Content marketing is hard, there’s really no way around it. Everybody knows that content marketing is difficult, even we do. We have a video that shows just how challenging it is to produce high-quality content. While content marketing is hard, it doesn’t have to be impossible, and some aspects can even be easy. Depending on your strategy, you can make it easier or harder on yourself. Today, you’ll learn the tactics that will make your content marketing easier, and some ways to make your content more digestible for your audience.
Build A Content Plan
One of the best ways to manage your content marketing and make it easier is by building a thorough content plan. This should at the very least include the topic, the date it will be published or posted, and the keywords you plan on targeting with said content. You’ll want to make this plan spanning over the course of a couple of months. With a content plan, you’ll be able to have a lot of time for research on particularly difficult topics. It will also be helpful for keyword research or topic research, depending on where you start. It can also be helpful to reference to keep yourself on-topic while writing your post since swaying off-topic will lower the success of your content. If this seems like a great idea to you, but you’re looking for where to start, Hubspot has some great templates to get you started on your content strategy and planning!
Rewrite a Blog from Someone Else in the Industry
When saying this, we don’t mean plagiarizing someone else’s content. We also don’t mean to find a random blog post to rewrite. Do some research into what your competition is talking about, and what’s relevant right now in your industry. Find a topic and blog post from another business in your field, and rewrite or redesign the content. This could mean making a YouTube video or an infographic based on their content, which is proven to do very well. Users tend to respond better to information presented in a visual way than in a text-based presentation. You could also just rewrite the content but include your own experience while writing and add your own twist and view on the topic. This is a great way to create high-quality and valuable content without making it too much of a challenge for yourself. Plus, if you comment a link to your content on their blog, this creates backlinks for your website which will help improve your SEO as well. It’s a win-win situation for you: easy content, better SEO!
Rewrite Your Own Content
If your business has been blogging for a while, you’ve probably made some changes to your voice and style over time. Because of this, you likely have at least some blog content that feels outdated because your business has changed. One of the easiest tactics is to rewrite your own blog posts. Take an older post and rewrite it in your current voice and style, or update the information from when you wrote it. The trends in your industry have most likely changed, so change the information to match the current climate. Annual trend anticipation is a foolproof bit of content for the end or beginning of the year, that you’re guaranteed to know at least something about. This tactic overall is a great way to refresh content and have something new to post that is mostly effortless.
Convert your Content to YouTube Videos
YouTube has become a dominant player, not only as a search engine but as a major contender for content marketing. People love watching videos to get the content they need. This is also a great way for you to get the most out of the content you already have written: You have a pretty much perfect script already written for you (although you should change the wording to sound more human and casual). The content is laid out for you to use, you just need to make the shift from text to video. This is also another great off-site SEO tactic that allows you to link your video back to your blog and vice versa.
Write About What You’re Doing
One of the easiest ways to create content is to write about what you are doing or learning in your field. Some topics and tactics that work for your competitors, or just other businesses, may not work for you, so talk about those things. When you talk about the parts of your industry that you have more expertise in, people can tell compared to when you discuss something you’re not as well-versed in. When you discuss the things you’re learning about or doing as a business, people will sense the authenticity and knowledge and your content will be more successful and potentially drive more conversions.
Post Based on Trends
This tactic is a little more complicated than the previous ones, but it’s an extremely effective strategy. Using Google Trends or similar software, you can and should easily discover what topics are trending in your industry. Once you find some good up-and-coming trends in your area, research and write some high-quality content on those topics. This is a great way to keep up with your industry and inform your audience of where your industry is headed and what to look for as of right now. It’s also helpful for keeping your business up-to-date on the current trends to implement into your business.
Use Content Design to Your Advantage
While the content itself is important and should be the star of the show, people won’t be able to get very far if they’re just looking at a plain block of text. Be sure to add some design elements to your content, even if it’s just whitespace. Don’t keep your text condensed into as little space as possible, this will make it nearly impossible to read. Leave a lot of whitespace around, even within paragraphs by increasing the line-height of the text. Separate paragraphs with plenty of whitespace as well, it makes the content much easier to digest. Try to include visuals as well, whether it be images, videos, infographics, or even just some colors in the design of the page itself. Adding something that pops out on the screen will make it easier to read and give the brain something to help along the way. It’s surprising how few businesses take advantage of nice content design, despite how successful it makes your content. While it is slightly time-consuming, it’s still a very easy tactic and makes a huge difference in your content.
Focus on Quality over Quantity
While you may feel that it’s important to get as much content out as possible, this isn’t necessarily the case. If you’re not creating high-quality and valuable content for the sake of quantity, your content marketing efforts will not be effective and you won’t see any progress. It’s important to produce content that will provide value to your buyers in all stages of the buyer’s journey, even if it takes a while to get the content make and distributed. If you can only post every other week, that’s perfectly fine as long as what you’re producing will be valuable to your audience and well-written. Providing helpful information is far more important than anything else.
Content marketing can be very hard, but it can be a lot easier to produce great content than you think. The difference in the challenge is how you build your content strategy. If you’re slaving over your content every week, you won’t have fun with what you’re doing. These tactics will be extremely helpful in building a new content strategy and implementing it with ease and making content marketing more fun for you. Content marketing is a great aide in your digital marketing efforts and helps you get new customers and clients.
Contact us to learn more about how our team at Ascent Digital can help your content marketing efforts.
