10 Steps To Ensure Success in Content Marketing

Some of the challenges that many small businesses encounter when trying to market their content are budget constraints and limited resources. Although it is easier to produce and market content when one has a big budget, that doesn’t mean content marketing is impossible for small organizations. Before you start tossing money down the drain, consider revamping your marketing efforts so they are more cost-effective and practical to give your content the boost in viewership and authority it deserves. Here are some ways you can get your content marketing efforts to work for your budget.

1. Use SEO to Your Advantage

There seems to be a misconception that SEO and content marketing are like two strangers whose paths rarely cross. However, many marketers fail to realize that SEO is a vital component of content marketing, they are practically cousins. SEO states what it needs and content marketing fulfills the request.

In order for your content to attract the attention of search engines, it has to be of value and SEO friendly. That doesn’t mean you should place keywords all throughout your blog posts. Instead, you need to make sure your content successfully engages the reader and provides answers to the questions they searched for.

The key is to make sure that all of your content is relevant, readable, valuable and comprehensive.

2. Understand the ROI of Content

Whether you got into content marketing because it seemed like the thing to do or you are genuinely interested in using it to promote your brand, you need to understand its value. Monetary value is not the only benefit that content has. When done right, it is a very effective tool to use to increase awareness, social exposure, links, leads, sales and followers.

3. Track Your Progress

Don’t expect to gain a large following and leads if all you’re doing is posting random words and irrelevant content to your blog. Not only do you need to post valuable content, but you need to track it. You have to dig deeper and measure a variety of factors, such as conversions, bounce rate, time on page and engagement in order to know the true value of the content you are producing. When creating content, you need to market it to the right crowd. Make it engaging and don’t forget to include a call to action to encourage readers to engage and respond.

You cannot successfully measure your content by relying on one metric. Try using four metrics like the ones below so you can get a clearer picture of how well your content is doing.

• Consumption: How many people viewed, read and consumed my content?
• Sharing: How often is my content being shared?
• Lead Generation: How often is my content converting readers into leads?
• Sales Metrics: How often are readers converting into paying customers?

4. Create Goals

When gauging the value of your content, it’s a good idea for you to make some goals. Once you have goals in place, it becomes much easier for you to assign a monetary value to better assess your return on investment. Your goals can be anything. Maybe you want to increase page views or gain new followers. No matter what your goals are, just make sure you are using the right analytical tools to keep track of your efforts, such as KISSmetrics, Google Analytics or some other platform. Keep in mind that your analytics only tell half of the story. Consumer feedback and engagement tells the other half.

5. Check Out Your Competition

In order to understand how much work you need to do, check out your competition. Find out who your top 10-15 competitors are and put them on a list. Jot down the different types of content they are putting out there. Videos, blogs, slide shows, infographics, and lists are very popular platforms of delivery for many companies and are good places for you to start if you are new to the content creation game. Analyze the amount of traffic, comments, shares and backlinks they are generating on a daily basis from their marketing efforts. This information can help to give you a much clearer picture of where you need to be focusing your content creation and marketing efforts at.

6. Use Your Budget Wisely

Being on a budget can be a weakness in itself, but that doesn’t mean that you should give up. You’ll need to make the most of the money and resources you have. Focus on really learning everything you can about content marketing and creation. If you don’t feel up to the task or don’t feel that it is your strong suit, consider investing your money and resources into your weak areas. For example:

Are you having trouble creating valuable and useful content? Consider hiring a content writing service to take over that aspect so you can focus your efforts in areas where you are more comfortable and effective. You don’t even have to hire them on a full or part-time basis. The goal is for you to get the biggest return for your time, energy and money.

7. Quality Over Quantity Every Time

When ramping up your efforts, it can be all too easy to assume that the more you put out, the more successful you will be. If you can’t post several blogs a week, that’s okay. Being able to post one high-quality blog over several mediocre ones is much more effective and beneficial for your company. What you need to remember is that quality will always trump quantity. Placing the emphasis on quality instead of quantity will ensure several things:

• Your brand and image will always be taken seriously and seen as credible
• Your content is useful and engaging
• Improves brand awareness and exposure
• Generates leads and conversions
• Natural links will help to solidify your company’s reputation

Quality content is amazing. It is engaging, it never grows old and no matter what, people will always be drawn to it to read and share it. Once you know your business inside and out, you’ll know how to talk to and approach your customers. This will put you in a better position to write authoritative content that is useful and can be published and shared to blogs, social media and influential websites.

8. Know When to Leave Things Alone

In your quest for quality, it is very important for you to remember that there is no such thing as perfection. This can cause you to put too much effort into your content marketing and cause you to start sacrificing quality and hurting your credibility. When you’ve managed to create a blog post that is of the utmost quality, leave it alone. Don’t continue to tweak it or look for small imperfections so you can add other content, pictures or change the format and layout. Once you get to that point, you are no longer being productive. You are wasting time and messing around with things that don’t need to be changed. Even though you are striving for quality, know when you’ve achieved it and when enough is enough.

9. Invest in Content Creation

Content creation is a full-time job. If you are not that great at putting words together in a meaningful way, but are determined to make content marketing work for you, then consider hiring an article writer or content writing company. Don’t mislead yourself into thinking you can’t afford their services. If you think that you can afford to waste time, money and other valuable resources while you try to figure everything out, then you’re only going to end up spinning your wheels and going nowhere.

10. Breathe New Life Into Your Content

You’ve researched your niche, have some good keywords and know what types of content you want to produce, but you don’t have the time nor the resources to sit in front of a computer all day to write new content, so what do you do? How about repurposing your old content so that it looks and sounds new. By repurposing, you can take your information and transform it into infographics, slideshows, newsletters, advertisements and more. Here are some examples of ways you can repurpose content.

• Choose a core topic and turn it into several steps.
• Write a blog post on that topic.
• Take each step of the original topic and write a blog about each step.
• Create an image for each step and share each one as a tip of the day on social media.
• Combine all of your blogs and images on that topic and turn them into an eBook.

This method alone can provide you with several blog posts, social media posts and an eBook from one topic.

Marketing on a budget is not necessarily an easy task, and creating and maintaining quality content is not cheap. However, there are ways you can make content marketing work to your advantage when you are on a limited budget. Incorporate several of these tips to improve your marketing success.