Content marketing is an integral part of developing your business online. It helps your business attract a target audience and convert people into paid customers. Moreover, every marketing strategy revolves around content.
Content drives traffic to your website. It promotes your product or service organically. It aims to help consumers solve the issues they have.
If you analyze your competitors, you will see that their success is built completely on creating a high-quality content marketing strategy.
Your goal is to win this content marketing game and get more leads.
How to do this?
Keep on reading to find out everything you need to know about content marketing. Plus, get ready to explore 11 growth hacks that will help you out.
The Essence of Content Marketing
Content marketing is a creative process. It consists of two main aspects – content creation and content distribution. The goal of content marketing is to communicate with the target audience. And convert users into paid customers (brand ambassadors ideally).
Consequently, you will be able to boost your sales and grow your business organically.
Practice shows that the majority of businesses online stick to the same scheme of content marketing strategy. For example, here at Visme, our team writes in-depth comprehensive guides on content design. These guides help people understand how to design content using Visme tools. It helps get about 778K monthly search visits.
Besides writing content for Visme’s blog, our team enforces a content marketing strategy by posting videos on YouTube.
Obviously, the content marketing strategy can slightly vary. It depends on business, audience, resources, objectives, etc.
The Importance of Content Marketing
It has been already stated that the primal goal of content marketing is to attract, convert, and retain customers. However, let’s review why content marketing is so important for growing your online business.
It works for building awareness for your brand and attracting new potential customers
Your business starts with brand awareness. Your potential customers can never know about your product or service without content marketing. But they are aware of the problem they want to solve.
They go to Google and search for a solution. For instance, people want to create eye-appealing content. They know that if there is a need to create engaging content, it is worth mixing written posts with some visuals.
The users type different search queries related to content design tools – infographic creator, chart maker, etc. And if you have a powerful content marketing strategy, you can help people get familiar with your tools.
It helps engage with the audience
You know that the competition is high. Therefore, there is a chance that people might choose other alternatives to your service.
How to make users prefer your brand to others?
Let’s say people know about your content design tools. But they still have some doubts regarding your brand and content design in general.
You need to help them find the answers to the questions they might have.
For instance, the potential customers are curious about “how to use icons in infographics” – give them this information through content.
If your service or product demands you to explain to your customers some information visually, record video content and post it on YouTube.
It helps you convert users into paid customers
Even if the users still have some doubts about what brand to choose, content marketing is your weapon to give them a final nudge.
Write a post where you compare your product with the competitors on the market.
It helps retain customers
The goal of content creation doesn’t end with converting users into customers. You must retain the customers for all costs.
How to do this using content?
Create a comprehensive help center that would provide your customers with the answers to possible product-related questions.
Prioritize Types of Content to Use
Content marketing is rich for the types of content you can use. To name a few – ebooks, video, blog posts, infographics, etc. You might wonder what content type fits your business the most.
Analyze your business at first. Explore the type of content your competitors use. Draw attention to what your target audience wants to find on Google. And make your own choice.
Now, let’s see how you can do this in practice.
1. Identify niche-related topics
First and foremost, think about seed keywords, or how people search for your service online. If you own a SaaS company that offers a tool to find email addresses, your seed keyword would be “find email addresses“.
To find a few topic ideas, you can use the Keywords Explorer tool from Ahrefs. Review the report called “Questions” that you can find under the “Matching terms” tab.
The report suggests 691 phrase ideas you can use for your content goals.
2. Identify niche-related topics
Again, think about seed keywords, or how people search for your service online. If you own a SaaS company that offers a tool to find email addresses, your seed keyword would be “find email addresses”.
To find a few topic ideas, you can use the Keywords Explorer tool from Ahrefs. Review the report called “Questions” that you can find under the “Matching terms” tab.
The report suggests 691 phrase ideas you can use for your content goals.
Identify search intent for the chosen keywords
Go to Google and see what types of content you will be suggested per keyword. Pay attention to top-ranking results.
As you can see, the results reveal “how-to” guides mostly. Eventually, your task is to create a “how-to” guide that is more comprehensive in contrast to your competitors’ posts.
When you know how to create topic-related content, it is time to review content marketing hacks that will help you stand out from the crowd.
Growth Content Marketing Hacks to Be Armed With
“Growth hacking” is quite a new term in the marketing world. The idea behind it is to suggest extraordinary strategies using growth hacking tools to get more leads, grow brand awareness, and win the competition.
A hallmark of growth hacking is that the suggested strategies can help acquire more customers in a short period of time. In this very case, content marketing includes different growth hacks you can use in practice.
Let’s review eleven content marketing growth hacks one-by-one.
1. Create Question-Based Post Titles
If you review content within the niche, you will see that the top-priority posts are informative content. People want to get the information they need. However, if the post doesn’t answer the questions customers have, it won’t resonate with the audience properly.
Also, you can observe “review” blog posts. These posts can’t guarantee a huge boost of traffic to your site as well. Why? Because writing such content makes sense in the middle stage of the marketing funnel – when people need to get more specific information about the product.
How to catch the audience’s attention with content?
Review the “People also ask” box in Google. It suggests to you those question-based topics that people are searching for as well.
Here are a few pieces of advice if you decide to write content on a question-based topic:
- Analyze the marketing funnel and cover the questions that are related to the “trouble” stages
- Answer the questions you are a hundred percent aware of
- Analyze your social channels comment sections and talk to your audience – it will help you figure out the questions that need answers
What’s more important, question-based articles don’t require you to write long-form pieces of content. If you can answer the question in 1K words, that would be great.
2. Work On Creating Optimized Headlines
When users skim through the content, they draw attention to headlines. If headlines look engaging and raise the issues the audience has, there are more chances that the reader will be engaged.
To write headlines that nudge people to review content you’ll need to:
- Stir interest (include questions within headlines)
- Use data or statistics (users like to see raw data and it makes the content look more professional)
- Try to write 8-12 word long headlines (headlines with 70+ words long Google will cut)
- Stick to the topic (don’t cover third-party sub-topics in your posts, stick to the chose topic only)
Run A/B testing and figure out which headlines work the best.
3. Analyze Content Data
Data speaks for itself. And if you want to get more leads using a content marketing strategy, you need to impress your audience with facts.
Try to base your content on personal findings and experience. In other words, create content that would show what you achieved using the cut and dry method.
The example above illustrates how Ahrefs has run their study to share some important takeaways with the audience.
4. Enrich Your Content With Visual Elements
When your content consists of walls of text, it won’t be attractive to the audience. People consume information far better if it includes various visuals.
If you analyze content that drives traffic the most, you will see that it is full of screenshots, infographics, charts, videos, GIFs, and other elements that catch the audience’s eye.
But don’t use visual elements just for fun. They should follow the topic of your piece of content. Therefore, don’t use unnecessary stock images. Instead, add more screenshots to complete the topic.
5. A/B Testing Call-to-Action in Your Content
It is strictly important to use call-to-actions in your content. It helps you tell readers what action to take. As a rule, this action has strategic values for your business.
But don’t get it wrong. CTA is not to say something like “buy our service” – nope. The goal of CTA is to motivate users to take action.
Here is a great example from Ahrefs, where they suggest their tool to check the “Traffic Value” metric. They don’t write – you should buy our tool. They explain how people can help themselves with the problem.
Test different CTAs to find the one that works well.
6. Reach Out to Your Audience Using Outreach
Content can’t show itself to your audience. Your task is to do this using outreach. Email outreach consists of four stages – finding opportunities, searching contact information, creating an email template, personalization.
Let’s run through the entire process quickly.
Assume that you want to promote a blog post on “brand awareness”. You need to find outreach opportunities first. Take your seed keyword “brand awareness” and go to the Content Explorer tool.
Filter down the results using the time frame, language, “one link per domain” option. Also, you can apply the “Domain Rating” filter as shown in the example above.
Review the lost and choose the most promising opportunities.
The next step is to find contact information. For this, use tools like Hunter.io. You will need to know the full name of the contact and the website domain this person is associated with.
When you have a list of prospects to reach out to, you need to craft an email template. Respona can help you with this. Just create a campaign and choose one of the available templates.
You can craft your personal email template from scratch as well.
Email template personalization involves not just including a person’s first name. Personalization means adding something special to your pitch. Explain why you’re reaching out and what you want from the recipient in a friendly manner.
There is a golden rule – give anything to the person first, then ask what you need in return.
And the final step is to send your email blast.
Use outreach to promote your content and build links.
7. Write Guest Posts On Third-Party Resources
Guest blogging is one of the most legitimate ways to promote your business and get more leads. It has a wide range of benefits. First of all, you share your knowledge with the audience showing yourself as a thought leader. It leads to building brand awareness.
Secondly, guest blogging allows you to demonstrate the power of your product/service. However, don’t write content that is too self-promotional. You should rather focus on sharing your expertise rather than talking about your product solely.
8. Create a Schedule for Your Posts Across Social Channels
Social media is a powerful source of traffic. When you share content across social channels, you create a chain reaction. This chain reaction happens thanks to your followers who retweet and share a link to your post with their followers.
Thus, if you have 1K followers – each of the followers will be notified about your brand-new post that you shared on socials. And if these followers retweet your post, you will get more exposure immediately.
However, there is one problem – don’t think that it sounds simple. Nope.
Keep in mind that social media is a noisy place. There are hundreds of thousands of posts that people share every day. Hence, your post might be buried beneath the rest of the posts right the way.
How to solve the problem?
You should create a schedule for your content. It will help you start the ball rolling. Besides, use one of the social media scheduling tools to make the process automated.
What’s more importantly, you need to figure out the most optimal time to publish posts on socials. Analyze when your publications get most of the shares, likes, comments.
As you know, if you want to get most of the social channels, you must give ear to your audience.
What does it mean?
It means that you shouldn’t share each post with the audience. Instead, communicate with people. Ask them questions, run quizzes, post your random thoughts. Do whatever you think would help you get closer to the audience.
9. Use Pinterest for Content Promotion
Pinterest gains traction day by day. Now, there are 320 million active users. As you already guessed, Pinterest can drive lost traffic to your website.
Despite the fact, not so many businesses take Pinterest seriously.
To turn Pinterest into one of your content marketing hacks, take on board these four pieces of advice.
- Start using a business account and monitor analytics, which helps you figure out what pins people like the most.
- Create 10-15 boards of niche-related topics (explore other types of pins by using keywords to find them).
- Work on well-designed pins (you can hire a freelancer with design skills who could design the pins for you).
- Schedule pins using scheduling tools for Pinterest.
Pinterest is an excellent place to promote your content and get new leads eventually.
10. Answer Questions on Quora
Quora is a Q&A platform where people search for answers to the questions they have. Quora has over 300 million active users per month. It makes this platform the top one that can generate a huge amount of traffic you can get.
When you answer someone’s question, you not just share your advice but can implement a link to the piece of content that would support your thoughts.
If your answer provides users with useful information, it can get lots of views and upvotes.
A few suggestions on how to get most of Quora:
- Create a profile that contains your bio
- Always stick to your industry
- If you don’t have any expertise in some question, don’t answer it
- Don’t focus on adding links within every answer you post
- Focus on solving people’s problems
Quora starts to work when you help the audience with resolving issues users have.
11. Don’t Forget About YouTube
You are aware of getting more leads from Google by creating optimized content. However, you shouldn’t forget about the second largest search platform – YouTube.
This platform can help you drive more traffic to your site and get more leads. The question is how to make people come to your site watching your video content?
First and foremost, you must know how to create optimized video content on YouTube. It is the only way to get more YouTube subscribers and views on your channel.
Afterwards, take into account a few tips:
- Include a blog link on your channel
YouTube allows you to add social links on the channel. Besides, socials you can add a link that redirects to your website. - Add a link within the video description
You can add a website link to the video descriptions. It is one more way to grab users’ attention with your site. - Repurpose your blog content into videos
It is a well-known fact that if you want to give another breath of life to the outdated topic – repurpose it into new content form. Content repurposing works great when it comes to covering the same topics using a new format.
Don’t shy away from using this YouTube content marketing hack to get more leads.
To Summarize
Content marketing is a driving force of the online business. It seems unreal to attract leads and convert them into paid customers without content.
Content helps drive extra traffic to your site.
However, it is not enough to just create content. It gives the results when you know how to utilize content marketing strategies and promote your business organically.
Consider using these eleven content marketing growth hacks and get more leads in 2021.
If you think this post lacks more content growth hacks, don’t hesitate to share your ideas in the comments section.
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