3 Tips for Optimizing Your Content Marketing Strategy

In today’s digital age, content marketing has become a staple in marketing. Content helps businesses reach new audiences and generate leads by teaching them about the product/service being sold or shared. Content can be used to build relationships with customers and prospects alike. Content also offers a safe space for brands to develop their voice and showcase their personality while building credibility with potential clients. However, just because you have content doesn’t mean that it is optimized for your business goals! In this post we will explore 3 tips for optimizing your content marketing strategy.

1. Prioritize the User Experience

User experience is a huge factor in content marketing and an often time gets overlooked. Content is only as good as the experience it delivers to your customers/prospects, so consider how they will interact with what you create before launch.

Even if you have the most well-written, well-researched article, if your website’s user experience is poorly designed, people will abandon the page and give a negative ranking factor. Finally, those are leads that you will not be able to convert. Make sure your site loads quickly, is mobile-friendly, and has navigability elements like a table of contents. On all devices, your content should be simple to understand with a number of clear, uniform headings and a sans serif typeface. Also, be sure to optimize for web accessibility guidelines. Ensure that all images include alternate text, that videos have captions, that the website is set to a high-contrast mode, and that your material can be read aloud by a program.

2. Use a Mix of Paid Placement and Organic

Content marketing is about building relationships and providing value, so think of content as a long-term investment. If you are trying to sell your product or service immediately and do not plan on creating additional content in the future, then I recommend using paid placement ads like Google Adwords to garner leads until your website’s traffic grows organically through word of mouth referrals.

For those who want content marketing for its own sake (in other words, if you intend on continuing to add new Content over time), organic growth will be more beneficial than relying exclusively on pay per click advertising. When people find out about your company from an article that was shared with them by someone they trust instead of seeing it while searching online, is much higher chance that they will build a relationship with your brand that will lead to purchasing in the future. Content Marketing through organic means is also cheaper and much less competitive, which can save you time/money for other marketing initiatives down the line.

3. Build your Audience

Content marketing is a long-term commitment, so it’s crucial to start building your content audience from the very beginning. Try creating custom links on social media for all of your content pieces that you can then use as hyperlinks leading back to your site or even as share buttons if people want to post about their favorite piece online. You should also create email marketing campaigns around content and promote them through paid ads with retargeting features so you can build up an audience over time instead of depending entirely upon organic search rankings. The more content you create, the more likely it is that you will be able to build an audience. Content marketing can provide many benefits for your brand if done correctly; however, content should only ever serve as a means to meet goals and not vice versa.

John Lawson is one of the most trusted and experienced eCommerce professionals in the industry. John is the founder of The Ecommerce Group, which he started in 2011 to share his knowledge with other entrepreneurs in the industry. It’s the oldest eCommerce group on Facebook with over 8,500 members from around the world!

John speaks at conferences all around the world, including Retail Global, South by Southwest, Etail, Digital Summit, Hubspot Inbound, Ad-Tech and more. He also writes for several international publications such as Power Retail, Small Business Trends and Disrupt Magazine.