Content Marketing Best Practices

A survey shows that 97% of businesses see content as important to their overall strategy. That alone shows that your focus should be on polishing your content marketing best practices in 2022. Otherwise, you risk running behind your competitors.

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is the practice of using content to:

• Increase brand awareness
• Drive traffic
• Educate people about your products
• Boost thought leadership
• Earn more conversions

This is a very effective, budget-friendly way of reaching customers. However, it only works when content best practices are applied.

Different Types of Content Marketing

The types of content marketing are varied and allow you to easily present your content to different audiences. The different types of content marketing include:

• Blog posts
• Articles
• Social media content
• Animations
• Infographics
• Slide presentations
• White papers
• User-generated content

When you take the various platforms into consideration, as well as offline content, there are many ways to reach people if you use content marketing best practices.

Benefits of Content Marketing

Content marketing is authentic and relevant. It builds audience trust and allows you to engage prospects at every stage of the sales funnel. When you implement content marketing best practices, you’re sure to get a great response from your target audience.

Content Marketing Best Practices

What are the content best practices you should know, and how do you put them to work for your brand? These tips will get you started.

Create Personalized Content for Your Audience

Personalized content is written, promoted, and distributed to reach the right audience at the right time. It can be personalized according to the customer journey, target demographics, platform, values, and preferences. This helps your content resonate with audiences more. It also means that you will create and share content that isn’t always relevant to every customer and where they are in the sales cycle.

Match Content to the Platform

Every social media platform, as well as your own website, evolves with its own “personality.” It’s important that what you share on each platform is a good fit. Also, certain platforms perform better with specific content types. For example, TikTok is perfect for short-form video content, and your company blog is best for long-form written content.

Focus on Bringing Value Instead of Selling

The golden rule of content marketing is that you should publish 70% customer-focused content and 30% promotional content. That customer-focused content:

• Answers customers’ questions
• Addresses concerns prospects might have
• Provides entertainment
• Educates customers in best practices

The remaining 30% can then be content that directly promotes your products and services.

Optimize for Search Engines

Content strategy best practices may evolve, but one thing is always true: You must optimize your content for search. Keep up with Google’s latest core updates and changes to their algorithm, that way you will have a better understanding of what Google is looking for in its page ranking process.

Encourage Collaboration and Engagement

Content marketing isn’t just you broadcasting thoughts and ideas. With content strategy best practices, the idea is to build community and start conversations. This happens when you invite other people to the table and encourage your audience to engage. Some examples of this are:

• Encouraging social sharing
• Allowing readers to comment and share feedback
• Partnering with influencers or complementary businesses/industries
• Guest blogging
• User-generated content
• Content curation

Yes, by all means, learn how to write a great blog post, but don’t forget about the role of relationships in content. Relationship building is key to increasing sales and revenue.

Have a Distribution Strategy

Your distribution plan is what ensures that people actually see your content. It’s determining who the content is intended for and where they will be most likely to find it. You’ll want to think about where you will post content and how you’ll promote it. This will also help you determine what various types of content you need to be creating, i.e short clip videos for TikTok vs long-form written content for your blog.

Measure Your Performance

Your strategy can only be deemed successful if you get the results you want. Every content marketing initiative should involve setting goals and KPIs, determining the metrics you will use to measure success, and engaging analytics tools to quantify the results.

Avoid These Common Mistakes

Don’t waste all of your hard work by making any of the following mistakes. Each of these can cause you to lose any benefits you gain from a good content strategy.

Choosing Quantity Over Quality

This is a tough one. You must produce content regularly to earn followers and increase name recognition. However, poor-quality content will have a negative impact. If you have to choose, quality always trumps quantity.

Forgetting to Fact Check

Check facts carefully. Source statistics, and ensure you can quantify any claims you make. Otherwise, you risk losing credibility.

Creating Duplicate Content

There are two types of duplicate content to be concerned about. The first relates to plagiarism. This is when content is copied without permission or attribution. This can happen intentionally or unintentionally. For example, common phrases could trigger reports of plagiarism, or a disreputable writer might steal content. In any case, every page should be checked for originality. Otherwise, you could face search engine penalties.

The second concern is duplicate content within your own site. Here, site architecture problems and other issues could cause the same content to appear multiple times. This also leads to indexing and search issues.

Publishing with Too Many Spelling and Grammar Mistakes

Google doesn’t scan your content for mistakes, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have issues. Spelling and grammar issues can have an indirect impact on your SEO and traffic. 

Excessive spelling errors reduce credibility. Other content creators will be less likely to share and link to your content. Additionally, poorly written content can increase your bounce rates. Fortunately, all of this is easily avoided with a bit of care and a grammar-checking tool.

Final Thoughts

Content marketing best practices can be succinctly stated in the three Ps of content marketing. 

• Punctuation: Creating well-formatted and grammatically correct content 
• Polish: Using the best content assets and earning engagement with top-quality elements 
• Power: Creating compelling content that gets people to answer the call to action

To make content marketing work for you, consider partnering with a content marketing company that has developed content strategy best practices that work. We’d love to talk more about what we can do for you. Get started by scheduling a free consultation with AOU Creative.