3 Strategies For Elevating Your Content Marketing in 2021

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Content Marketing in 2020

“Content Marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience – and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.” ~ Content Marketing Institute (CMI)

Content Marketing in 2020

The above definition of Content Marketing (CM) covers the true essence of what CM stands for. In simpler terms, Content Marketing is the use of relevant and valuable content for the audience. Its motive is to provide them with information that would be beneficial. Most of the companies are unable to provide relevant and useful content to their audience. It ends up looking like spam to them and damages the company’s credibility. The reason why so many people swear Content Marketing to be a useful tool is that it benefits us in a lot of ways:

– providing an increase in credibility,

– boost in sales,

– increment of lead conversions,

– and a hike of brand-loyal customers.

CM nowadays helps create a more credible image than advertising or direct marketing. With increased technological development, there is easy access for consumers to keep themselves updated. It makes them more reluctant to direct marketing or advertising techniques.

With Content Marketing, the customer feels that the company provides more than just a product/service. It makes them feel the need of the companies for engagement. Providing relevant information makes the company more credible in front of the customer’s eyes. The content a company would provide is something its consumers would relate to and spread awareness to others about the same. So even if someone is not your direct customer, content marketing helps to spread awareness of your company, which is the first step to becoming salient.

Content Marketing helps us to extract benefits that help the company and consumers in the long run like:

  • good knowledge of the buyer segment
  • a customized approach to reach customer’s interests
  • catering to their emotional needs, as most buyers connect with the qualities brand has to offer.

The advantage of knowing what your customer base is helps companies stay relevant to their needs and expectations. Now that we know what content marketing is and why it is the need of the era, let’s see the three Strategies to elevate your Content Marketing in 2021:

Dig in deep, research your audience:

No argument seems valid without immense facts and research backing it up. The same goes for knowing our audience. One cannot make the mistake of only assuming what their audiences might need or want.

Our First Content Marketing Strategy is to define our Target Audience. Our audience should be classified by their demographics and other aspects like:

  • age
  • gender
  • interests
  • their preferred media
  • income
  • ethnicity
  • profession
  • personality traits
  • lifestyle

Once we are aware of the information above, we segment our audiences to how we would deliver them content, for eg., homemakers, college freshers, etc

After segmenting, we make buyer personas. Buyer Personas are a description of our audiences, a hypothetical person whose characteristics we study to address their goals, needs, pain points, wants, and buying patterns.

Visit this link to know more about how to make a buyer persona:

The most important thing we need to keep in mind is to be very particular about what content we provide to our audience. The content should be relevant to our products and services and should speak our brand values. It helps in building a community of people interested in our product/service and can be potential brand-loyal customers. Like Starbucks on Instagram, posts information about their products and services, new additions, their programs, and charities which speak not just what they are offering, but where are they offering from.

The last but prominent factor of all the information is knowing your competitor’s offerings. What topics do they talk about, or what are the trends they are following? Many tools can help us give the same information, and competitor analysis for content are:

  • Buzzsumo
  • SEMrush
  • Feedly

 

Content Calendar: A must!

The second strategy for Content Marketing this year should be making a content calendar. Content Calendar is a schedule for posting your content. Mostly Content Calendar templates are of a month, but you can make yours weekly, according to your organizational needs.

Visit to learn more about how to make a content calendar.

While Planning for the content calendar can look like a lot, as it requires content ideas for the whole month. You do not need to fret as most of the people don’t always have fresh content ideas on the go. As for every person, there are seven blogs present on the web! So the kind of content you can post beside your product/service or brand are:

  • Curated Content
  • Repurposed Content
  • Content Atomization
  • UGC

Once you have a content calendar ready, after posting your content, the most important thing is to measure its reach. Lucky for us, we live in a world so advanced that everything has a metric that can track its relevancy. Those metrics are:

  • Consumption Metrics
  • Sharing Metrics
  • Lead Generation Metrics
  • Sales Metrics

These metrics will help us track what type of content is getting a good reach, what type of content leads to CTA, or what type of content didn’t generate any action.

Optimize everything in your sight!

The third Content Marketing Strategy for this year is optimization or making the most of our websites and social media. Optimization in today’s scenario yields more results than anything paid, as it gives us more organic results. SEO, as many of you, would have known is just not about using keywords and hashtags, but optimizing the site so well that it reaches the ranks through SERP (Search engine results page).

There are many new ways to optimize your content; they are:

  • Targeted Landing Pages: These are those web pages entailed with information, especially targeting specific marketing messages. If your landing page is keyword-driven, has an optimized URL, and use meta tags, so that Google Bots can read them easily, your page is bound to rank much higher than other web pages. The trick here is to understand that even if quality content is what matters today, it is also imperative to strategize it in a way that Google interprets and delivers that to your audience. Taking these measures will help Google appreciate your website as well as provide quality content to your audience.
  • Content should be adaptive: With most of our audience hooked to their phones, we need to create and publish content adaptive to their platforms. Someone who was viewing your website on a laptop should also be able to see it on phone later.
  • Emotional Approach: Most of us think that it’s the facts that convince people of credibility and increase their reach. That is completely untrue as emotions drive people, and that is the only way to reach them. Try to use headlines that depict an emotional tone.
  • What’s happening behind the curtain?: Big MNC’s like Google, LinkedIn, and YouTube, post their behind the scenes so that they can evoke a sense of curiosity in them by making the audience think this is their need. Now even if the information might not be relevant to a person, the idea that they still posted this generates curiosity in people’s minds as to why someone would post it, and they watch it to find out.
  • Ok, Google? Alexa? Siri? Cortana?: Hearing this a lot nowadays? With voice search so much in use, we should make sure to optimize our content in context to this.

With these three strategies, you will be able to make your content marketing effective this year. Okay Google, here is the end of the article.