily crawl your website, it loads fast and you provide meta information to make it easier for the search engines to understand the nature of your content.

Having said that, it helps to have your main keyword in the title of your web page or blog post.

Strategically placing your main keywords also helps.

Again, don’t make extra effort. Focus on good writing but make sure that you use your keywords and search terms when you are creating content.

For example, since I want to attract clients who are looking for content writing and content marketing services, these are the phrases that I often use.

Just as content marketing is very important for better SEO, search engine optimization also fuels your content marketing.

If people are able to find your content on search results, more people can access it and there are more opportunities for inbound traffic.

8. Create an active presence on social media and social networking websites

Remain active on social media for content marketing success

Social media and social networking websites can be great content distribution platforms.

For example, everybody is on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram these days.

Most of the content consumption happens through these platforms.

Your social media and social networking platforms (your accounts, your profiles) can be a great source of targeted traffic to your website or blog.

Share content from your website or blog on social media. Publish original content. Build an audience.

It takes time. Ongoing engagement will be needed. So, there is no need to hurry. But, consistently make an effort to build an audience.

9. Use email marketing to disseminate your content and keep the people in your mailing list engaged

Email marketing is an integral part of content marketing

Billions of emails are sent to and fro every day. More people use email than Facebook, Twitter and Instagram combined. Email marketing can be the backbone of your content marketing success.

How do you use email marketing to implement a successful content marketing strategy?

If you continuously publish high-quality content, your visitors wouldn’t like to miss it. But, they cannot visit your website or blog every day. Give them an opportunity to subscribe to your updates.

When they subscribe to your updates, send them an email whenever you publish a new blog post or a new web page.

Send them useful information that they can use to better utilize your product or service.

Keep in touch with them. Ask them how you can help them.

But basically, you can use your mailing list for successful content marketing.

10. Use analytics data to steer your content marketing in the right direction

Use analytics for successful content marketing

Without analytics data it is just guesswork.

Analytics tell you what content your audience wants and then you can write and publish your content accordingly.

Even when you are trying to cover keywords and search terms for your SEO, analytics will tell you whether your SEO-content is working or not.

You can track individual links. You can track a group of web pages and blog posts. You can track your social media updates.

Your email marketing service (I use MailChimp) will have its own analytics features that will let you know how well your individual email campaigns are performing.

11. Have well-defined KPIs

Clearly define your content marketing KPIs

Key performance indicators are very important.

Although, as I often write on my blog, by the end of the day what matters is how many sales you have made, content marketing is more targeted and segmented.

Content marketing doesn’t directly increase your sales, it creates positive circumstances that in turn, increase your sales.

So, your KPI might be getting more subscribers for your email updates.

It can be increasing the number of unique visits.

If you want to target a particular geTorres of theographic area, you track whether your visitors from that particular geographic area are increasing or not due to your content marketing efforts.

You may also aim for bringing your bounce rate down.

Before and after data is very important for tracking your KPIs.

KPIs tell you how successful your content marketing strategy is at the grassroots level. This is how the sum total of your content marketing brings you success.

Concluding remarks on making your content marketing successful

To implement a successful content marketing strategy first most you have to understand and accept that it is not a one-off activity.

The second thing is, before it can bear fruit for you, you have to keep the momentum going even when you feel there is no return. This is because in the beginning, there is actually no return.

For the initial months, you will simply need to focus on creating and publishing lots of high-quality content, distributing that content using all available channels to you, and building a platform and a presence.

Then, it is this platform and presence that begins to generate business for you, more leads and more sales.

Content marketing in the beginning is like laying bricks and building other structures of a house or a building. You cannot use that house or building before you have built it.

Hence, unmitigated quality, distribution and engagement and perseverance definitely ensures content marketing success and through that, business success.

Why isn’t content marketing working for you?

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No matter how “new age” content marketing may seem to some, it is very hard to make it work for you unless you completely know what you want to achieve with your content marketing strategy.

In fact, “strategy” is the keyword here. All those people who say content marketing doesn’t work for them, don’t have a strategy.

They want to benefit from content marketing because they have read or heard about companies and businesses benefiting from content marketing.

There is nothing wrong in wanting to benefit from something the others are benefiting from, it’s just that people want to use content marketing without actually understanding it, and then when it doesn’t work, they are disenchanted.

Why content marketing doesn’t work for some businesses?

Content marketing doesn’t work for some businesses because they carry it out half-heartedly, or they think that it is a template that can be implemented as it is.

They think once they have published 5-10 blog posts it should suffice as content marketing.

Content marketing, contrary to the prevalent belief, is a full-fledged business component.

It is not something that you do just because you want to do it as a novelty.

For example, if you need to have an office or a workplace for your business, there is no other option but to have it.

If you need electricity, then it is not an option.

Some business managers think that content marketing is optional, whereas, it is not.

What is content marketing?

It is, promoting your business on the strength of your content rather than conventional advertising.

Read What is content marketing: 15 definitions from industry experts

Who are more likely to do business with you? People who have come to your website via an advertisement or people who like the content that you publish and distribute regularly?

Obviously, it is the latter.

Your content nurtures familiarity. Your brand becomes recognisable when people come across your content at other places.

Content should be published and distributed for its usefulness and not because you want to cover all your keywords or you want to create an ongoing buzz on your social networking profiles.

It should provide answers to people’s questions.

If your prospective customers and clients have problems regarding your business, your content must provide solutions to those problems.

Your content must be the information they need to be able to decide whether they should do business with you or not.

Your content should help you establish yourself as an authority in your field or profession.

When people consume your content they should be able to make out that you are the right person to seek right information from.

It doesn’t work for some people because they think that content marketing is a one-off activity.

They think that they can start or stop content marketing as and when it is convenient to them.

It doesn’t work that way.

One needs to be consistent otherwise each time you start, you have to start more or less from scratch. When you have to start from scratch repeatedly, you tend to think that it is not working.

For content marketing to work for you, stop thinking that it is an activity that is optional.

Publish useful, high-quality content and then make sure the right audience can access that content not just on your website but also on other websites and social networking platforms. Do this consistently.

Focus on purposefulness and quality.

Don’t publish content just for the heck of it.

Your audience these days accesses content on multiple platforms according to individual preferences of your customers and clients.

Some may prefer your blog, some may prefer Instagram posts, some prefer LinkedIn updates and some would like to interact with you on Facebook.

A good thing about quality content is that it can be repurposed according to the platform you want to use.

The same blog post can be turned into a presentation and hence a YouTube video. You can take out individual points and post them on Instagram. You can post useful paragraphs on Facebook and encourage your contacts to respond.

So basically, content marketing means, constantly communicating to your prospective and present customers and clients in such a manner that it is a fruitful interaction and not one way promotional exercise..

Content marketing always succeeds when you publish useful and relevant content and then use appropriate channels to publish it and distribute it. People will always respond.

If you are regularly interacting with your customers and clients through your blog, online forum, social networking platforms and/or email newsletter, you are already doing content marketing.

12 Rules to Make Your Content Marketing Successful

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While trying to find some topics on content marketing on Quora, I came across this old question: Does content marketing work?

This is an old question and it was posted back in 2015 by Neil Patel, but still, almost daily I come across this question on various content marketing forums and blogs.

Publishing content and distributing it is an age-old form of content marketing. In his book Epic Content, Joe Pulizzi refers to The Furrow magazine that was published and distributed back in 1895. Here is the full story of how the company that sold John Deere’s new revolutionary steel plow used content marketing to sell the new equipment.

The Furrow‘s first issue was printed in 1895, and its reader base grew drastically in the immediate years that followed. The magazine focused on educating the farmers about the latest advancements in the field and also shared solutions to problems that existed then. Longtime Furrow art director Tom Sizemore associates the success of the magazine with their content strategy that focused on the farmer’s problems rather than on John Deere products.

It is said that the Star Wars movies have made close to $5 billion for its makers and promoters, but the merchandise sold in the name of the movie has done business close to $12 billion. This is one of the biggest examples of the success of content marketing – create a platform and then using that platform, generate business.

Just like any other field, content marketing has its clearly-defined rules. Follow the rules and guidelines and your content marketing is going to succeed. Ignore the rules and guidelines, well, at your own risk.

A few months ago I wrote The never changing fundamentals of content marketing. The fundamentals, the rules, the guidelines, or whatever you call them, keep you on the right path. It’s like, when you are cooking a recipe, there are certain ingredients you cannot avoid. Although you can experiment, the fundamental ingredients have to be the same otherwise you will be cooking something else and not what you originally intended to cook.

Want to make sure that your content marketing is successful? Aside from following fundamental guidelines I have mentioned above, here is a nice post that talks of The 12 simple rules of successful content marketing. In whatever context, in whichever language you talk of these rules, they hardly change. Even their digital existence doesn’t alter their behaviour. These are the rules the above post talks about:

Create unique content: The importance of unique content cannot be understated. The sole purpose of content marketing is to give you a unique identity. If you are publishing something that is available on every second website or blog, how are you going to stand out? You can stand out only when you publish something unique, something totally different from what the others are publishing. Publish fewer blog posts, web pages and social media updates, but always publish unique content.
Tailor your content according to the medium: Content marketing will require you to publish content on different media. For example, you may publish blog posts, web pages and articles on your own website. Twitter has its own limitation of 140 characters (although this limit is being raised up to 280 characters). Images and shorter updates do well on Facebook. The point is, in order to be successful in content marketing, publish content according to the medium you are using to publish it.
Create or write relevant content: Is your content useful to people? I publish a content marketing and content writing blog to share my knowledge of my profession. Suddenly if I start publishing film reviews or recipes, will it do any good to my business? I don’t think so. So, always create or write content that is relevant to your business.
Follow a content publishing schedule: Even when people don’t consciously realize it, they get used to hearing from you at a particular time or during particular days. Also, to optimize your content marketing effort, you should publish your content when there is the greatest chance of your audience coming across it. Suppose, most of the people who follow you on Facebook come online around 4-5 PM every day. If you don’t publish updates during this time, most of the people are going to miss them. Similarly, if you publish a new blog post every Wednesday, stick to the schedule no matter what. Irregularity makes your brand appear non-serious and non-committed.
Don’t just focus on your blog: Actually, this depends. If most of your business depends on an audience that prefers to read your blog posts, then definitely you should focus on your blog. But if you want to reach out to a wider audience, you should think beyond your blog when implementing your content marketing strategy. Also, it also helps if you publish your content on other platforms. I routinely try to publish on Medium and Quora.
Closely observe your metrics: Once you start publishing and distributing content on a regular basis, if you are using a tool like Google Analytics, you will start collecting metrics. Analytics data tells you what kind of traffic your content is attracting from search engines and social networking websites. Closely observe your metrics and make changes to your content marketing accordingly. If you are publishing and distributing wrong content (content that doesn’t bring you customers and clients) you will be wasting effort and money.
Optimize your content for mobile consumption: Your website or blog might be getting a big chunk of traffic from mobile phones. Publish your content in such a manner that it is easily readable from mobile devices. Although whether your content is accessible on mobile devices depends a lot on the structural layout of the website or the blog, there are many ways you can write content that is easier to consume on mobile devices. You may like to read How to do content writing for the mobile-first experience.
Take creative risks sometimes: To stand out, sometimes you need to write something totally contrary to what you normally write and there is nothing wrong in that. You don’t need to do it often, but sometimes you can take creative risks. For example, what are your views on the various Donald Trump policies and how can you incorporate your views in the basic messaging of your business? How can I connect content marketing and Donald Trump? How can I write on controversial issues without offending my core audience?
Keep it simple: This is especially important if you are writing for business or B2B. Your messaging needs to be to the point and simple. By simple I don’t mean that you publish content only for dumb and dumber. An average entrepreneur doesn’t have enough time to figure out exactly what you are trying to say. Keep everything straight forward.
Stick to your brand message: Vagueness confuses people. The above link gives the example of Nike’s “Just do it!” – their every campaign revolves around this message. Define your core message and then stick to it. For example, if I want to establish my brand for “quality content” then every piece of content that I publish should reflect that philosophy. On the other hand, if I want to establish my brand for “cheap content” then every message should convey to my audience that cheap content is available here.
Respond to feedback as fast as you can: When you publish content, when you express your views, there is bound to be some feedback. People are going to respond. Whether you publish content on your blog or on Twitter, people are going to respond in all sorts of ways. Some responses will be justified and some will be trollish. As you are known for the content you publish, you are also known for the way you respond to feedback.
Create content for your audience: If every piece of content you create and publish is to promote your business, along the way it begins to lose its charm. You desire to earn more and more business takes precedence and this begins to show through your content. Of course you want to grow your business, but let your content do the job.

Just like the proverbial “butterfly effect” there can be millions of factors contributing to success or failure of your content marketing. But, as mentioned above, there are some fundamental rules that are applicable not just to content marketing, but to every field. They can even be applied to your business in the conventional sense.

10 metrics that tell you content marketing is making a positive impact on your business

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It’s been now a few years since content marketing went mainstream. People no longer wonder what content marketing is although a majority of business owners, entrepreneurs and companies still have doubts regarding how it exactly works for businesses and companies that vouch for it. The problem with content marketing is most of the buzz in its favour is created by people who themselves are content marketers. There are few non-content-marketing companies that put forward case studies to show how it has impacted their businesses in a positive manner and improved their bottom lines. This is also because content marketing is also a relatively new phenomena (in terms of using it on the Internet, otherwise it has existed for centuries).

Why is it important to know the content marketing success metrics?

Because unless we know them, how do we know what works and what doesn’t work? Success stories of many businesses have proven repeatedly that content marketing is working for them, but it is not a copy/paste technique because every business is unique. If you want to use content marketing, you have to use according to the needs of your own business and according to the needs of your customers and clients. There are different dynamics involved. The metric that works for business “A” might not work for business “B” and vice-a-versa. But of course, there are some standard metrics that can be observed and monitored in order to know how well your content marketing is working, and some of these metrics are listed below.

Metrics that tell you that your content marketing is benefiting your business

The increase in traffic for the targeted keywords: Most of my content marketing and content writing clients approach me for this purpose – they want to increase search engine traffic for their targeted keywords. How many of these keyword-centric visitors actually turn into paying customers and clients is another issue, but if you see that since the beginning of your content marketing campaign your targeted search engine traffic has increased, it means your content marketing is working.
The amount of time people spend on your website or blog is increasing: The more they stay on your website or blog the more they buy from you. This maxim works for every website. If people are spending more time on your website it means your content marketing is working.
Your bounce rate is coming down:
Bounce rate means people leave your website immediately after coming to the page or blog post they landed on without checking out the other pages or block posts. The success indicator of your content marketing is that your bounce rate reduces and people tend to not just stay longer on your website but also go through other sections.
The number of unique visitors is increasing: If your content marketing is drawing people from various sources it means your presence on the Internet is being recognised and gaining traction.
The number of repeat visitors is increasing: People repeatedly come to your website when they find something valuable, whether it is your content or the products and services they are looking for. Again, the more they come to your website, the greater is the chance that they end up becoming your customers and clients.
Your email subscribers are increasing: Your mailing list is one of the most valuable marketing assets you have. It takes lots of effort to make people sign up for your regular updates and if your signups are increasing, it means people value your content and would like to repeatedly hear from you.
The number of inbound links is increasing: There are 2 reasons your website and blog need inbound links – to get diversified but targeted traffic and to increase your search engine rankings. When more people link to you it means they can easily find your content because unless they come to your content directly or via another source, they cannot link to it. If more reputed blogs and websites are linking to you your content marketing is yielding results.
More people are sharing your content on social media and social networking websites: Again, 2 things are happening – people are easily able to find your content and they consider your content valuable and useful. In terms of marketing, it is easier to publish valuable content but difficult to make it findable. This happens with strategic marketing. When people are finding your content links through other resources (not directly from you) and then they are sharing your links under their own social media and social networking profiles, this is a very healthy content marketing metrics although you may not realise how it brings direct business to you.
The number of leads are increasing: Your content marketing effort is showing results if the number of leads that you generate during a particular period is increasing. Surely you have some mechanism in place that tracks how many leads your website generates per week or per month. If you are observing an increase in the number of people showing direct interest in doing business with you after the initiation of your content marketing campaign, you’re getting positive results.
Your business is increasing: Your revenue has increased. You are making more sales. You are getting more clients. Your customers and clients are referring more customers and clients to your business. If you have been running a content marketing campaign and nothing else and you can see these results, it is one of the strongest metrics.

Please keep in mind that sometimes metrics can be misleading. If suddenly you see a spike in traffic you may believe that your content marketing efforts are working wonders but unless the traffic turns into business, you cannot rest assured of the efficacy of your content marketing efforts. This is why you need to analyse constantly. If you are getting traffic, what sort of traffic your content marketing is generating? Are you getting search engine traffic for the right keywords? Is your brand getting known for the right reasons? Are people lingering on your website for the right reasons?

Nevertheless, these 10 content marketing metrics can keep you focused.