Have you ever faced problems tracking or measuring the success of your content marketing campaigns? Do you struggle to understand why some of your content gets more traffic and conversions than others?
If yes, then chances are that you don’t have a clear content marketing plan and ways to track and measure your campaign performance. Not having a clear and documented content marketing strategy can leave you feeling overwhelmed and confused.
But, that’s not all. There are content marketing best practices that you need to follow to run successful campaigns and be able to track their performance.
So, here’s a list of five content marketing best practices that can help you get more traffic, drive conversions, and achieve your other marketing goals.
Make a Detailed Content Marketing Plan
The most important part of a successful content marketing initiative is to have a detailed, well-documented strategy. This should include your content marketing goals, KPIs that you would track, distribution channels, and more.
Having a clear understanding of what you want to achieve makes it easier to do it. For example, if you want to drive traffic, then you would focus on content marketing tactics that can help you do that. You will also use KPIs like site traffic and click-through rate.
Having clarity on these helps you establish a clear course of action that you need to take to achieve your goal.
Also, you need to be clear about who you’re creating content for—your target audience. This helps you create targeted content that will draw the attention of the right people and get you good quality leads.
Start Your Content Creation Process with Keyword Research
If your goal is to drive traffic, then you need to focus on organic traffic as a long-term solution. For this, you should optimize your content with the right keywords to make it discoverable and even rank high on Google SERP.
Therefore, you should always start with keyword research to find and list the keywords that you want to target through your content. You can create a list of primary keywords and a few secondary keywords associated with each primary one.
Next, you can create content and optimize it for one primary keyword and associated secondary keywords. Do this for every piece of content that you create.
Following this best practice will get you more qualified leads who are more likely to convert as they are already interested in the topic and searched for that keyword.
Create Evergreen Content
Looking for a long-term solution where you can continually get traffic and conversions from a piece of content? Then, focus on creating evergreen content.
As the name suggests, this is the kind of content that stays relevant for a very long time. Any exhaustive resource on a topic can become evergreen content given that it provides all the information pertaining to a topic.
This wine guide for beginners is everything a person needs to know about wines, which one to choose, how to drink, etc. This is the kind of information that remains evergreen and relevant for a very long time.
If you create a resource like this for your niche then you can get organic traffic on it for years. But, you don’t necessarily need to create a long-form or exhaustive guide. Here are some other types of evergreen content that you can create:
- How-to guides
- Cheatsheets
- Templates
- Tips, tricks, and hacks
- Podcasts
To get conversions from these, simply add compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) on the content page.
Make Your Content Easy-to-Read
One important characteristic of content that gets more views and shares is that it is scannable. The easier your content is to read, the more people will read and share it.
Moreover, an easy-to-read content piece also ensures that your CTAs are strategically placed and clearly visible. This improves your content’s conversion rate as well.
But, how do you make your content easy to read?
Follow these simple tips:
- Divide your content into relevant sections with headings and subheadings
- Add visuals to it
- Use lists and bullet points
- Maintain enough white spaces
- Avoid large blocks of text
Track and Measure the Right Content Marketing KPIs
Analytics plays an important role in measuring the performance of your content marketing campaigns. You can track your content marketing KPIs to assess whether you have met your goals or not.
Analyzing your performance also helps you identify areas of improvement and work on those. You can see what worked for you and which initiatives failed. You can then use these insights to finetune and optimize your future campaigns.
You can use third-party content marketing and management software to manage and measure the performance of your campaigns. You can also use free tools like Google Analytics for website content and built-in social media analytics for your social media content.
Conclusion
These are the best practices that expert content marketers follow to run successful campaigns. Follow these for all your upcoming campaigns and see the results for yourself.
Remember, always start with listing your goals and identifying the KPIs that you can use to measure those goals. If you need help identifying the right content marketing KPIs for your campaigns, read the infographic below.
Contributed by guest author Shane Barker is a digital marketing consultant who specializes in influencer marketing, content marketing, and SEO. He is the co-founder of Attrock, a digital marketing agency. He has consulted with Fortune 500 companies, influencers with digital products, and a number of A-List celebrities. https://twitter.com/shane_barker