Content marketing is as full of ups and downs as the Pacific during a typhoon. The bad news? Content marketing needs change as quickly as the moods of the masses and the Internet itself. The good news? It doesn’t take a full-time content managing pro with years of experience to strike the perfect chord to resonate with potential customers.
Content marketing and analysis success takes root when you’re willing to adapt and keep learning. You might be an expert today, but tomorrow there’ll be new developments in the market and in your customer base that you’ll have to relearn. And that’s what makes content marketing such a rewarding challenge. These tips will help you step up your game and stay on top of those fluctuations–without losing your mind.
1. Rethink your assumptions about success.
What are your content marketing goals? According to a recent Time Magazine article (What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong), we need to pay attention to the fact that there’s far more to optimizing website performance and content than publishing clickable, sharable content.
We confuse what people have clicked on for what they’ve read. We mistake sharing for reading. We race toward new trends… without fixing what was wrong with the old ones.
–Tony Haile, What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong
In order to generate actual returns, you’ll need to go beyond social media engagement and measure more than clicks. The best web visitors aren’t necessarily the ones that come en masse; rather, they’re the ones who stick around to explore your site, find out what you have to offer, and take action. Targeting your content to those readers will get you a lot closer to your goal than the clickbait lottery.
2. Target the audience that matters.
The audience that matters isn’t necessarily the one that’ll share your compelling blog post with the Facebook world. So who are they? Your ideal audience depends on your company’s vision, personality, and goals. Identifying it isn’t the easiest task out there, but it has to be done, unless you have almost unlimited resources to blanket the masses with your content and hope for the best.
One content marketer took Facebook ad targeting to an extreme. His goal was to prank his roommate by targeting him with eerily knowledgeable Facebook ads. The prank worked brilliantly. But it also teaches something about content marketing: You can target pretty much any audience if you know who you’re talking to.
3. Invest time learning to use free resources.
It doesn’t take hundreds of dollars in analytics software to develop a solid content marketing strategy. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are two incredibly powerful tools that enable you to pull almost unlimited insight from your webpage. If you’ve never taken advantage of them, now is the time to up your game. Other free tools like Addvocate and Tweriod collate relevant data about your social network sharing that you can use to hone your content more effectively.
When you take the time to pull together the metrics that actually matter for your business and pass that information along to your content developers, amazing things happen: an increased ROI for every piece of content you produce, smarter keywords, and content that would-be customers find more relevant and helpful than ever before. Building a repertoire of skills that money can’t buy–that’s where the magic happens.
Writer Bio: Steffani J is a part-time content writer who loves to drink tea and craft content but struggles with one-liners.
