Increasing the efficiency of content marketing: tips and recommendations

Everyone probably knows that content rules the world today. But if we talk directly about the Internet, then the most important point here will be content marketing. This is the tool that today works in absolutely all market niches, regardless of the budget allocated for it. In order to get the most out of all the work carried out in this direction, it is important to accurately and correctly formulate your own strategy and tactics for subsequent work, select those content formats that will be most appropriate in a particular case. Then all that remains is to implement your ideas step by step, monitor their effectiveness and make timely adjustments if necessary. And all of this will be based on the advantages and goals of the specific business you are working with.

As part of today's review, we will get to know in more detail what content marketing is, what advantages and disadvantages can be identified here. We will provide ten practical recommendations that will increase the effectiveness of such work, will contribute to increasing brand recognition in the market, and improving loyalty on the part of the user audience. You may also be interested in such a question as checking the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.

What is content marketing

If we delve into the theory a little, content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy that involves the development and subsequent distribution of text and graphic material in order to attract the attention of the target audience and encourage them to perform a particular target action. A properly developed methodology will increase brand awareness in the market, will help attract new customers and retain the attention of regular ones, increase the level of income and help the comprehensive development of your business.

Among the main advantages of this solution, we highlight:

• Quality content. This is what will allow companies to promote their own products, services, take their business to a new level, and establish themselves in the eyes of customers as a reliable and responsible brand.
• With the help of content marketing, you can easily generate leads. If you provide the user market with useful information, quality products, then you will definitely be able to interest them, make them take a closer look at the brand.
• Retaining the attention of existing customers, business partners. With the help of content marketing, you can show that you are constantly working on yourself, developing, discovering new boundaries and opportunities, keeping up with the times. And this is all that increases the level of trust many times over. And this means that there is no point in looking for an alternative.
• The ability to increase the effectiveness of SEO promotion of Internet sites. This is ensured by filling the site pages with informative, relevant and high-quality material. Such that can interest potential clients and partners.
• Minimizing advertising costs. Due to the fact that you can attract the target audience with the help of content marketing, you can review advertising budgets, optimize them, thereby eliminating a very expensive expense item.

Where there is a plus, there will always be a minus. You need to know about the disadvantages of content marketing in order to determine for yourself the possibility of using this tool in practice. In particular, you must understand that all the work that needs to be done in this direction will require a lot of time and effort. It will be necessary to attract specialists who can prepare the material and present it to the user market. Another difficulty is that you cannot know in advance what result you will ultimately get. In addition, the strategy here is quite long-term. That is, you should not expect that literally the next day you will see a massive influx of customers and orders.

But you will have the opportunity to constantly analyze the effectiveness of the launched solutions and make timely adjustments to them. But there is one BUT here: the number of metrics that you will have to use in practice is quite impressive. The most important ones include traffic indicators, time spent by potential clients on the site, visited pages, content readability rate, etc. And this means that you will have to delve into all the details, understand which of them are more important for your business, which are less.

But in any case, all the shortcomings associated with content marketing can be minimized by a comprehensive and professional approach. If you organize everything as correctly as possible, if you do not forget to analyze the effectiveness, then you can get amazing results, albeit in the long term.

The main stages of implementing a content marketing strategy

The implementation of content marketing in any case involves a comprehensive and multifaceted approach. In particular, to implement the idea, you will need to consistently complete the following tasks:

1. Defining the goal. Even before working with content, it is important to understand what key tasks you set for yourself. That is, initially you will clearly outline a list of tasks that you would like to solve with the help of such marketing. So, for representatives of one business, this may be increasing the coverage of the target audience, conveying information to them about the project, the services provided. For others, it is important to attract new clients, for others - to increase the level of sales, for others - to increase loyalty from the consumer market, to form a strong trust in the brand. In fact, there can be very, very many such goals and, first of all, they depend on the market niche in which the business operates, its current state and plans for future development.
2. Creating a portrait of the target audience. The next task to be implemented as part of the development of a content marketing strategy will be creating a client profile. That is, you need to determine what category of people you plan to target, who you see as your potential buyers. At this stage, it is important to take into account the interests and needs of the user audience, to be well oriented in those channels of interaction with the Internet that they use in practice. These works can be done in different ways. As an option, you can launch surveys or form a focus group in the same social networks, instant messengers. You can analyze your customer base and, based on the data obtained, form a target portrait. You can also use information from social networks and search engines in your work. Automated data parsing will significantly speed up the implementation of these works. How to implement this in practice, we will tell you at the end of the review. If your business has a separate sales department, then you can conduct a survey of employees. They constantly communicate with customers, so they can say what kind of people are interested in your products and services, who receives the most orders. That is, by working through this stage, you will know who exactly your business should focus on: needs and interests, communication channels, goals and dreams. This is the information that will allow you to understand your target audience and prepare subsequent content that will be truly useful and interesting for them, and will cause a positive feedback.
3. Getting to know your competitors and analyzing them. Along with potential clients, you should also, so to speak, "know by sight" other business representatives who work in the same niche as you. Moreover, it is necessary to understand what promotion solutions they use, which of them give the highest results, which allows them to stand out from companies working in the same niche. Perhaps, some of their ideas will be useful for you, will allow you to avoid mistakes and increase the efficiency of your work with minimal time and money. To analyze your competitors, it is important to carefully study their websites, profiles on social networks, instant messengers, blog channels. Look at what content they create, what information they cover in it, how often they publish. It is also important to evaluate the channels of interaction with the target audience that are used in practice, as well as the methods of promotion. And all this should be analyzed from the point of view of results: which solutions gave the greatest effect in practice, and which, on the contrary, proved to be a failure. By the way, collecting data on competitors can also be automated using specialized software solutions.
4. Choosing the channels through which the content will be distributed. Before preparing the material itself, you need to understand where it will be published. The fact is that each platform has its own nuances and features both in style of presentation and in the number of characters. That is, you will have to adapt the material to these features, otherwise you will not get the desired result. In practice, most often used are not only the official website of the company, but also social networks, email distribution, corporate blogs, webinars, materials that will be published on video hosting sites and much more. Which option will be the most suitable for your business? Here, focus on its specifics, on the same portrait of the target audience. It is also important to correctly assess your own financial capabilities, since promotion on certain platforms will require different amounts of money. Are you ready to invest in expensive solutions or rely on channels that require minor expenses? But still, it is optimal to choose those platforms where the maximum of your potential buyers will be concentrated.
5. Selection of criteria by which you will analyze the effectiveness of the work. We are talking about the so-called key performance indicator, KPI. It includes a large number of parameters by which the success of the launched content marketing will be assessed. By analyzing them, you will be able to understand whether you are able to achieve your goals and what efforts it may cost you. The set of parameters that will need to be monitored directly depends on the tasks that you plan to solve within the framework of the launched strategy. The main points here include traffic leading to your site or other online presences, the level of interaction with the email newsletter, materials published on your official resource or profiles in social networks, conversion rates, etc.
6. Development of the content plan itself and the corresponding content. And only now, at the sixth stage, we have come to the point where we can already talk directly about the content itself. The first thing to do is develop a content plan. It is a document that will list all the types of materials that you will publish and on which resources you will do this. The content plan also specifies target KPIs and the indicators that will be optimal for you. That is, you determine the norm, as well as the time period in which you want to achieve it. And now you can prepare the materials themselves: write texts for the site, blog, social networks, email newsletters, etc. Then the publication itself is carried out in accordance with the time intervals that will also be specified in the content plan.
7. Analysis of results. We have already mentioned more than once that without monitoring the effectiveness of the content strategy you have launched, you will not be able to achieve the desired results. That is, you must understand whether the decisions you made earlier were correct, whether your user audience appreciated them, whether this led to an increase in sales or visits to your site. Such monitoring should be carried out at predetermined intervals. This is what will allow you to identify discrepancies as quickly as possible and immediately respond to them, make adjustments and do everything to get the desired results and reach the KPI indicators that you have written down in your content plan on time.

At this stage, it may seem that there is nothing complicated in working with content marketing. Yes, the work ahead is large-scale, it requires your constant presence and attention, but it seems that there should be no difficulties here. But alas, practice shows the opposite. More than half of the launched strategies do not give the results that specialists and business as a whole expected. In order to minimize all possible errors and initially make the most correct decisions in the field of content marketing, we suggest that you familiarize yourself with a number of tips and recommendations from specialists who have been successfully working in this market segment for a long time.

TOP 10 recommendations that will help improve the efficiency of an Internet marketer

Today, content marketing has a huge number of tools and solutions at its disposal that will improve the efficiency of work and achieve the desired results. Some of them give quick results in practice, while others, on the contrary, show themselves well in the longer term. Now we will give 10 recommendations that can be safely used in content marketing, regardless of the market niche you will be working in. You can take them on board, use them in your work, slightly interpreting them to suit the individual characteristics of the business you are working with.

Add a touch of creativity to your content

A good content marketer is a specialist who is able to adequately assess the situation and predict how it will develop in the future. And here, the depth of your market research will have a significant impact. But you can do this by communicating with your prepared audience. And here you can not limit yourself in creative approaches. You can launch original interactive events, marathons, sweepstakes that will attract people, encourage them to voluntarily provide information about their interests, wishes.

Also, creative developments can be transferred directly to the content preparation process. So, imagine that you are filling out the “About Us” page. What will you write about? About your company? Most likely, no. This page is more dedicated to customers, that is, how you show care for them, what level of service you provide, what values your team adheres to, what decisions it makes to please the consumer market. That is, the bet should not be on the fact that your company is cool, but on the fact that you know how to do something as cool and awesome as possible for your customers.

It is worth discarding hackneyed and outdated phrases, such as “you can buy high-quality goods at low prices”, “during our work on the market, we have achieved impressive success and continue to develop”, “we offer products of famous world brands at an affordable cost”, etc. That is, we move away from general phrases, but at the same time do not forget about the interests of the client and that you should emphasize the specific advantage of the business with which you work. Phrases like these will look appropriate in modern content:

• official cooperation with a well-known brand, long-term, promising partnership with a particular company;
• multi-level loyalty program, attractive to each client;
• social responsibility of the brand, official guarantees, etc.

That is, you must present your own advantages from the client's position, show what benefits he will receive. Particular attention is also paid to the description of the process of cooperation, sending and paying for orders. By being creative, you can boldly ask your consumers what is important to them and provide answers to these questions in your materials.

Put the most important ideas at the beginning of the content

If you monitor the sites that are online today, you can see that information about the company itself, a unique selling proposition, or even the benefits of cooperation can be located in places that are completely inappropriate for this: at the very end of the page, in product sections, or even in the item cards on the site. And here the first question arises: are you sure that people who get to your page will read it all, that they will go to study the catalog and find the most important information? The one that will convince them to place an order on your site?

To avoid such mistakes, the key aspects of cooperation, including the brand's advantages, should be written on the main page, optimally even at the very beginning of the text. Start your material something like this: The company... is a leading manufacturer of children's clothing and toys made from natural, certified materials. We work in the market so that you can surround your little ones with the safest, but at the same time stylish, fashionable things and toys that will develop them from the first days of life. This will already be enough for potential buyers to understand what products they can buy on your site, make sure that they are safe and suitable for use by children.

All subsequent material is only a disclosure of those features and advantages that you briefly mentioned at the very beginning.

A blog is not only a tool for attracting SEO traffic

Most users get to a particular site through search results. That is, they enter a key request and, if it matches the phrases that you wrote in your text, the search engine adds the corresponding page of the site to the display. By the way, the more accurate the match of key phrases, the greater your chance of getting into the search results. But here we are talking not only about the site pages themselves, but also about third-party platforms where your materials are published and the possibility of switching to the company's official resource is provided. In many ways, this also applies to the blog.

However, directing traffic to your site is not the only task that such channels are responsible for. Posting articles on your blog is also your chance to show a wide audience your uniqueness, high quality of goods or services, new approaches to solving certain problems, and a fresh look at everyday things. To increase sales through your blog, you should use the following tips:

• Add photo content to your materials, including in the form of product cards that already have an active link to the relevant sections of the site.
• Offer different consumption options for consideration. That is, you have a product and it can be used in different areas. Make such a list and make each item from it a separate article. Practical examples and application nuances will make such material interesting and useful for users.
• Prepare detailed instructions for use, detailed reviews of a particular product. Here, not only text descriptions but also short educational videos will be useful.
• Think about the link mass that you will add to the article. Imagine which pages you would like to redirect readers of your material to and based on this, introduce link phrases into the text. The main thing is that they look appropriate and concise.
• Old content must be deleted or radically changed, rebuild it to fit today's current trends. That is, let your URL remain constant, but the publications themselves can be changed, add fresh information to them.

Highlight your customers' purchasing cycles

A content marketer is well acquainted with such a term as the customer life cycle and how important it is to attract attention and impress readers at each of these stages. That is, the same material should:

Video companies have proven themselves well recently. They are gradually replacing infographics, which have already lost their relevance and fictitiousness.

Think through the main page of the site to the smallest detail

The main page of the site is a kind of product card for all those who work in the field of e-commerce or a full-fledged page for a certain service. In most cases, it is on the basis of its material that the buyer decides to place an order or look for an alternative. That is, it should contain all the most important information about your company and the goods and services that will be supplied to the market.

It is also important to focus on personalization. This is what has become the basis of modern content marketing. That is, in order to prepare a worthy option, you need to understand what previous interactions your buyers had with the main page of the site, what other pages they viewed, how they got to the resource. Based on this information, you can create personalized content that will literally guide a potential client through your resource, introduce them to the most interesting publications and offers, which will ultimately facilitate the placement of an order.

Actively use guest posts

The term guest posting is already actively used in content marketing. This is what can increase brand awareness and the level of loyalty on the part of consumers, and get the most out of your investment. To implement such ideas, opinion leaders are involved. Yes, you will have to pay for such a publication, but you can be sure that the entire devoted fan base and subscribers will believe the blogger and decide to personally check the product or service that he advertised.

And this means that people who are already confident in advance in the need to purchase a product and that it fully meets their needs and is of high quality will come to your site. These are those who are already ready to make a purchase in advance. As a result, the return on investment will increase several times.

Constantly monitor your target audience

We have already talked about the fact that drawing up a portrait of the target audience is one of the key stages in preparing to create content for a website or blog. That is, initially you work through a large amount of material, communicate with potential clients, and make a lot of efforts to get the desired information. And here is the portrait of the target audience in front of you. Can I breathe a sigh of relief? No!

All this will work for a while, and then it may happen that the strategy simply stops giving an effect. And the reason here may be that the portrait you created is no longer relevant for the modern audience. Everything in this world changes, including people, their preferences, interests, needs for certain products. And if you analyze the situation again, it may turn out that literally in a couple of years your target audience will have completely different features than those that were characteristic of it before.

This means that you always need to be aware of changes, respond to them. And to do this, you should regularly interact with your customers, receive feedback from them, monitor changes in their interests. This is what will allow you to offer the consumer market only relevant content, which will be perceived properly.

Optimizing your content

On average, content remains relevant for a year, maximum two, after which it becomes outdated and can do more harm than good to your business. This means that it must be constantly updated, optimized, adjusted to those key queries that are relevant at a given time. That is, you do not have to completely rework all your publications. It is enough to simply replace outdated queries with new ones, adjust the information if it is already far from the truth.

It is also worth dividing all content into two separate groups:

But in any case, it is also important to monitor the style of presentation. It should be simple, understandable, contain a minimum of complex terminology that not every reader will be able to understand. The text content is supplemented with graphic material, video, which enhances its visual perception.

Make maximum use of the opportunities that social networks provide

It is difficult to underestimate the opportunities that social networks provide to business owners and all those who specialize in its promotion. They open up very broad opportunities for attracting the target audience, getting to know new brands, products, services, as well as offering them to an impressive segment of the consumer market. And this means that you will be able to attract to your site the entire audience that is concentrated in certain social networks. Here you need to proceed from the specifics of your business and the target audience itself.

This means that you can publish your materials on specialized sites, placing appropriate tags and even direct links in them. If your publications attract people's attention, they will share them, like them, write comments and do everything that will contribute to their distribution. At the same time, you get practically free advertising that gives amazing results in reality.

Target the local audience

This is relevant even for a business that operates online and sends its products to different regions of the country or even other countries, continents. The fact is that every day more and more people are looking for the goods or services they need through smartphones. Take, for example, the same Google, which is used by the vast majority of gadget consumers today. And here there is an opportunity to search for local results. Why should a person order delivery, pay for it, if he can find the product he needs in his city? Moreover, he can come to a store or warehouse, look at it, understand whether it suits his needs, thereby avoiding returns.

Relevant keywords will help optimize your content for the local market. But here you need to understand that if you write “confectionery in Moscow”, then only local residents will be able to use these services. Don't forget to add all your offline points to Google Maps. This is what will allow the service to automatically bring customers directly to you.

Let's sum it up

As you can see, content marketing is a really powerful tool, but you need to know how to use it. This is the only way you will get results that can exceed your expectations or at least justify them. Following the recommendations given in the review, you will be able to increase the efficiency of your work and make decisions that are sure to be correct.

The last point I would like to draw your attention to is the need to use mobile proxies. They will be useful to you when creating a portrait of the target audience and collecting data on competitors, with multi-accounting, working with services that automate actions on the network. Also, do not forget that MobileProxy.Space mobile proxies are This is a tool that can provide reliable protection against any unauthorized access, including hacker attacks, and maintain your privacy when working on the Internet.

To get to know this product in more detail, evaluate its functionality, and test it before buying, we suggest following the link https://mobileproxy.space/en/user.html?buyproxy. You can also familiarize yourself with the available geolocations in advance and understand which markets you can work with without any restrictions established in a particular country at the legislative level. That is, you can change this parameter, pretend to be a local resident, and the system will not notice this substitution.

Along with the mobile proxies themselves, the service offers to use a number of related tools for free that will be useful in your work as a content marketer, as well as many other specialists. In particular, we are talking about services that allow you to determine the IP-address, port availability, Internet speed and many others. If you encounter technical difficulties in your subsequent work, you can contact the support service, which works around the clock.

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