You’ve probably seen your share of posts with mountains of advice on SaaS content marketing.
At this point, you don’t need any more convincing of the power of show-stopping content and what it can do for your SaaS business.
However, you probably need focus to understand what actions drive successful content marketing.
You’re in the right place.
Sit tight, and we’ll walk you through 20 tips that will supercharge your content marketing game.
Table of Contents
Only Your Very Best Material Cuts It
In content marketing, only the best material deserves to be published. Everything else is just a waste of time and resources.
Every day, marketers across the industry publish mountains of content and try to get to the top of the first page of the search results.
In this race, there’s no room for runner-up filler content.
When readers search for something, they’re looking for the best actionable advice that will help them out, not pointless fluff they’ve heard a thousand times.
Winning them over demands your best efforts, not your minimal effort at covering a topic.
Remember the last time you saw a piece of content that knocked you off your feet?
The feeling of awe and inspiration you got from that amazing post wouldn’t have been there if the publisher had settled for an okay performance.
When you make your best content, your visitors can get a taste of what you’re truly capable of and maybe even become a fan of your work.
If they become followers of your brand, it’s going to be because they fell in love with your skills through your content.
Regardless of your industry type, your skills are your bread and butter.
If your content shows what your skills are all about, it makes zero sense to do your skills a disservice and present them in a mediocre way.
After all, everybody has high standards nowadays.
If you give up on high quality at the very beginning, you essentially cut most of your potential clients from the start. We can both agree that’s a mistake.
Now that we’ve established why only the best content matters, let’s talk about how you’re going to get there.
Every skill has improvement methods, and content publishing certainly is no exception. It’s all about adopting healthy content habits and directing them to your publishing. With that in mind, here’s how you nail it.
Tips for Making the Best Content
This is what you can do to make sure you’re always on the top of your game when it comes to content.
- Learn how to evaluate which content piece is your best. Before you publish, have the criteria ready and run your content through it without holding back. If the content checks out, you can publish it knowing you did your best.
- Prioritize quality over quantity. We know you’re under enormous pressure to publish a ton of posts for your business. That’s a trap many content marketers fall prey to. It’s better to take your time and establish yourself as a publisher of top-quality content than to spam volumes of pieces with mediocre quality.
- Never save on research. Visitors can tell when you’ve done your homework.
Writing one killer blog post per week beats posting five mediocre posts that aren’t special in any way, shape, or form.
The next thing we need to talk about is the depth of your writing.
In-Depth Articles Outperform Short Content
Everybody in the biz knows that in-depth articles outperform short blog posts.
You might ask, why? Aren’t people ultra-busy nowadays and want content that’s quick to read?
Somewhere out there, a content marketer is screaming.
First off, in-depth articles excel at providing value to the reader, and that’s the first reason they came here for.
If you pile a bunch of info without offering true value, they’re going to skim through your post and call it a day.
On the other hand, if you take your time with your readers and guide them through the subject, they’re going to get something insightful out of them.
That doesn’t mean you should write a novel about a topic, but that you should do better than assume your readers have the attention span of a goldfish.
You see, writing articles is all about giving your readers an outstanding learning experience—and you can’t do that with a post that steamrolls through a topic in 700 words.
One more thing, short-form posts get a fraction of the backlinks that in-depth articles gain. To get on that winning first page of Google rankings, you’re going to need a lot of backlinks.
Have you ever wondered why you almost always end up on a guidepost or a study when you click on post hyperlinks?
You can bet that the website you landed on benefits greatly from every backlink those long-form posts get.
As a matter of fact, according to data by Backlinko, long-form posts get 77.2% more backlinks than short-form posts.
This makes them the ideal vessel for backlink acquisition.
See what we did there? Backlinko got another link back. They’re living up to their name.
Since it’s clear that the way to write in-depth articles is to write MORE words, we’re going to leave you here with this advice: write more quality paragraphs without filler content.
Check my guide on creating high-quality long-form content on LinkedIn for more info.
Nobody likes to see their time wasted.
Post length by itself isn’t enough to get on top of the first page of search results, but it makes an enormous difference.
Repurpose Your Old Content
Fantastic content you’ve published is a gift that keeps on giving. If you were aware of how many ways you can repurpose valuable content, your jaw would drop to the floor.
As you know, content marketing is very time-consuming.
Great content marketers know that repurposing well-written old content is one of the best practices for saving time.
That’s largely due to the fact the basic groundwork is already done in old content, so you don’t have to start from scratch.
When you repurpose old content, you don’t have to spend as much time on research and outlining, but you’re simply making the old content fit the new format.
That’s one less thing to do, right?
The top perk you get out of repurposed content is working with material you already field-tested.
Since you’re working with published content, you have volumes of data on how well it clicked with your audience.
This makes choosing the right content and finding its audience so much easier and quicker.
Using content that’s proven to work well starts things off on the right foot.
And here’s how you can repurpose old content systematically.
How to Repurpose Content
Here are the four golden rules of content repurposing:
- Audit your published content. You can’t know which direction to go in unless you have a good idea of what you’re working with.
- Pick out the top-performing content pieces. If a specific piece of content resonated with your audience, it makes perfect sense to repurpose it into a different format.
- Pick out the new format for your content. There’re many formats you can turn your old content into, from LinkedIn posts to downloadable PDF guides. Once you know what content to repurpose, pick a format and go for it.
- Update the content. Publish the content in the chosen format. You can always bulk a handful of insightful posts into a larger piece of content or vice versa and make it available to your audience.
It’s great you understand old posts are a content marketing goldmine. Now it’s time to talk about going after specific keywords for topics.
Keyword Research Matters
You can write the best blog post in the world, but if the keywords you picked utterly miss the mark, nobody’s gonna find it.
Doing keyword research tells you what keywords your audience is googling.
After all, it’s them you’re writing this for. To make content that users will discover and read, know what they’re searching for, word for word.
Creating SEO content that ranks on top of the search results begins with doing your keyword research and picking out the highest-performing keywords.
We guarantee that behind every top-ranking blog post is thorough keyword research that makes sure the topic is hot.
In this process, there’s no room for guesswork.
The alternative is wasting your time and hoping you land the right keywords every once in a while.
When you neglect your keyword research, you risk making yourself invisible to the targeted audience of your SaaS business.
You’ll end up spending your marketing budget on writing ghost topics with keywords nobody is searching for when you could’ve spent that effort on buzzing topics that drive visitors to your website.
You can use my keyword research checklist👇
If you need additional assurance, let’s look at the facts.
According to research by SeoClarity, 65% of all Google searches have 3-5 keywords.
Finding the right keywords for your content is of utmost importance. If you duck out on keyword research, we guarantee you’ll miss your shot at achieving excellent search result rankings.
You shouldn’t feel bad if you’re inexperienced at researching your keywords. What matters is that you start your keyword research from now on.
Tips for Keyword Research
Lucky for you, we’re here with some actionable tips that are sure to help you out:
- Use keyword tools to search for keywords with high search volume. You can use free or paid keyword research tools based on your preference and budget. Those could be Google Keyword Planner, Moz, or Ubersuggest.
- Group your keywords by search intent. Search intent implies the reason behind the searcher’s quarry. It can be for general info, to reach a specific topic, (commercial) investigation, or a transactional keyword where the searcher is looking to buy something.
Let’s talk more about research for your posts.
Back Your Claims With Data
Without data to back your claims, you’re no better than the average comment section—merely spouting baseless opinions.
Data is proof that what you’re claiming is true.
We can all agree that what you’re basing your claims on has to be true.
The only way to prove that is to use data as evidence.
Supporting data proves to the reader that what you’re saying is accurate, giving them a reason to trust you.
After you establish your trustworthiness, you can elaborate further on your claim.
Also, relevant data gives your readers more context.
When you combine data and your insights, you prove your claims are rooted in real-world experiences, creating a valuable reading experience.
Data-rich content gets readers to dive into the topic.
Giving your readers quality, hand-picked data is a top way to get readers to explore certain data pieces and reach a new level of interest in the topic.
They’ll become fascinated and read up about a data piece that gives you plenty of room to follow up with relevant content from your website.
Have you ever read a statistic that impressed you so much that you had to do more research about it?
Well, that’s what well-picked statistics do for readers.
This is an opportunity no content marketer can pass on.
With that in mind, researching for statistics to cite can be a drag. Finding the right statistic is never impossible, but it often requires patience.
If you find yourself stuck when fishing for data, you have to change the way you do research.
To get new data points, Google [keyword] + statistic, or use phrases like the importance of or the value of when searching for specific data.
It would also help to get familiar with research portals such as ResearchGate.
Finding the right data for your content is hard work, but it separates quality content writers from lazy ones.
Trust us, your audience will appreciate it.
Speaking of your audience, it’s time we talk about understanding them better for the sake of your content.
Audience Education Matters More Than Selling
Did you know that the most successful content marketing pieces are not bent on selling at all?
It’s easy to imagine why; internet users are sick of being shelled with content obsessed with selling, selling, and selling.
Turns out audiences aren’t too happy with being viewed as revenue streams instead of individuals with specific pain points (that products and services can solve).
For that reason, they leave as soon as you talk about sales.
If you want your content to actually generate revenue, focus on teaching readers instead of telling them to buy something you’re offering.
Make no mistake, the fact that you’re educating your audience doesn’t mean you’ve given up on sales. It just means you’re marketing your content instead of products. But here is the kicker…
The quality of your content will enable you to land a lot of sales.
The greater the educational quality of your content, the more followers you will attract to it.
If you create content that has value and fosters appreciation from your audience, they’re going to trust you enough to buy the products you’re recommending.
You don’t have to take our word for it, just look at the data.
Research shows that educational content makes potential customers 131% more likely to buy a product after engaging with educational content.
You’re probably thinking about how to make your content more educational right now. The answer lies in the format of your content.
To teach your customers and provide them with actionable value, improve your teaching methods.
There are various educational formats you could use, such as webinars, podcasts, tutorial videos, and eBooks.
Pick a format that works best for you and press all content marketing efforts at getting users to engage with your content.
The rest will be up to your teaching abilities.
User Experience Reigns
Nobody likes apps and websites with horrible, unforgivable user experiences. Turns out, readers feel the same way about articles and posts.
When something has a dreadful UX, the user is going to get frustrated with it. They’re going to get rid of it right away or use it to the bare minimum.
It doesn’t matter if it’s an app, a blog post, or a toaster; user experience determines how the user (or reader) will interact with it.
Then why are content writers pretending it’s not a big deal?
A blog post with a great user experience allows its reader to enjoy reading the article rather than merely scanning for helpful information.
Understand that readers need guidance when going through the data, so they have a smooth reading experience.
This means you have to work on the flow of the article instead of only focusing on its content.
It’s not enough to list everything you think is important and give yourself a high five. It’s about enabling the reader in every way possible to have an excellent reading experience.
If you’ve ever been frustrated with waiting forever for a blog to load, you’ll know where we’re coming from.
Your website has to run as smoothly as possible.
Else, your visitors will drop your website or blog in a heartbeat and get back to googling what they need.
By neglecting your blog’s technical performance, you’re making your readers’ lives difficult, and that’s not why you’re here.
Why bother with writing blog posts if it’s going to take ten years for your blog to load?
UX Best Practices
Honestly, user experience should be taught at schools. But since it’s not, we’re here to advise you on how to do it.
- Write user-centered blog posts by focusing on solving problems, not selling
- Make sure your website/blog loads FAST (you can check load times here)
- Have tidy page navigation, so other blog posts are easy to find
- Regularly discuss ways you could upgrade your visual UX with your web designers
The whole talk of UX starts by taking your reader’s perspective seriously, from the moment they click on your page’s link to the moment they go through the article.
Without it, all this talk about content marketing is just philosophy.
Content Clustering Wins the Day
Creating content clusters around pillar pages is a blueprint for building a blog that acts like a self-driving engagement machine. And who wouldn’t want their blog to achieve perpetual motion?
In the pillar cluster model, topics are interconnected with links.
Remember when we talked about the importance of user experience?
Well, the pillar cluster model is your ticket to achieving a top-notch user experience.
It enables your visitors to go through your website quickly and stay on the topic without going back to Google for similar posts.
When you join topics using the pillar cluster model, you create a beautiful blog architecture that makes engagement with your other blog posts a seamless experience.
That way, the user engagement on your website goes off the chart. The only effort it takes from you is to use interlinking to bridge similar posts together.
Additionally, using the pillar cluster model makes you look like a pro.
When readers see how deep you went to cover related topics, you’ll appear as a trusted source of insights on the matter. Also, readers can quickly discover new related topics and go deeper into the subject.
Content clustering is an SEO-friendly practice that significantly benefits your website.
Creating more content on a specific subject and connecting the pages with internal linking tells Google all your posts are relevant that particular topic.
You can bet that has a significant influence on your website’s rankings.
We’re here to tell you about a free way to boost your SEO.
To learn more about topical authority and how to build it, check out this carousel I published on LinkedIn.
Guest Posting Builds Your Authority
There’s been some controversy around the years about the legitimacy of building website authority using guest posting.
If you ask us, guest posts are still a good way of doing it, but it takes more effort than in the old days.
After guest blogging-based link building became a thing, it didn’t take Google long to catch up and roll out the new ground rules, punishing the salesy, keyword-stuffed posts with a decrease in website ranking.
Still, just because Google doesn’t take kindly to it doesn’t mean you should abandon guest posting altogether.
After all, guest posting boosts your domain authority, generates traffic, and increases brand awareness.
You’re going to need all of that for your content marketing to work.
Byline links with guest blogging are the most common way to get backlinks.
That is great. However…
It would be best if you tried to get contextual backlinks in the guest blogs you’ve written.
every blogger or editor will let you link back to your own relevant statistics posts because it’s providing value to the reader.
So the million-dollar question is: how to use Guest posting successfully without Google getting on your case?
The Basic Principles of Guest Posting
You should follow these principles when guest posting and linking your website.
- Ensure the content you’re posting isn’t too similar to the page you’re linking to, or even duplicated. You’re sending a signal flare to Google that you’re guest posting for link building.
- No link-spamming is allowed—EVER. Stuffing your post with keyword-heavy hyperlinks will not do your website any favors.
- Focus only on getting links from high-quality blogs and websites, and not any website you can get your hands to. Great websites don’t just come with volumes of monthly visitors; they also have editor’s guidelines that tell you what kind of content they’re looking to get.
- Make sure the post you’re linking to provides value to the reader. There’s nothing wrong with subtly linking to your website or blog in a guest post as long as you’re low-key about it.
The bottom line is that both search engines and content consumers pick educational content over salesy, spammy articles.
Read more: Link Building Mistakes That Most SaaS Blogs Commit
Optimize Content Based on Data
In top-level marketing, you don’t pull decisions out of thin air. There’s a reason behind every choice you make.
The reasons behind significant marketing decisions are never abstract nor spontaneous, but data-informed.
Think about it: having the right piece of data can tell you everything you need to know about your next step.
The same goes for content optimization.
Since no piece of content is inherently perfect forever, it has to be optimized to click with the reader.
There are so many ways to change your content, which is why making choices about it at random will only lead to poor optimization.
However, when your choices are rooted in relevant data, you’re not engaging in guesswork.
You make changes the same way you read statistics and change your opinion based on facts.
There’s nothing mystical about it, and that’s why data-backed optimization decisions perform best.
Data helps you narrow down your choices and leaves you with justified optimization decisions.
You leave nothing to chance and are solely oriented towards optimization and performance.
Let’s illustrate our point.
Imagine your analytics tell you that your website visitors remain on your website longer when they engage with long-form posts.
You’d have to create more long-form posts, as suggested by data. There’s nothing random with this decision because it’s data-backed, and that’s why it will work.
If you want your content to reach top performance, using data to optimize it is not optional.
Opening up your analytics page often feels intimidating because there’s so much data you can’t make heads or tails out of it.
This is perfectly normal at first, but it’s going to make a whole lot more sense.
How to Make Use of Data
Here are the golden rules for using data.
Look at charts to understand big chunks of data and gradually dig deeper for an accurate understanding.
Don’t be afraid to try different analytics tools to find the one that works best for you.
If you make data reading your routine, you can spot patterns quickly.
The data you collect is here to enable you to create and optimize your content to take it to the next level.
Using different tools to win at content marketing is what this business is all about.
Use Writing Tools Like a Pro
Every master of the craft uses the proper tools to get the job done. Creating content is no exception.
As much as some content writers hate to admit it, writing tools profoundly affect the quality of work. They make it easier to reach a certain level of quality even without having decades of writing experience under the belt.
Using tools does not make you an expert writer overnight, but it keeps you from making rookie mistakes that decrease the quality of your work.
Here’s a classic example.
Imagine you put in all the effort you can into writing a comprehensive guest post; you double-check for errors and send it to an admin for publishing.
You see your post on a big website with a handful of typos or errors that got through.
Readers notice these silly mistakes, and your work seems less professional because of them.
This happens all the time.
Nevertheless, when you use writing tools, errors, typos, and overly long sentences are the last thing you have to worry about.
Since there’s plenty of tools and software out there, we’re not going to drop a massive list on you and tell you to pick one.
However, let’s say this: pick a tool according to the purpose of your writing and your budget.
Regardless of what you chose, never publish or send a finished draft before conducting a spell check.
Also, start using writing tools to improve your sentences. There’s no shame in it.
The Best Content Publishers Have Editorial Calendars
For all things content marketing, there are few tools as handy as editorial calendars.
When you’re relying heavily on your content marketing efforts, you can either post things at random and hope something sticks—or you can plan everything and be in complete control of the process.
In simple terms, editorial calendars enable you to have your whole content marketing strategy spelled out, day-by-day, so there’s zero wandering around.
Since all content marketing duties are written down, you can ensure there’s accountability in the team.
As you know, content creation is a team effort, which means multiple people are doing separate phases of content development.
When there’s a calendar in place, you can hold members accountable for specific setbacks and underperformance.
Editorial calendars are beneficial to the entire team. Knowing there’s a plan and schedule instead of an ambiguous pile of work takes the edge off.
Your team has less decision-making to do and only has to stick to the plan, making the entire process much easier.
Best of all, learning how to implement editorial calendars is a piece of cake.
It’s more about your discipline as an organized team and processes than about using fancy tools and learning new tricks.
Start simple; list the topics you plan to cover in an orderly fashion and their planned publishing dates. You can even use docs and spreadsheets on Google Drive for this.
After you finish, follow the schedule to the letter, and you’re all set.
If you’re short on time or struggle to fill your editorial calendar, you should revisit your old content and see what it can do for you today.
Update the Numbers on Your Old Content
Thinking older content is of no use anymore, or that it’s as good as it is and should be left untouched, is a rookie mistake.
Do you have old posts buried in the depths of your website? If so, you should unearth them and update them ASAP.
Outdated numbers are of no use to anyone. Content with current data is.
You’d be surprised how many researchers are looking for content with up-to-date statistics and a thorough run-through of a topic.
You only have to check and update the data, and you’re all set to bring new visitors to your site, thanks to content that costs nothing to create and takes a fraction of time compared to writing something from scratch.
There’s a case study that proves this point you might wanna look into.
HubSpot updated their old content, and guess what happened?
Their old posts gained a whopping 106% traffic increase, and their number of monthly leads doubled in size.
It’s safe to say that leaving your old posts outdated is a poor content marketing decision.
No matter how old, you can update every post you wrote by adding a handful of healthy practices to your workflow.
How to Update Content
If you think content updating is time-consuming, you’re doing it wrong.
- Check your post’s current CTR in Google Analytics. It makes prioritizing which content to update easy because you can see which posts aren’t performing well.
- Look at the data you used in your posts and update it. If the statistics you’re citing are older than two years, find new ones that match the topic. In case you used an industry report for one year, download its newest version and update your data.
- Make sure all the links you’ve posted are in working order. Broken links are like a slap in the face. You don’t want to do that to your readers.
Take this approach with all your old posts and watch them spring back to life.
Let’s take a break from the technical stuff and talk about something close and personal; your writing tone.
Your Writing Tone Has to Be Conversational and Simple
You can’t expect people to fall in love with dull writing, right?
Picture this.
While doing research, you find a post whose title and topic made it look like the missing link you needed to nail the project you’re on.
But as you go through the article, you realize the writing tone is so dull, that reading it feels like a 5-mile uphill hike on a hot summer’s day.
However, if the writing tone were conversational and simple, going through that post would’ve felt like a walk in the park instead.
Readers don’t want to fight their way through blog posts to extract the insights they need.
They want a light writing tone that’s simple enough to understand, so reading it feels like a conversation.
Or, as Denzel says: Explain it to me like I’m a two year old.
So, bear in mind that maintaining a conversational and simple tone turns reading your posts into a learning experience, as opposed to a tedious task.
Showing off your expertise by pushing lots of technical terms into your posts will only make your readers work more because they’ll have to Google what a word means before they can continue reading your post.
Nobody wants that.
The question is: how do I make sure my writing tone is conversational and straightforward?
Like any great conversation, your writing has to serve the person you’re trying to explain things to.
This means that you’re passing your insights while prioritizing their point of view, without assuming they understand everything you’re talking about by default.
Things like complicated technical phrases or burying your users in sheer numbers are off the table.
The person coming to your blog post wants to understand more of the subject, not get confused by its complexity.
Also, try to engage your readers by asking them questions every once in a while.
They, too, need a chance to take a step back and get their bearings, and questions offer them a chance for them to do so—like we’ve given you many times over in this guide.
It’s all about helping your audience understand and engage with what you have to say.
With that in mind, we’re introducing you to a new friend called a Call to Action or CTA.
Use Calls to Action as Much as You Can
Assuming you did a terrific job, your writing would guide readers to a key point – a Call to Action (CTA).
If you fail to include a CTA, you’re missing out on a fantastic opportunity to lead your readers wherever you want them to go. People don’t know what you want them to do if you don’t tell them to.
CTA’s are natural-born engagement boosters.
They carefully guide readers to click the button, which often happens thanks to the trust and value that arose from reading a well-written, insightful article.
It’s like explaining to your friend how much love they get from having a cat or a dog, then taking their hand and walking them to the pet shelter.
Including Calls to Action also increases the activity on your website.
Since you’re using them to guide your readers to different pages, users spend more time on your website as a whole.
There are three angles to a successful Call to Action, though they’re not always mashed together in a single CTA:
- color
- value proposition
- and location
Ideally, the Call to Action will stand out, hence using different colors for this part in particular.
It needs to have a powerful statement or a value proposition that moves or instructs the reader, i.e., go to, buy, try, etc.
Add a CTA after you’re done convincing your readers with the content. They’re almost always at the end or after a large, insightful paragraph.
It costs you nothing to add a CTA at the end of your content, but you stand to gain new sales possibilities and supercharge your post and website engagement.
That’s a sweet deal in anyone’s book.
Knowing Who Your Audience Is Makes a Difference
We talked about the importance of user-centered articles, but how do you know who the user is?
It sounds straightforward, but you’d be surprised how many content marketers miss the mark.
You’ve probably seen a fair share of sponsored posts in your newsfeed that have nothing to do with you.
It would be terrible if others looked at your content the same way.
The solution to reaching the right crowd is understanding who they are and what they need.
Knowing who is your target audience is necessary for creating content that clicks with them.
Not every reader is ideal for your blog posts, and that’s all right. You should focus on the readers that actually need content like yours. That’s the whole point.
Instead of writing posts for the entire internet, understand who it is that will benefit from your content and cater to them, both with writing and targeting.
Otherwise, you’re spending too many resources trying to impress the wrong crowd.
If you want to stop burning time, money, and effort, you have to start thinking about improving your audience-targeting game.
After all, your content is getting lonely with no new website visitors.
Before you can bust out your advertisement tools and software, ask yourself some fundamental questions first about your target audience:
- Who is my ideal customer persona?
- Which relevant demographics do they belong in?
- What are the interests that drive my ideal reader?
- What are their problems that my content can solve?
Answering these questions will get you on track with understanding who your audience is.
Once you know who it is that you’re creating content for, you can start writing posts that never miss the mark.
Choose the Right Channels to Focus On
Unless you can clone yourself, you’ll never be able to focus on all channels at once. Many marketers and content creators try to be present on every channel, but that’s a mistake.
To address the first bit, content marketers have to make the most of the resources they have available.
By focusing on all channels, you’re stretching your resources too thin and won’t be able to do a proper job on any of them.
The best you’ll get out of it is to achieve a weak presence everywhere but a strong, influential presence nowhere.
When content gains traction, it’s usually because of its convincing performance on one or two channels.
You see, not every channel is equally suitable for the content you’re putting out in terms of performance. Some channels outperform the others, simple as that.
It makes sense, then, to focus on the top-performing channels, at least until your business grows to where it can afford a bigger content marketing budget.
Have you ever rushed to open up five different channels on different websites and social media, only to completely neglect half of them?
See, now we’re getting to the crux of the matter.
As a content marketer, you have to decide which channels to focus on and tailor your content towards those channels.
Mind you, like every business decision, choose based on performance data.
For starters, pick two channels to focus your content on and win audiences there before attempting to branch out onto a completely different channel.
Your performance metrics will tell you which channels your content is most effective at.
Best of all, once you’ve gained a big following on one channel, it’ll be easier to get new followers on a different one because you will have already made a name for yourself.
Remember that it always takes focus to hit the mark, and if you’re looking in 10 different directions at once, you’re sure to miss it.
Since content on every channel needs to be promoted, it’s only natural we talk about that next.
Great Content Needs a Great Email List
Many marketing practices have come and gone over the years, but email remains one of the best supporting practices in the game.
Email marketing is evergreen, as simple as that.
Marketers have been using it since businesses started opening their emails, and they won’t be going away as long as email remains an essential communication tool.
Where there are emails, there’s always going to be email lists.
That being said, email lists have great outreach potential. When you have a large email list, you can reach many qualified prospects and pitch them your content.
Countless business relationships started with a single well-written outreach email, so there’s no reason to give the same chance to the content you published.
Who knows, maybe the next prospect on your email list will become an avid reader of your blog?
If that happens, your email list will pay off big time.
We know email lists have outstanding ROI. It’s because you don’t have to break the bank to find email addresses of leads to add to your list.
That makes email lists so much more affordable than other acquisition channels, such as PPC, for instance.
If you’re looking for ways to create a great email list for your content, know that can achieve it with 2 different methods.
Create the Email List Yourself: Quality Over Quantity
Pros: You have full control over the lead criteria, you can do thorough research on your prospects, handpicked leads are up to date
Cons: It’s time-consuming and demands the use of tools
Outsource Email Acquisition: Quantity Over Quality
Pros: It saves time, you’re able to get a vast amount of emails, and there’s no need for using acquisition tools
Cons: There are risks of poor task execution, less control over email quality, and no process improvement possibilities.
Whether you use one method or a hybrid solution is up to you and your marketing team. Just make sure you use email lists to the fullest extent.
Content Remarketing Is a Must
One thing that happens all the time is that users browse through content and close it because it’s not what they’re looking for at the moment.
Now comes the kicker: you can get those users back to consume that content. This is where remarketing comes in.
Remarketing is necessary to re-engage visitors to your content. It’s perfectly normal that not all users stick around to read your posts or watch your videos from start to finish.
They can leave at any point but remarketing is here to make sure they come back and give your content a second chance.
Using remarketing tactics, you can retarget those users and push your content their way, so it doesn’t get dismissed so easily the second time around.
This process allows you to re-engage users who interacted with your content in the past but didn’t commit all the way and convert. Content remarketing is too good to pass on.
To remarket, you need to retarget.
This is important, so keep it in mind.
The success of your remarketing efforts depends on your retargeting abilities.
Whether it’s retargeting users on social media or on a different channel, whoever is behind the helm has to know how to retarget users that have interacted with your content in the past so he or she can re-engage them.
Offer an upgraded and re-done content piece when you’re retargeting; otherwise, you’re just spamming users with the same content over again.
Repurposed or updated content is an improved version of the content they’ve engaged with in the past.
Building on your existing content increases your odds at re-engaging the users that are revisiting the topic.
If you want to support your content, you’ll remarket it, so it gets a fighting chance at winning its visitors back.
Look at remarketing as a piece of your overall promotion strategy. Speaking of which…
Don’t Forget to Promote Your Content
You’ve put time, effort, and good money into creating amazing content that will amaze your audience, yet you’re risking it to go completely under the radar by not promoting it?
If you fail to promote your content, you’ll succeed only in wasting your efforts.
Understand that marketers upload countless content pieces every hour, on every topic you can think of.
On any given day, someone has already bombarded your ideal reader with new content similar to yours.
That fact alone makes it impossible for all your content to stay afloat without promotional efforts.
There’s even a study that backs what we’re saying.
Backlinko analyzed over 900 million blog posts and found out that a stunning 94% of them get no external links.
Blog posts without backlinks don’t even make a splash, so all that effort and money people have put into them has essentially gone down the drain.
Let’s go over some tips about ways to promote your content, so it doesn’t end up like 94% of the abovementioned posts.
Like any successful feat, promotion requires planning and effort:
- Understand the unique marketing aspects of your channels and fine-tune your promotion towards them
- Set up a promotion budget so you know how much money you can work with
- Track and analyze your results to detect potential improvements.
If you focus on SEO rankings, you can leverage tools like Ahrefs to track your ranking results and search engine visibility.
Just import your data from GSC or manually put keywords to track.
If you are constrained by your budget, you can look for cheaper alternatives.
One of those is Ubersuggest from Neil Patel, for which you can register for free.
And if you like it, the monthly subscription is just 12 dollars per month. This will get you started with tracking and analyzing your SEO and content. Mind you, we’re not advertising them, merely trying to give you useful advice.
In content marketing, promotion is a continuous process inseparable from content creation.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this article, we promised to give you actionable advice that will improve your content marketing game.
We’ve made good on our promise.
Nobody expects you to read this once and understand the Matrix of content marketing. You can always come back to this post after hitting a roadblock.
Roll your sleeves, start using this advice and crush your content marketing strategy.
