Content marketing is an important part of any marketing strategy as it helps to drive traffic to your website, build authority, and demonstrate your value to customers. It is also an integral part of your SEO strategy, so it’s vital that you get your content right. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses don’t really know how to develop a winning content strategy and they think that posting content regularly is enough, but there’s so much more to it than that. 

Creating and posting content takes time and investment, so if you are not seeing any good returns from your content strategy, you are not spending your marketing budget effectively. However, if you make some simple changes to your content marketing, you can increase the return on investment and you will see a tangible increase in sales. If your content marketing strategy is not working for you, these are some of the best ways to improve it. 

Use Visual Content 

When you are creating content, it’s important that it is informative, engaging, and entertaining. It’s also important that you create content that people are willing to share on social media, so you can expand your reach and drive more traffic to your site. You can achieve both of those things by using more visual content. Studies show that people respond far better to pictures and videos than they do to simple text posts, and they are far more likely to share visual content online. Visual content is also more accessible to people that may struggle to read large blocks of text. You should spend some time exploring different ways to use video content, like using screen recording, for example. Instead of writing about the great features that your product has, why not create a video demonstration and show your customers? Once you start to use engaging visual content, you will notice a big increase in engagement and traffic to your site. 

Use A Content Discovery Service 

Getting people to view your content in the first place can be a big challenge. Social media is a great place to push your content, especially if you can encourage engagement and get a lot of people to share it. However, you should also consider using a content discovery service, like Revcontent, to get your content out there. They can create suggestions for your content on relevant sites at the bottom of articles, and they will carefully select sites based on your target demographic. They can also create sidebar ads and social media feed ads to expand the reach of your content and help you to generate interest from new customers. The majority of the people that you reach on your own social media accounts will be your own followers, so using a content discovery service is the best way to expose new potential customers to your content. 

Create Useful Content That Doesn’t Promote Products 

You might think that content which doesn’t promote your products is a waste of time, but that is not the case. In fact, one of the big mistakes that businesses make with their content strategy is only posting about their own products because this doesn’t help to build a relationship with customers and it quickly becomes boring. Building trust and demonstrating value to potential customers is one of the biggest advantages of content marketing. Then, when you do publish posts that promote your products, people are far more likely to respond well to them and you should see an increase in sales. In most cases, it’s best to post 3 non-promotional pieces of content for every 1 promotional one. By doing this, you build a relationship with customers because you are offering them something of value without the expectation of payment. It also helps to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise so you can position yourself as an authority in your industry, which builds trust in your products. 

Encourage Engagement 

Engagement is an important part of your content marketing strategy, but you will only get readers to engage if you encourage them to do so. If you want people to share your posts on social media, you need to ensure that they are informative and entertaining, but you also need to close out posts by asking people to like, comment, and share. 

It’s also important that you pay close attention to engagement and adjust your strategy accordingly. If people are commenting on your posts, read their comments and see what they have to say. When people engage with you directly, always comment back and start a dialogue. If a lot of people have complaints about your content, try to change it in the future to address the things that people don’t like. You should also pay attention to which posts get a lot of engagement and which don’t, so you can get a clear idea of which aspects of your content strategy are working well. If you continue to invest resources in content that doesn’t connect with your audience, you are wasting time and money. 

Tailor Content To Different Platforms 

Posting content on a number of different social media platforms is important if you want to expand your reach, but many businesses make the mistake of creating a single post and putting it out on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. The thing is, you will have different people following you on each platform and each of the platforms has a slightly different user base. For example, Snapchat is used primarily by younger people, while the older generation tends to lean towards Facebook. Instagram also has a younger user base and is primarily focused on visual content. If you don’t pay attention to these differences and you blanket post the same content on all platforms, it will not perform as well. You need to consider the audience on each platform and adjust the type of content that you post, as well as the tone of the language and the length of the post. You should also experiment with posting at different times of day on different platforms. 

Getting your content strategy right can be difficult, but it’s so important. As long as you follow these tips, you should be able to build a strategy that gets results.