5 Little Changes That’ll Make a Big Impact in Your Content Marketing

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Are you looking for ways to better capture and engage your audience? As more brands embrace content marketing, creating compelling content is crucial to cutting through the noise and attracting customers to your brand. Mediocre content that doesn’t align with your market’s interest will simply yield fickle results.

Yet, using top practices in your strategy positions you for increased traffic, improved social media engagement, and new opportunities for leads and sales generation. Your content marketing will be much more effective as you drive favorable business behaviors that ultimately increase your bottom-line.

The big advantage is, there are simple tactics you can implement now during your content creation to achieve these results. Here are the five small changes that will make a profound impact on your overall content marketing strategy.

#1 Craft an Exceptional Headline

Your headline gives the first impression of your content. Whether it’s your blog article, video, or email subject line, it determines if people stop and engage or choose to move on. Therefore, spending the time to craft the most persuasive, eye-grabbing headline is worth the investment to get more followers reading your content.

Commit to setting aside a few minutes to create an exceptional headline. The following shares some winning tips to help you capture attention and increase engagement:

    • Numbers, listicles, questions, and how-tos make great headlines. It piques interest and compels readers to want to learn more
    • Share the benefit or the outcome people will achieve as a result of engaging in your post
    • Add adjectives that make your title colorful and standout
    • Include the long-tail keyword towards the beginning of your title, if possible, that your audience is actively searching for

#2 Optimize Your Content for Search Engines

A top goal for any content marketing strategy is to increase brand awareness in search engines and on social media. Since search is a top choice for consumers to find information, solutions, and discover new brands, optimizing your content is vital to showing up when your audience is looking for you.

So, using best SEO practices brings visibility to your brand, helping to drive targeted traffic to your web pages. Here are simple ways to optimize your content for search:

    • Include relevant hashtags or keywords in your social content. Hashtags reign on Twitter and Instagram whereas keywords work better on YouTube, Pinterest, and Facebook
    • Use keywords your audience is actively searching for on YouTube. Add your primary keyword to the title, description, tags and in the video content itself
    • Long-form content performs well for SEO because it provides more opportunities to naturally sprinkle your keyword throughout. You also delve deeper into content topics, alerting the engines that your content is indeed valuable. Aim for longer posts of 1,500+ words
    • For your blog, focus on 1-2 longtail keywords and include them in the introductory sentence, your subheadings, meta description, the URL (the primary keyword), tags, and naturally throughout your article
    • Optimize your images within your blog article by saving them using your primary keyword as the file name. Also, complete the alternate text field with a keyword-rich description of your image
    • Include authoritative outbound links to enhance and validate your content

#3 Leverage Interactive Content

Interactive content such as videos, surveys, and polls, quizzes, infographics, slideshows and audio improves user-experience and keeps people on your website longer. These brilliant content pieces give visitors alternate ways to engage and digest your message. As people click through, click on and swipe your interactive content, it helps them retain the information, making it an incredibly valuable experience.

Additionally, the longer visitors remain on your site, the better this is for your SEO ranking. Therefore, enrich your marketing by adding interactive content that aligns with your message. You can choose to create your own interactive content (recommended) or borrow from others.

#4 Complement Text with Images

Did you know that articles with an image once every 75-100 words earned double social media shares than posts with fewer images (Source: Hubspot)? Visuals complement your text and make your content appealing to the eye. They help foster engagement, capture attention, and make it an enjoyable reader experience.

Use images to bring zest to your content. You can access royalty-free photos from sites like Pixabay, Pexels, and Unsplash. The more color and creativity you add to your content using high-quality images, the better results you’ll see in reader engagement through social shares and on search engines in the image search results page.

#5 Include a Strong Call-to-Action (CTA)

Many marketers miss the mark by failing to give a call-to-action in their content. This is the perfect opportunity to get your audience more involved by leaving a comment, opting into your list or simply sharing your post. Telling people what to do next helps drive positive business behaviors that lead to favorable results.

Every content you publish should have an intended goal. Being clear on this objective ensures that you create your post with purpose. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, give a CTA encouraging visitors to share it on their favorite social networks. Are you seeking to boost lead conversions? Include a strong CTA that highlights the benefits of opting into your list or the content offer they’ll receive in exchange.

The key is getting your followers to take your desired action so it moves you towards your marketing goals.

Conclusion

Making these changes to your content marketing will yield impactful results in your reach, engagement, and conversions. Use this guide as a checklist to bolster your content strategy. Be sure to test your efforts to discover what’s working and adjust what isn’t.

With consistency, you’ll create the perfect formula that gives your audience more of what they want…producing even better results in your content marketing.

To learn more about how to improve your marketing strategies, give us a call at 661-702-1310!

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