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Quality vs. Quantity: 4 Tips to Effective Content Marketing

“Create a blog and Google will love you!” or so the marketing genies say…

For the last few years, you have been told that creating new content for your website was the key to Google’s proverbial heart….fast forward 3 years and most businesses like you have taken the bait and have begun writing a mandatory weekly blog post on an industry specific topic hoping to gain a few readers and a lot of love from Google. Good job! That is one of the most important steps to gaining new customers and climbing the search rankings with Google.

For those businesses who were a bit skeptical about social media and blogging, and were late adopters to this form of marketing, it may feel overwhelming now…The Custom Content Council and Content Wise survey said that 73% of B2B content marketers are producing more content than they did one year ago.

So what now? How do you keep yourself from being completely overwhelmed by the constant downpour of new content and OUTSHINE your competition?

Content blogpost

One Great Article > Three Mediocre Articles

Although Google loves to see new content on your website frequently, it’s always better to write one amazing article than 3 mediocre articles. The people who take the time to write something meaningful will get noticed. Hubspot’s book on Inbound Marketing states that you must focus on writing “remarkable content”.  If it’s truly remarkable, then people will share it, read it, and comment on it.

Focus on Reader Engagement

How do you know if the content you’re writing is engaging? A tip I recently learned (which feels like a no brainer now that I know it – doh!), is to measure the success of your article(s) not by how many people visited that article on your blog, but how long they stayed.

Here’s an example – recently, I wrote an article on drip marketing campaigns. My readership on the post was low, but those that did read it stayed for an average of 5 minutes! And only 50% exited our website from the post. That tells me that the content was interesting and relevant to my readers, and that they stuck around to read other articles/check out our company.

Focus your energy on writing content that will engage your readers – you’ll know if your content is engaging by how long they stayed to read your article.

Quick to Listen, Slow to Speak

You want to write great content and you want it to be remarkable, but you’re not sure where to begin… try listening first and then writing second! You have to get to know your audience better to write content that they are interested in reading. I recently signed up for feedly.com in order to more closely follow top industry specific blogs. This helped me begin to understand what is currently trending and important in my industry

Patience

Our fast paced world of immediate results makes this possibly the most painful of the four tips. Writing quality content will get you the results you want, but you will need to be patient – write a great article and then write another one…if you’re writing remarkable content people will read it, share it, and come back for more.

If you haven’t added content marketing to your business’s marketing strategy, you’re not too late! 79% of best in class marketers rate blogs as the most effective marketing tactic.

What tips would you add? Let’s build on this list!

 

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