A powerful way to propel your marketing strategy is to develop consistent content. It has proven to be extremely cost-effective in building brand awareness, generating leads, and boosting website traffic.

While content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing, it generates more than three times as many leads. With the abundance of content being created, breaking through the clutter to reach your target audience is harder than ever.

Content Marketing Strategy Assists

To capture your audience’s attention, try these seven underrated content marketing tactics that are often overlooked.

Strategy 1: Segment Your Audience

Not everyone reading your content is an interested buyer. Of those who are buyers, many are in different stages of the buying process. For example, content designed to create awareness for new customers will not resonate with loyal, existing customers. To increase engagement with your potential and existing customers, segment your audience by their demographic and determine their product need. Use your buyer personas to develop content targeted to each audience segment.

While it is difficult to segment your blog or website, email is the best tool to use to reach your audiences effectively. You can create different content for each audience segment.

Segmenting can also help increase your conversion rate. Consumers remember content that is tailored to them.
For example, if your audience wants to know the difference between a living trust and a will you wouldn’t send out a general email about financial security. Further tailoring an email makes it more likely for your audience to rise in engagement.

Strategy 2: Create Quizzes

Online quizzes are a collaborative addition to your content marketing strategy. They are engaging, entertaining, and highly shareable. People love to share quizzes with their friends and on social media. Quizzes are also very useful for content marketers. You can use quizzes to present your products and services to your audience in an interactive and fun way, rather than having them read a blog post.

Additionally, you can get a better idea of what your audience is interested in by reviewing the data from these quizzes. Data drive campaigns are always credible and more effective. Tweak your products to make them better or provide a more efficient service using your new insight.

Strategy 3: Social Media

With one in three people, or 2.5 billion, active on social networks last year, social media is one of the best places to promote your business and your content to your target audience.

Your social media presence can help you build brand awareness, attract prospective customers, increase website traffic and drive more conversions. Make sure you align your overall content marketing goals to match your social media strategy.

Determine which social media platforms your audience uses the most and start posting. Don’t try to post on every channel, just the ones where your audience spends the most time. Be very strategic about your posts and create different content for different platforms. The same content you use on Twitter may not work as well on Instagram.

Hashtags are used on social media platforms to help build brand awareness and get noticed. If you hashtag a topic (#socialmediachat), many people interested in the topic will click on the hashtag and find your tweets and posts.

You can create hashtags with your product or service (#widgets) or a topic (#usingwidgetsinhealthcare). Hashtags also make it easier to track how your promotions are performing across different social media channels.

Strategy 4: Build Relationships Through Email

Many marketers consider email to be their most effective marketing strategy. In fact, according to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing sees an average 4300 percent return on investment (ROI) for businesses in the United States.

Evidently email marketing is not something you want to ignore. If people sign up to receive your emails, chances are they want to hear from you. Make sure to send them useful content. Don’t inundate them with sales collateral.

Building a rapport with your customers through email is a long-term process. Don’t expect instant gratification. Create a long-term content strategy to drive organic traffic to your website and create multiple opt-in offers.

Here are some tips to help you successfully build relationships by email:

• Don’t communicate to them, communicate with them—write like you are speaking to a single person.
• Be welcoming and inviting—don’t just ask for their business. Make your email an invitation to engage them.
• Keep it brief—the length of your email should be appropriate to your message. Be clear and to the point.
• Provide relevant and valuable content—once allowed to send an email, your customers are saying they want you to send them emails with value. The emails need to be useful and relevant to your target audience.
• Be consistent but not annoying—you want to keep your brand at the forefront of their mind but don’t send them too many emails. People may become easily annoyed.
• Stimulate your audience for referrals—if you want your audience to share your content with their friends and colleagues, you have to make sure your content is share-worthy. Ensure everything you send is relevant to your audience and contains content that will be useful to them in solving their business challenges.
  
  

Strategy 5: Video Content Marketing

Using video can take your content marketing strategy to the next level. Strategically designing video content is extremely popular because it can convey a vast amount of information quickly and in an entertaining way.

People are watching videos more than ever and the trend is expected to continue. In 2018, the number of digital video viewers in the United States amounted to 228.8 million viewers and is projected to reach 248.9 million video viewers in 2022.

With video viewing on the rise, it’s essential to use video content to reach your target audience, but be very selective in the type of content you produce. Your audience doesn’t want to see a promotional or sales video. They want to hear a story. Telling stories on video is an effective way to connect with your target audience and build deeper relationships.

Consumers feel emotionally connected to a brand if they believe it will enhance their lives. Video enables you to show your audience how your product or service will better their lives.

Strategy 6: Utilize Visual Content Such as Infographics

Did you know we process visual content thousands of times faster than plain text? Make sure you include visuals in your content to help draw your readers in.

If all they see are blocks of text, they aren’t going to read the content, regardless of how compelling it might be. A few days later they may only remember about 10% of what they read. However, if you pair the content with an image, people are likely to retain 65% of the content.

Infographics are one of the best ways to convey information to your audience. They are very popular because they help create a visual story, using data. This visual marketing infographic is a good example of how to turn a list into a memorable graphic.

Illustrating an image containing easy to digest graphics and accurate data makes for a valuable visual.

Strategy 7: Utilize Keyword Research

Did you ever think about where your website traffic comes from? Without those visitors, you won’t be able to generate leads and make sales. Most website traffic is driven by search engines. In fact, 93% of all internet experiences begin with a search engine. When someone is looking for something online, one of the first things they do is go to Google.

The amount of traffic you get from search engines depends on how high your website is ranked. Most people don’t look past the first page of search engine results, so it’s important to try and rank as high as possible to stay on the first page.

Keyword research is essential to improving your ranking. Keywords help people find your content. Users enter a specific query into the search engine and a search engine crawls the web to find content matching the keywords.

The better your content matches the search query, the better chance you have of ranking high in the search results. To ensure you use the right words, you need to investigate to find the best keywords.

Summary

If you aren’t using content marketing, you may be missing out more than you initially thought. Customers expect to see content from the brands they do business with. There are a multitude of reasons to use content marketing:

• Helps build brand awareness
• Improves your organic SEO ranking
• Generates leads for your business
• Inspires trust from your audience
• Attracts your ideal buyers
• Converts more website visitors into leads
  
  

With so much content being created, it can be hard to break through to your audience. The seven underrated strategies in this article can help boost your content marketing so you stand out from the crowd.

Anais Jun writes articles for businesses that want to explore different marketing strategies. Currently she is a contributor for 365 Business Tips and a digital marketing expert for e-commerce brands such as Day One Credit. Her educational background in Sociology helps her tackle topics regarding demographic trends, messaging, and branding. Feel free to connect with her via LinkedIn.