3 Ideas That Can Drastically Improve Your Content Marketing Efforts

For smaller, local businesses—and even a lot of larger, national businesses—content marketing can be hard, seemingly impossible work. WIth so much content being added to the Internet on an hourly basis, the amount of effort and luck that goes into creating an awesome piece of content that actually sees some success can make a person’s mind numb. However, there are a few ways you can change your way of thinking about content marketing to give yourself a better chance of hitting the content jackpot next time around.

Stop Focusing On SEO

While SEO is going to be a factor when getting your content to rank on search results pages, this shouldn’t be something you focus on when planning and producing your content. For most well performing content online today, SEO and other optimization techniques actually took a back seat to creating something of quality for readers to enjoy. A good rule of thumb to employ when writing content is for SEO to be a consideration, not a dictation. Your content marketing efforts will improve the more you focus on engaging with your readers, not with Google.

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Tap Into the Data

With so many businesses putting more and more of their money into content marketing, you’ll want to be sure you’re relying on data to help you find the most success you can out of your efforts. However, creative aspects of marketing—like content—are often hard to find reliable data for.

Ben Harper of Content Marketing Institute recommends for business to focus on some specific metrics when looking for data to support their content marketing efforts. These metrics should include things like visits, engagement and conversions. You could also look for other key performance indicators like the time spent reading your content and how your content compares to your competitor’s content.

Segment, Segment, Segment

Creating a content marketing plan that will actually get off the ground requires a lot of hard work. One aspect of this hard work comes in the form of segmentation. While you may think that casting a wide net will get you the most fish, it’s actually the smaller, more segmented nets that will help you find the most success with your content.

Entrepreneur contributor Mel Carson recommends segmenting your users based on both your audiences and their specific behaviors. This means taking the time to outline detailed demographics for all your potential visitors or markets and then creating customized content for those groups of people. While this will take up a lot of time and effort, the results will be worth it in the end.

To find success with content marketing, you need to be willing to put in the time and effort. But by letting go of SEO, using the right data, and segmenting your audiences, you can concentrate your efforts on tasks that will truly help your content marketing soar.