11 Tips to Crush Your Content Marketing

Everyone is doing it. It’s no secret anymore.

Search for something online and the top hits are often blog posts, videos or articles related to your search terms. And many of these sites aren’t the big guys but are very well-written (and high trafficked) pieces of content on someone's blog, even social media accounts.

And it's still no surprise.... we're all trying to conquer it. Many have been successful, many more have failed. The question is, where do you stand?

It’s not every company or every stage of a company, especially if you’re a one-woman shop and already have your hands full of tasks. Despite your position, there are ways you can outsource and manage the process so that your company starts to come up in search results.

Here are 11 tips to get you going.

1. Be prepared

Prepared for the needed consistency and writer's block that will inevitably come up. I used to manage the content for 5-6 blogs, which meant that I was writing or editing anywhere between 5-10 blog posts a week. It was a lot but I had a great team, a system, and writers that could spit out incredible content when needed. Even today, I have a team of writers to help with articles, blog content, and social media stuff. Without them, I couldn't do what I do. Just know, at some point in this content marketing journey you will need to expand your team...tips on this below.

2. Create Really Great Content

Hire writers and promote the crap out of your content. Your main goal = create great stuff that people want to share. Many content marketing pros make this the first point when they discuss content, but great content is great marketing.

“Content Marketing provides 4x the ROI of our traditional marketing spend.” - Julie Fleischer

Who is creating really great content?

Hubspot
Frank Body (letsbefrank)
BarkPost by BarkBox

3. Be Consistent...it’s Your Currency!

When I first started my agency blog, we posted infrequently. It wasn’t really planned, it was ok, a headache and didn't do us justice. But when we got organized and created an editorial schedule that held our entire team accountable to publishing weekly, success started to trickle in. Within a few months, we grew our email list to 7,000 subscribers and 20,000 monthly uniques. Not bad for a small PR agency from the east coast of Canada.

4. Content Promotion is 80% of the Work

What Renee?! Sorry to break it to you, but the actual writing part of this equation is 20% of the work. According to Derek Helpern, if you spend 80% of your time creating content and not promoting it, no one will ever read it, because... if a tree falls in the forest, will it even make a sound? So…. if you publish a great post and don’t even have a mini way to promote it, will people even see? Use the 80/20 rule, 20% of your time to create content and 80% to promote it.

I know it seems to take forever to create great content, but that's less than half of it. I once identified that it took us eight hours from content idea to actual publication (writing, editing, design, uploading…) If Helpern’s math is right, I would still have 14.4 more hours to put into promoting that piece.

So schedule in a clear and expected promotion plan.

Oh and P.S. you can (and should) promote the content you published months ago, so long as it’s still relevant.

5. Hone in on Your PR Skills

Even if PR terrifies you, you still need to put on that publicity hat and get going. How else will you attract your ideal customer, increase lead volume, get way more traffic and convert more window shoppers to customers? You need to show up with your best PR shoes on and get to work. PR and Content Marketing is the ultimate collaboration (P.S. I have a mini-course called PR Authority that can help you kickstart your PR journey.)

6. Great Content is Table Stakes

The foundation of a home needs to be strong to withstand everything that goes in it, so does your content. Duh! Your content needs to create a sense of urgency. Ultimately you're trying to get them to take action whether that's to share, comment, like or even BUY something.

7. Mobile-First Approach

In the first quarter of 2021, mobile devices generated 54.8 percent of global website traffic. This means that your content strategy needs to deliver on that tiny screen, because “having a mobile optimized site proves to be most beneficial to get more readers, keep them on your site for longer, and rank higher in search engine results,” explains the Hubspot blog. I am still dumbfounded by small businesses that don't look to their mobile experience as an important tool to get more sales. If the pandemic has taught us anything, it's that mobile shopping is growing even more!

8. REALLY Know Your Audience

A really funny mom who sells products or services to #mompreneurs can go to town on her blog with relatable/funny parenting content because she totally gets what it means to be a mom + entrepreneur. Your personality is your X factor. This is relevant to social media and content and should play an integral role in the development of your content and marketing strategy

“Your personality is your X factor.” - Renee Warren

Determine the following:

Who is your target audience? (Age, gender, favorite activities.)
What other blogs do they read, and why?
What can you teach them?
What persona’s will you create?
What is your voice?

Psst … download your Free Ideal Customer Worksheet and do this exercise again to pinpoint the who and why of your avatar.

9. Be a Keyword Master

Easy peasy. Here’s how to do this: 1. Select the top 20 keywords people would use to find your website. Here are some of mine for example Small business coach, coach for women, female business coach, PR coach … see the theme? Think of the variations of the words someone would use to search for their problem (that you solve.

Warning: Some have very high competition, and that's ok. But look to add some low-competition words to your list too. Dive into the Google Keyword Tool (easy to use) to determine what keywords you should use.

To start, pick up to 20 keywords with the volume range you are looking for and test them by running some paid ads (Don’t complicate this process, just do a simple 2-week test.).

Next, start creating blog post ideas using those keywords. I use the Portent idea generator for this task as well as the Hubspot Blog Topic Generator.

Remember to use your keywords in your title, subheadings, URL for the post, and bullet points. Google crawls those things first so sprinkle them in there first.

10. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle

Remember the 80/20 rule of content promotion versus creation? Yeah, now’s the time to break it out. All your blog posts can be repurposed for whitepapers, articles, social media, webinars, presentations, videos, infographics, and more. Reuse and recycle your content!

11. Go Deep on a Hyper Relevant Topic

If you already have enough content created, you can reuse those posts. Not by reposting them verbatim, but by looking at your top-performing content and creating pieces that go deeper into a specific topic. For example: In this article, I could write a whole post about how to use keywords to grow your email list. Goal = to help you increase traffic and revenue.

The point is to take a queue from your audience about what content they like the most and write more content about that. Share your best stuff, don’t be shy. What you’re really trying to do here is grow your list, increase traffic by establishing authority, thought leadership, and really great/useful content.