In 2019, there are over 4 billion active internet users worldwide. On social media? Mmm, that’s at 3 billion users.  That’s a tonne of opportunity for your brand to get out there and engage with an audience.

One of the most effective methods for spreading brand awareness and attracting new customers to your business is through content marketing. WTF is content marketing, you ask? And why should you care? Well. Simply put, content marketing can make a big difference to the bottom line of your business.

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating, publishing, and distributing valuable and relevant content online, with the purpose of reaching a targeted audience and incentivising profitable customer action. Ultimately, customer marketing is a critical component for long-term, sustainable growth.

And yet, despite its immense impact, many marketers don’t know how to implement a successful content marketing strategy. In fact, only 62% of businesses have a documented content strategy.

Sucks to be them, great news for you.

Here are our 7 top tips to take your content marketing from bleh to YEAH.

1. Make sure your content has a clear, measurable business goal.

Identify your target audience, and decide how your content can best serve that audience. Additionally, you’ll want to use analytics to ensure your content is able to reach the right people with the right search intent.

2. Understand your buyer’s journey.

While your content should be used to initially attract new visitors to your site, it should also be used to convince hesitant prospects to purchase, and encourage customer retention and long-term brand loyalty.

3. Rely on analytics to track your performance.

Carefully monitor, track and report on the numbers. Doing so will help you gauge what’s working, what isn’t, and what could be working better. Additionally, focusing on analytics will help you refine and improve your strategy for the future.

4. Stay content consistent and up-to-date.

Implement simple SEO tactics to ensure your content remains up-to-date and relevant to search engines. You can tell if being up-to-date is important to your topic if ‘keyword+year’ shows up in the ‘related searches’ of a Google search result.

To ensure your content remains relevant and updated, follow these three tips:

• Exclude the year in the URL when you’re optimising your content. Cool URLs don’t change.
• Include the year in the title of your content.
• Schedule your editorial calendar to revisit this content every year so you can keep it up-to-date, which could include updating the title tag, meta description, and content itself.

5. Adopt a historical optimisation strategy.

You can repurpose old (yet still high-quality) content, to increase leads and monthly organic search views. Repurpose your content.

6. Repurpose your content into new formats.

It takes time and talent to craft highly useful, engaging content so find ways to recycle existing content to ensure peak efficiency. For example, let’s say you published a high-performing podcast episode. Why not turn that episode’s topic into a blog post?

7. Ensure your brand voice remains steady across channels.

You want to have unwavering brand consistency regardless of the channel which users choose to engage.  Take Spotify as an example, when you visit their Twitter, YouTube or spot one of their billboard advertisements, you can quickly get a sense for the brand’s funny, candid, youthful voice. This is what makes people feel connected to Spotify. It’s the same Spotify no matter what channel.