If you’ve been employing digital marketing tactics for a while, you’re probably already well-versed in the art of content marketing. You produce quality content, you understand what your shoppers’ pain points are, and you know how to speak to them.
You may also perhaps be ready to raise the bar and are looking for tips and tactics that will help you reach an even wider audience.
Here are our top six tactics for those among you who want to take their content marketing a step further.
Embrace long-form content
Long-form content is a format you should definitely consider producing if you want to up your content marketing game.
Here’s how it can help your brand:
It can improve your rankings.
It is more engaging than short-form content and thus also good for SEO.
It is likely to get more shares on social media than shorter content.
It can generate quality backlinks for you.
It helps establish you as an authority on a subject.
It can be repurposed and reused in the future, cutting down on your content production times and effort.
Here’s what you need to know about creating this type of content:
Choose an evergreen, complex topic that is of interest to your audience.
Make sure you are able to contribute something new: research, statistics, or a new point of view.
Align your post with the topic’s search intent.
Structure your content in a logical manner, but don’t bury the lede: give your readers the most important information right up front.
Add a table of contents.
Add plenty of useful visuals.
Write the best piece you possibly can.
Here’s an example of a post that ticks all of these boxes. This guide for mannequin buyers covers an important, evergreen topic that will always be googled by the brand’s audience.
It features numerous images that break up the text and make it easier to read.
It opens with a general overview of different mannequin types, a great addition for those who are buying one for the first time. The insights themselves are peppered with pro tips that speak of the writer’s experience with mannequins and their deep understanding of branding and sales.
This post is a fantastic asset to have. Aim to create a similar pillar post for your own brand, targeting an important topic you can speak authoritatively on.
Make use of negative space to highlight important content messaging
A lot of brands forget that content marketing is as much about visual appeal as it is about writing content of the highest quality. If your posts or pages are difficult to read, very few people will stick around to see how well you write.
Consider how your blog posts are formatted currently. Is there plenty of white space around the text? Is there plenty of spacing between your lines and paragraphs? If visitors need to zoom in or out to read your articles, their experience will be marred, and they are less likely to leave completely satisfied with it.
Take an even longer look at your sales- and conversion-oriented pages. Some of the content on them is among the most important on your website because it plays a vital role in the final stages of the sales funnel.
You need to ensure that your messages are received by your audience loud and clear. You can do this by utilizing negative space to highlight the important messages. Don’t clutter the screen with too much information, be it visual or written.
Let’s look at Going’s page on cheap flights to illustrate this point. Notice how airy and light it is. There are very few visual elements on it, yet the page is not boring, nor does it appear to be one long wall of text.
Take a look at the typography and the way it is nestled among areas of white or color. The most important words are bolded and spelled out in a larger font. You will notice them first because they are not drowned out by images or videos surrounding them.
This kind of modern web design can significantly improve conversion rates, as visitors’ attention is subtly and imperceptibly directed exactly where you need it to be.
Embrace video as a content format
In order to be really successful in your content marketing endeavors, you naturally need to produce a lot of quality written content. This is what will get you to rank well and attract the most attention.
However, you shouldn’t forget that some of your audience will simply not want to read a long post. They will much prefer to get all of their answers from a video.
In order to give your audience what they want, you can (and should) establish a YouTube channel where you will feature all of your videos and add them to your written content. That way, you’ll ensure that people can find you through another channel and that those who’ve found your written content are able to enjoy a video.
Since you probably won’t be able to augment all of your written content with video, choose topics that are highly technical or complicated or those that could benefit from a visual guide. How to topics and anything hands-on lends itself well to video content.
Let’s look at this post on how to secure your Payoneer account. It comes with a couple of useful screenshots, but its best visual element is the video that walks you through a part of the process. It guides you through in a couple of simple steps, it doesn’t go into lengthy explanations, and it’s super easy to follow.
By merging these two content formats, the brand has ensured all of their readers will find the answer in the format they prefer.
Note that you can also produce shorter video content for your simpler topics as well. For example, a listicle post can be summed up in a 30-second video that you can also share on Instagram or TikTok. These kinds of videos are also more likely to get shared and liked, especially if you can add some sort of twist to them.
Help your shoppers choose the product that’s ideal for their needs
Your customers will appreciate any help you can give them to choose just the right product for their needs. Hopefully, your product pages already do a decent job of explaining what a product does, what its benefits are, and who it is for. Nonetheless, a blog post that dives deeper into your inventory can be a great asset to have.
You can approach this topic in several ways. You can compare and contrast several similar products, breaking down the differences and explaining who should buy which one. You can create in-depth guides for selecting a specific type of product. Or you can write guides for customer profiles and recommend several products for them.
This type of content is not only great for boosting user experience, but it can also take some of the pressure off your sales team. They will receive fewer product-specific questions, as all the answers will already be readily available on your blog.
This is also a great way to reduce return rates and boost customer satisfaction, resulting in better retention and lifetime customer value.
Shop Solar has a buyer’s guide that is a good example of this type of content. First, it recommends six solar generators from the brand’s own line, and then it dives into a very lengthy and detailed explanation of what solar generators are, how they work, and how you can choose one for yourself.
This piece of content is probably the only thing you need to read to get familiar with the subject and be able to make a purchasing decision. The table of contents at the top makes it very easy to jump between topics and skip ahead to the parts that interest the reader the most.
Reinforce the market for a product like yours
You will sometimes face a unique content marketing challenge: a large portion of your target audience may not even be aware of your product and how it can help them.
When this is the case, it will be your job to create enough content to cover the entire niche. You will need to generate some awareness about the kind of product you’re selling and make sure you connect it with the pain points of your target audience.
In order to do this, you will need to start by creating a list of posts that target the very top of your sales funnel. What is it that your audience is looking for that you can connect your product to? From there, you will need to slowly trickle down to content that specifically talks about the product itself, targeting those who are now aware of the product and its importance.
Don’t forget to connect these posts with internal links, and make it very easy for readers to keep reading once they land on a top-of-the-funnel post. Make other posts prominent and clearly highlight them.
Here is an example of this kind of post. This article on the reasons to invest in a medical alert system has been written for those who don’t know that they need one. This is a very niche product that people won’t think about purchasing in their day-to-day life. However, once they read the article, they may realize they actually need one.
Having several of these more general topics that are directly connected to your product are a great way to both raise awareness and interest in your brand. They can help you reach a wider audience, plus they’re a great conversation starter.
Give away your knowledge for free
Finally, don’t forget that one of the goals of content marketing is to teach. Don’t be afraid to give away some of your knowledge and experience for absolutely free. You don’t need to monetize or capitalize on every piece of content in any direct and tangible manner.
You may be afraid that this type of content will damage your sales. However, providing free access to your specialist insight will build a lot of brand goodwill that will pay off in the long run. You will be seen as a brand that genuinely wants to help its audience. You’ll show that you are someone who cares more about their audience than about their bottom line. That is a huge plus in the modern market.
When selecting the knowledge you want to share for free, try to select something your audience will benefit from the most. You want them to have tangible benefits. Help them solve a real problem and make them feel better.
Here’s a very nice example for you. This post on Spanish table etiquette can be of great help to anyone who is learning Spanish, traveling to Latin America, or just trying to learn more about the Spanish-speaking culture.
The post dives deep into a specific Spanish phrase that can often be heard and that may not be easy to understand for English speakers. It’s also a very interesting and insightful read, so it makes learning something new quite effortless and actually fun.
By creating similar types of posts, you can also help your audience out and teach them something new.
Wrapping up
Are you perhaps already employing some of these content marketing tactics? How are they working out for you?
If you’re about to try some of them out, don’t forget to consider how you can best align them with your marketing and sales goal, and the needs of your target audience.
