How to Improve Your Content Marketing in an Afternoon

It’s hard to believe, but this post was originally written 10 years ago on this site as part of a series that reviewed what’s happening in marketing each week. Content marketing is entirely different now from what it was 10 years ago, with new tools and a new search algorithm, making your content marketing strategy unique enough that we decided to update this post. So, read on to learn how to improve your content marketing, although it might take more than an afternoon in today’s landscape.

Why you should improve your content marketing

Forbes recommends that EVERY business craft a website, yet 27% of small businesses don’t have one currently. If you’ve procrastinated about creating a website for your business, here’s an ebook designed to provide step-by-step directions so you can easily create one without writing a single line of code. Hence, anyone can do it.

Obviously, there’s more to a content marketing strategy than a website. You should also post content on social media platforms that align with your goals, develop an email marketing strategy along with the content needed to support lead nurturing, and consider guest posts as a tool for expanding your reach.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s discuss what to put on your website and all the other places you use to share content. To a large extent, that depends on your industry, target market, and resources you bring to the table. The trick is to add content frequently to drive traffic to your website through SEO (search engine optimization), convert visitors with attractive graphics and persuasive content, and position your business as professional, credible, and a solid corporate citizen. While a website provides an online presence, content marketing is the fuel that powers success on your website.

How to improve your content marketing

As you seek to improve your content marketing, you need to keep several considerations in mind, including:

• Content variety – as you can see in the image above, your content marketing strategy should reflect a balance, just as your daily diet does, if you want to retain a healthy website. Meat involves in-depth posts with research, data, and analysis. Grains include repurposed content, how-tos, and tips. Vegetables include guest posts and thought leadership pieces. Desserts feature graphics, entertaining pieces, and cultural stuff. Condiments share your point of view. You can mix up your content by featuring one type of post each day or mixing up your posts with bits of various kinds of content.
• Write content with the goal of providing value to your target market. It’s ok to post promotional content occasionally, but strive to deliver value with at least 90% of your posts.
• Use keywords effectively so you show up in searches related to your content. Use tools like Keyword Planner, a free tool that’s part of Google Ads, to keep an up-to-date list of keywords. Also, look at trending topics to find ideas for new keywords or ways to connect your content to things people are discussing.
• Tools like ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are invaluable to improve your content marketing. Use them to create a rough draft of a post, create an image to jazz up your content, create a list of post titles based on your keywords, and even determine the best posting schedule to reach your target market. The new deep research feature of ChatGPT is especially valuable, as it provides insights into your topic along with links to sources.
• Ensure you routinely provide content for each segment of your target market and for the different stages of the buying process so you can engage every visitor with content that resonates with them.
• Publish on a schedule. Aim for one post per day to support SEO and reach new prospects for your business. A content calendar (you can find a free template by clicking the link) will help you maintain this schedule by suggesting topics and resources to get you started with each day’s content.

Improve your content marketing with metrics

Andy Betts from the Content Marketing Institute suggests that we’re spending too much time producing content and not enough time monitoring its performance.

Okay, so this isn’t something you can do in a day. Still, you can spend an afternoon with your team reading this rather lengthy article and deciding how to improve your performance monitoring and create an action plan to implement your decisions.

Recent B2B research from Content Marketing Institute illustrates the challenge:

• Production: 86% of organizations use content marketing
• Performance: 21% say they are successful at tracking the ROI of their content

Andy goes on to share three steps in the process of monitoring your content marketing performance.

To improve your content marketing, I’d suggest spending an afternoon and assigning each member of your team (or groups of team members if you have a large team) to one of these three tasks. Spend some time brainstorming ideas and the initial budget necessary to accomplish each task. Then, come back together as a group to discuss the ideas generated by each team. Select the ideas that are likely to generate the most improvement in your content marketing performance, and ask each team to develop an action plan for the elements within their assigned task.

 Measurement

To gauge performance you, above all, evaluate your audience to harness a rich and multi-layered understanding of what it wants. Start with identifying the personas to develop a detailed understanding of each audience segment. Breaking down your audience into personas gives you the ability to develop targeted content and measure its success with the intended audience.

Andy suggests several metrics that monitor performance better than vanity metrics, including likes, follows, and shares (collectively termed engagement) as these metrics reflect your reach for each post.

Among the metrics to improve your content marketing are:

• Brand lift – likened to brand awareness but broadly encompasses audience perception, rather than simply recognition

• Engaged time goes beyond the time spent on a page or site to actual time actively interacting with your content (For example, bounce rates are good indicators of how engaging a blog post is.)

• Average finish – identifies how many individuals read your content, eliminating those who skip it or exit early (less than 10 seconds)

• Audience loyalty – details the frequency or recency of returning visitors (over five times a month, and you’re doing well)

• Content longevity – speaks to how long the content reaps rewards

In addition to identifying these metrics in aggregate, you should track the performance of individual pieces of content in terms of how well each one improves your metrics. You’ll likely find that most of your engagement and lift come down to just a few pieces of content or content types. Armed with this information, you can work to create more of the content that delivers the best.

Also, monitor who is reading and engaging with your content. If one segment responds well to a piece of content while other segments ignore it, you might find a way to create new content that engages the segments that ignored your original content. If one segment of your target market doesn’t respond well to anything, do some research by monitoring competitors or reading posts created by that segment to learn how to reach them more effectively. That’s especially true if that segment reflects a higher buying power.

Attribution

Connecting the dots between your content marketing activity and your organizational objectives requires defining how to attribute the success (or failure) of your content marketing toward genuine business objectives.

Attribution is not just about looking at the performance of your digital channels. It is also about how you build, create, and attribute content that feeds into these digital channels.

Content attribution involves tracking the types of content and the individuals or organizational teams responsible for the content against the content’s performance. Attribution also involves who is sharing the content and how they are doing it.

Attribution requires mapping content marketing performance against organizational objectives. Building a funnel describing the customer journey helps. This conversion funnel keeps your team focused on crafting a strategy that moves prospects through the journey efficiently.

Matching content to the various stages in the customer journey acts to move prospects down the funnel more effectively and give you information about what you should measure to improve your content marketing. You can then score each piece of content, allowing you to optimize the performance of new content.

 Scale

Your next task to improve your content marketing is to scale the task you’ve already accomplished. Building scale requires resources and these might be in short supply if you’re a small organization. Tools like Market Automation make your tasks much easier because these tools, like Buffer, allow you to create a week or month’s worth of social media content in an afternoon. This means you always have content ready to share on the optimal schedule, so you never miss a post. It also reduces the time and disruption involved in posting each piece of content manually.

As mentioned earlier, tools like generative AI and content marketing tools like Canva and Adobe Express help you scale your efforts without adding to your team.

Inbound marketing versus content marketing

Next up, we have Jon Cook from Keynote Content, discussing whether inbound marketing and content marketing are the same thing.

His discussion is reminiscent of mine on whether the difference between digital marketing and social media marketing was simply semantics. The answer in both cases is no, and for very similar reasons. Jon goes on to say:

So, how do inbound marketing and content marketing play in the same sandbox? Inbound marketing is the engine (paid advertising, keyword targeting, social media sharing) and content marketing (blog posts, eBooks, email marketing) is what fuels the engine. Without the context of inbound marketing to position and promote the right content, even the greatest content in the world will struggle to find the right audience.

Use this shift from content marketing to inbound marketing in all its forms. Take the afternoon to improve your content marketing by updating your marketing strategy to include additional forms of inbound marketing, such as email marketing or social media marketing.

Changes to Facebook are making it harder to improve your content marketing

Lest we forget, content marketing isn’t just writing content for your blog; it’s sharing your own and curated content on social networks. And, Facebook just made it a little harder to gain traction with posts to its popular site. Specifically, Facebook made three changes to its algorithm that determines what you see on your News Feed and how far up that content appears:

1. The first is improving the experience for people who don’t have a lot of content available to see. Previously, you wouldn’t see multiple posts from the same source in a row. With this update, if you run out of content but want to spend more time in News Feed, you’ll see more.
2. The second update tries to ensure that content posted directly by the friends you care about—such as photos, videos, status updates, or links—will be higher up in News Feed so you are less likely to miss it. If you like to read the news or interact with posts from pages you care about, you will still see that content in the News Feed.
3. Lastly, many people don’t enjoy seeing stories about their friends liking or commenting on a post. This update will make those stories appear lower down in News Feed or not at all, so you are more likely to see the stuff you care about directly from friends and the pages you have liked.

The net effect of these changes is that the reach of organic social media content questions whether this is a viable strategy anymore. Organic reach on Facebook, for example, fell to 1.37% last year, and engagement fell to a paltry 0.2%

Here’s what Jamie Wilkinson said about these new changes to the Facebook algorithm on LinkedIn Pulse this week:

… for organisations and brands, it will mean doubling down on the creation of content which is laser-guided in its relevance to their audience, meaning it’s useful, helpful, funny or emotional. If what you post doesn’t interest your target, you can be sure it’s less likely to appear in their newsfeeds.

Take this to its logical conclusion, and it means your brand will need content producers in the future if you are to have any chance of creating an organic impact with your stories, news or company information. It also means you’ll need an understanding of why people view and share content.

Can you use this to improve your content marketing in an afternoon? Sure, change the way you think about posts on Facebook. Instead of self-promotion, think about providing something your audience will find interesting, funny, or that touches their heartstrings.

Conclusion

Well, that’s it for this week’s edition of our recap of marketing from the week.

In crafting this column, I scour the internet looking for insightful articles from lesser-known sources. Still, valuable sources to highlight the great work they’re doing and give you some fresh perspectives on marketing to improve your market performance.

I welcome suggestions from you — send me the link or post a comment below and you might see your content featured in a future edition of the recap of marketing.

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