Calling all content creators — we’ve got just the article for you! After completing the HubSpot Content Marketing Certification Course, we’ve learned a few tips and tricks that can help you create high-quality content and have fun while doing so.
Keep reading to learn some of the best practices for content marketing according to HubSpot.
What is Content Marketing?
Before we dive into content marketing tips, let’s cover what exactly content marketing encompasses. When it comes to developing a marketing strategy, content marketing should definitely make its way into that plan. Content marketing refers to the process of brainstorming, creating, and sharing valuable content online to attract a target audience. This can be done through a variety of formats — videos, blogs, podcasts, social media posts, and more.
Content marketing can accomplish a handful of goals. For one, it’s a great format to educate potential customers on what your product or service is all about. You’ll have the ability to showcase just how your product or service can be an ideal solution to your customers’ problems.
You’ll also have the opportunity to fully establish your brand and give customers an insight into who they’ll be working with. Content marketing is a great place to start when building relationships with customers.
Without further ado, let’s get into the latest and greatest content marketing tips.
Content Marketing Tips You’ll Wish You Knew Sooner
Creating content can be challenging. What direction should you take it in? How do you establish a brand voice? What’s the best formatting for articles? These questions and more are all completely understandable. Luckily, there are plenty of content marketing tips and tricks out there to reduce your content creation stress and help you build quality content.
Know Your Purpose
When you begin planning your content strategy, take some time to consider the intent behind every piece. Are you looking to establish yourself as a serious, authoritative source for educational information? Do you want to create fun, lighthearted pieces of content that answer your customers’ questions without being too formal? Are you looking to drive immediate leads to your services or do you just want your brand to stick in people’s minds for future reference? Knowing your purpose can help you better establish and plan out the type of information you’ll want to share in each piece of content.
Establish Your Voice
Once you’ve established your purpose and are ready to create content, it’s time to set the tone and voice. Think about your brand and the feeling you want your content to convey. Should you use a more conversational tone? Are you hoping to portray a more formal voice?
Make sure that your tone and voice match your brand as you’ll want to keep this consistent throughout your content. After all, content marketing is about nurturing relationships with current and potential customers. A consistent, predictable style will help consumers grow familiar with your brand and build trust along the way.
Understand Your Audience
Knowing your target audience is essential to creating quality content. You’ll want your content to relate to your audience. If you’re aiming to target Millennials, you’ll want to use relatable language and style your content in a way that matches their lifestyle.
Younger generations are more invested in content that is easily digestible and won’t take too long to read. Older generations may search for more details that answer their questions. You’ll want to determine your audience and how to best target them as you create content.
Follow SEO Best Practices
Using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) best practices in your content is the best way to receive organic traffic to your website. This includes using elements such as keywords, internal linking and external linking, URL building, and more. Each of these SEO practices can help your content rank on search engines and build the credibility of your company.
Research, Research, Research
The last thing you want to do is create a beautifully written article with outdated or irrelevant information. Make sure you verify your information with a credible source before incorporating it into your piece of content. When possible, externally link to your sources. This builds your own credibility and signals to search engines that you source from reputable sites.
Additionally, make sure that your content is addressing what users are looking for. There are many different directions you can go with a piece of content. Research top ranking pages of competitors and other popular content on the SERP to see what resonates best with users.
Avoid the Surface Level
When a user clicks on an article, their hope is that the content will actually answer their question. Surface-level content often excludes relevant information that will fully satisfy the reader and keep them on your page longer. You’ll also want to focus your attention on how you can make your content stand out compared to competitors. Is there a question users are searching for that hasn’t been answered yet? Are there case studies that will increase the authority of your page in comparison to others? Creating engaging and valuable content may take more time in your day but will have a much higher pay-off than surface-level content.
In addition to avoiding the surface level, make sure that you are creating evergreen content. Though searchers may want current information, writing an article that uses statistics that may not be accurate in a year can deter from your information. It’s okay to create these pieces from time to time, but do your best to keep content as evergreen as possible so it continues to stay relevant for longer.
Track Progress
Understanding how your content is ranking on the web is a necessary step in creating quality content. If you’re producing content that is not doing well organically, it may be time to re-evaluate your strategy and try a new approach. However, if your content is ranking well and driving leads, you can continue to grow on your current strategy and maintain the direction your content has taken.
Implementing an analytics service such as Google Analytics can give you insights into how your content is doing. Investing in your technical SEO practices gives you a better understanding of where your published content stands and how you can make further improvements on your creation process.
Refresh Your Content
As time goes on, it can be beneficial to give your content a little refresh. This may mean adding new information to a pre-existing blog post, verifying links are still live, or reworking content to include more relevant keywords. Updating your content can improve visibility and lead to more clicks on your website.
Content Marketing Certification
Interested in learning more about the best practices for content marketing? You’re in luck! HubSpot’s Content Marketing Certification Course will teach you all of these tips and more.
From one content marketer to another: make sure you pay close attention to every part, even if you think you may already know the information. You’d be surprised how many small snippets of beneficial information HubSpot sneaks into this course.
And when it comes to studying for the course exam, keep your focus on the big picture information. You’ll have the opportunity to see first-hand how all of the information provided is used with real examples, but you won’t necessarily be quizzed on these specifics. We definitely recommend taking notes every now and then though — they can be an incredibly valuable reference for more than just the exam.
Ready to wow your customers with your exceptional blog posts? Contact our team here at Markitors and let us help you elevate your content.
