To help you refine your content marketing strategy, I’ve gathered fifteen pieces of advice from top professionals in the field, including Content Marketing Managers and CEOs. From leveraging your unique personality to engaging your audience with storytelling, these experts share their most valuable tips for success. Dive into these insights to take your content marketing to the next level.
- Leverage Your Unique Personality
- Understand the Context of Your Content
- Speak to Your Audience
- Use Analytics to Guide Strategy
- Educate and Entertain Your Ideal Customer
- Understand and Tailor Content to Your Audience
- Focus on High-Quality, Valuable Content
- Treat Audience Understanding as a Dynamic Process
- Create Evergreen Content
- Empathize with Your Audience
- Define Your Business Development and Marketing Plan
- Combine Different Forms of Content
- Hire a Skilled Writer
- Incorporate AI Technology
- Engage the Audience with Storytelling
Leverage Your Unique Personality
Understand your personality, then lean on it to differentiate yourself and your brand. In the age of AI, I think we’re all quickly getting sick of seeing the same copywriting formulas and video hooks. When your audience can connect with you (and differentiate you from the pack), they’ll keep revisiting your content over and over.
The same goes for B2B content marketing. Your audience might be brands, but it’s the people who work there who will connect with your content. Understand your brand’s personality, then infuse it through all of your touchpoints.
Anastasia Pelot, Gen Z Expert and Content Marketing Manager, YPulse
Understand the Context of Your Content
Content strategy starts with context. Know what you have (audit), know what you need (identify gaps), and be honest about why you need it (ask tough questions). These things will give your content purpose and set expectations for performance.
Otherwise, you’re just cluttering and cannibalizing your content ecosystem. Where does it fit in the journey? What makes it unique from other stories you’re telling? How is it valuable in the moment to your reader, viewer, attendee, survey participant, etc.? If you can’t answer those questions, it’s probably best to re-prioritize, barring everyone’s favorite motivator: an executive order from your CMO.
Corey Johnson, Content Marketing Manager, Workiva
Speak to Your Audience
Speak to your audience as much as possible to enable you to craft your content marketing efforts around their popular needs and interests.
For example, if you worked with a fashion brand for plus-size women, you could speak with 10-20 plus-size women you know to learn more about their shared sentiments and dislikes.
Once you have a good understanding of your audience, you can filter their likes and dislikes to match with what your company can solve.
Finally, organize this information into a content strategy that aligns with your distribution channels.
Onyeka Ekwemozor, Content Marketer, Zedi Africa
Use Analytics to Guide Strategy
My suggestion is to look at the analytics of each article’s performance. Using Google Analytics, we can find out which article had the most users and its average time on page. We can tailor our future topics towards the articles with the most views. We can also make changes to the articles that don’t have many views or have the least average time on page.
Mei Ping Mak, Director of SEO and Web, Weave Asia
Educate and Entertain Your Ideal Customer
It’s crucial to look at your ideal customer profiles (ICPs). What can educate or entertain them? These should be the building blocks for your content marketing strategy. Too often, we get lost in conversions, keywords, and other performance metrics, but at the end of the day, our content marketing strategy needs to figure out how to educate and entertain your ideal customer profile. If you do, the metrics will come all by themselves.
Anders Thornild, Head of Marketing, CyberPilot
Understand and Tailor Content to Your Audience
The most crucial element in improving your content marketing strategy is an intimate understanding of your audience. Drawing from experiences in founding multiple companies and writing for platforms like HuffPost, Elite Daily, Startups Magazine, and Entrepreneur, it’s essential to tailor your content to meet the specific needs of your target demographic. Specializing in various fields like digital marketing, AI, and SEO can be beneficial.
Employing market research to get precise insights into your audience is also recommended. This is not a one-time activity, but rather an ongoing commitment. Use this data to create detailed buyer personas, which will be a guiding light in crafting content that resonates. By applying this personalized focus across all your content outlets, from blogs to social media to email campaigns, you’re investing in a dialogue that not only adds value to your audience but also exponentially increases brand loyalty and ROI.
Bhavik Sarkhedi, Brand Consultant and Content Marketer, BrainerHub
Focus on High-Quality, Valuable Content
Write less (kind of!). Content marketing goes hand-in-hand with SEO. Dare I say, content marketing is SEO.
Generally, in-depth, long-form content performs well in Google. It’s easy to try and “give Google what it wants” by creating lots of content based on keywords or what’s ranking in “People Also Ask.”
But I say, provide the utmost value to your readers with in-depth, long-form content, and you’ll find your site will perform.
Content marketing is about giving your audiences what they want to read. Don’t get stuck in the details of what works in Google or what keywords go where. Instead, ask yourself honestly, is this the best piece I could’ve written for my audience? And if it is, publish it.
From experience, content written for the user outperforms in Google. I always say, “Soul is part of the algorithm,” so make your content soulful.
Zoe Ashbridge, Co-Founder and Senior SEO Strategist, forank
Treat Audience Understanding as a Dynamic Process
Don’t treat your understanding of the target audience as static documentation, solely for reference during content production. Instead, view it as a dynamic and ongoing process that continuously improves your content marketing strategy. Actively engage with leads, clients, individuals in your industry, and even those outside of it through offline interactions. Seek their insights on why they would or would not consider your product or service.
Then, take actionable steps based on these valuable insights!
Refine your messaging to align with their expectations, improve your product or service offerings, and effectively address the pain points of your target audience. Craft engaging stories that resonate with them, capturing their attention and positioning your offering as their undeniable first choice. Instead of using content solely as a means to spread news, utilize it as a tool to respond to your audience’s questions and provide answers they may not even realize they need.
Joyce Tsang, Content Marketer and Founder, Joyce Tsang Content Marketing
Create Evergreen Content
To improve your content marketing, think about how long your content will be useful. Some topics will always be important, like “how-to” guides. Look at your old content. Remove outdated stuff and update the rest. Use pictures that won’t feel old quickly.
Check what topics keep coming back over time. Avoid writing too much about things that will change soon, like a new gadget. Always make your content helpful, and keep sharing it if it’s still good.
Neil Hodgson Coyle, Content Marketing Manager, PRLab
Empathize with Your Audience
When refining your content marketing strategy, my crucial piece of advice is to genuinely understand and empathize with your audience. Look into their challenges, aspirations, and conversations. Tools and analytics can provide useful insights, but genuine engagement—like hosting focus groups or community forums—can provide invaluable qualitative insights that you can’t get anywhere else.
By resonating deeply with your audience’s journey and basing your content around search intent, you elevate your content from mere information to impactful narratives, fostering loyalty and driving engagement.
Luke Glassford, Marketing Director, Gambit Partners
Define Your Business Development and Marketing Plan
The first step is to define your business development and marketing plan, which includes really knowing and breaking down your target market so you know who you are writing content for and what they like.
This process also develops your competitive advantage, elevator pitch, social media strategy, website content, and more. Stay abreast of your competitors and the industry using the mediums they frequent, which could be LinkedIn, social media, newspapers, online blogs, etc. Keep up with your trade and business sector with ongoing education, online masterclasses, etc. Utilize content writers or AI writers like ChatGPT.
Kennette J. Burgess, Founder and CEO, Marketing and Business Development Consultant (Owner), FOCUS MARKETING & DEVELOPMENT SOLUTIONS
Combine Different Forms of Content
Look for ways to combine content. Many companies and content creators miss this. Videos, podcasts, and audiobooks are all individually effective. But when you combine two or more of them with a write-up, or just have a content calendar that contains all mediums of content, you have a far better chance of appealing to everyone out there.
Videos and images offer people something to visualize, while good writing spells out exactly what you are promoting. For instance, add a video link or a few relevant and catchy images in between your text, or do both, and your content marketing strategy is immediately better.
Soham Chakraborty, Senior Content Writer, BeatRoute
Hire a Skilled Writer
I often work with companies looking to improve their content marketing strategy. I first take a look at their advertised roles. More often than not, search marketing and copywriting are encompassed in a single position. This is a mistake.
Understanding SEO and SEM may give you the keywords you need to win the SERP race, but it won’t produce compelling copy that keeps people reading your posts. For this, you need a skilled storyteller.
A dedicated writer might seem like a luxury you can’t afford, but I’ve seen it pay off repeatedly. My clients’ click-through rates explode and bounce rates drop when they bring in an experienced copywriter. It’s an investment that returns dividends.
Rob Reeves, CEO and President, Redfish Technology
Incorporate AI Technology
One piece of advice for improving your content-marketing strategy is to leverage AI technology. Many people are hesitant to use it, but I highly recommend that you try it because AI can be a powerful tool for enhancing your content in several ways.
It can help make your text tighter and more concise by identifying and eliminating unnecessary words or phrases, ensuring that your message is clear and engaging. AI can assist in adding more detail to your content by suggesting relevant facts, statistics, or examples to support your points, making your content more informative and credible. AI can also be a valuable resource for generating new content ideas by analyzing data and trends to identify topics and angles that resonate with your target audience.
By incorporating AI into your content-marketing strategy, you can streamline your content-creation process and produce more compelling, data-driven, and audience-focused content.
Josh Bluman, Co-Founder, Hoppy Copy
Engage the Audience with Storytelling
Dive into the vibrant content-marketing sea with storytelling as your powerful current! For your book service and publishing enterprise, captivating narratives are the secret sauce to compelling content. Craft stories that resonate—whether it’s the journey of a manuscript transforming into a bound book or a success tale of an author breaking through.
Make your audience the protagonist, addressing their challenges, aspirations, and literary dreams. Infuse your stories with relatable emotions, experiences, and valuable lessons. Each story should not only reflect your brand’s voice but also echo the heartbeat of your audience. Engage them with tales that unfold the magic lurking in pages, the joy of discovering new authors, or the sheer delight of holding a freshly printed book.
With storytelling, your content becomes a mesmerizing tapestry of words that attracts, retains, and converts your audience, turning each marketing campaign into a bestseller!
Vikrant Shaurya, CEO, Authors On Mission