Are you struggling to achieve satisfying results from on your content strategy? Rest reassured, you are far from being the only one.
Content is King. But, surprisingly, still only 57% of businesses have a content marketing strategy implemented. And even those who have a strategy often can’t figure out how to set up an effective content strategy that genuinely resonates with people.
Mastering the art of content marketing isn’t that complicated. It’s a matter of understanding the dynamics involved and applying the best practices.
In this article, we share the 7 most important content marketing tips to help you create compelling content that your audience savor consuming and engage with.
Also, we included an unraveled yet bonus tip. Stay until the end!
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a medium to long-term strategy that focuses on building relationship with your target audience. It involves the creation and distribution of relevant and valuable content to attract, retain and engage.
It enables brands to build trust and establish thought leadership in their industry.
Content marketing can take many forms including blog posts, social media posts, video content, infographics, case studies, e-books, white papers, webinars and much more.
While long-form content types contribute to increase authority and expertise, shorter types of content keeps your audience fed, engaged, and maintain your online presence.
Depending on your business goals, content marketing is a core element of any successful digital marketing strategy.
7 Content Marketing Tips to Grow Your Business
Get ready to learn how you can improve and scale your content!
1. Understand your audience at a deeper level
Follow these steps to understand your audience and better serve them through your content.
Make your own research (do your homework)
Understanding your audience is the key. Take time to make thorough research.
Being able to recognize their needs and focus of interest, you will enable to generate content that match with them.
Hence, leading to more engagement, higher conversion rates, and ROI.
Ask yourself the following questions before getting into the needy-greedy of your content marketing strategy:
- Who am I targeting?
- What is my audience trying to achieve?
- What are their pain points?
- What matters to them?
- How can I help?
Having a deeper understanding will enable you to elaborate content that is not only more valuable to your audience, but also resonate at a higher level.
Define your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) & Buyer Persona
B2B Marketers often seek clarification on the difference between an ICP and a buyer persona.
ICPs and buyer personas are related but two different concepts. It is important to remember that each company is composed of individuals with distinct roles and priorities.
While ICP will define a company as a whole, the buyer persona will define an individual within the company.
Is Your LinkedIn Not Delivering Results?
Just released: my new book to help professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners maximize LinkedIn for real growth.
With years of LinkedIn expertise, Maximizing LinkedIn for Business Growth offers actionable steps to build your brand, expand your network, and drive results.
Start leveraging LinkedIn like never before—grab your copy now! Click the cover or button below to buy on Amazon.
As an example, If you are offering off-page SEO services to Saas Tech companies, your ideal customer profile would include social media platforms, SEO tools, AI-writing tools… as potential targets. Your buyer persona would likely be the SEO Manager or digital marketing manager of the targeted company.
Map out your buyer journey & adjust your content strategy accordingly
Having a deep understanding and a well-defined target is an important step, but being able to apply that knowledge to your content creation process will make a significant difference.
Mapping out your buyer journey, enables to have a visual overview of the decision-making process. Hence, ensuring your content marketing campaigns are designed and crafted on each buying stage.
MOFU, BOFU, and TOFU are terms used in content marketing to describe different stages of the buying cycle.
TOFU: Top of the funnel (awareness)
In the buyer journey, TOFU stage represents the awareness phase. Where potential customers are becoming aware of their problem or need.
At this stage, we often talk about branded content. Your audience is not ready to buy yet, you shouldn’t be focusing on conversion. Create content that educates and attracts a wider audience. Focus on providing valuable information and generating brand awareness.
Content can take the form how-to guides, eBooks, infographics or any other useful asset.
MOFU: Middle of the funnel (consideration)
Moving down the funnel, the MOFU stage represents the consideration phase.
The audience is more aware. This is where prospects are actively considering different solutions.
Content at this stage should provide more in-depth information about your product or service. Highlight its benefits and addressing any objections or concerns.
BOFU: Bottom of the funnel (decision)
The BOFU stage is the final phase. Prospects are already knowledgeable about their pain points and are ready to make a purchase decision.
Content at this stage should focus on why your offering is superior to your competitors, while provide strong calls-to-action. This can include offering product demos, free trials, or exclusive discounts.
Give your prospects a chance to experience your solution without having to commit. Keep an close eye on conversion rate.
If you want to succeed in competitive environments, being present during the whole customer journey and nurture them all the way through the funnel will maximize your chances of conversion.
Further Reading: 19 Inspiring Content Marketing Examples to Learn From
2. Genuinely solve your audience’s problem
Genuinely solving your audience’s pain points is the key to stand out from all the noise.
When you address your audience’s problem, you show that you understand their needs and challenges. By providing valuable solutions, you establish yourself as a trusted and authoritative resource in your industry.
Trust is the bridge
Trust is the base of any prosperous relationship, including the one between a brand and its audience. Trust enables potential customers to make the leapfrog. An academic study revealed strong correlation between trust and economic success. Both parties involved needs to be able to trust each other to foster exchanges.
The same principle applies to brands and their audiences. When your audience trusts you, they are more likely to engage with your content, consider your recommendations, and become loyal customers at the end of the line.
Building confidence from your customers is the key. People are anxious about the unknown. It is your role as a business to support them through this stage.
Set yourself as an Expert
Solving your audience’s problem set you as an authority in your industry. By sharing valuable insights and practical solutions, you showcase your knowledge and expertise.
Setting yourself as an expert will help to establish your credibility and position you as the go-to source for information. When your audience perceives you as an authority, they are more likely to rely on your content and hence seek your expertise.
Genuine value is key
When you address your audience’s problem, you provide real value in their eyes. Your content should offer practical solutions, educate or entertain your audience to establish a positive relationship and foster customer growth.
Keep that in mind: an educated audience always take better decision.
By consistently offering value, your audience will recognize how beneficial their engagement is with your content, leading to increased loyalty, brand appreciation, high engagement rate, and potentially word-of-mouth recommendations.
This positive experience and perceived value can help to expand your reach. Get notice by other experts, potential business partners, or even potential customers.
Further Reading: What is Content Writing? 13 Ways to Write Better Content
3. Leverage analytics to refine your strategy
Analytics are essential to drive any business decisions. As part of your digital marketing strategy, keeping a close look at your content performance will provide you with insights on how your audience is engaging with it.
By analyzing engagement rates, impressions and other key content marketing metrics (also known as KPIs), you will be able to have a better understanding of what type of content you produce performs better, identify any content gap, engagement differences across your platforms… Hence, enabling you to make data-driven decisions.
By leveraging the power of Google Analytics or alternative SEO analytics tools, you can monitor your website’s traffic and behavior.
Gaining valuable insights on the effectiveness of your marketing efforts is essential for improvement. By continuously refining your strategy based on data insights, you can optimize your posts for better results and increased ROI.
In the example below, we can take a look at some of the keywords the nealschaffer.com is ranking on search engine results.
From this data source, we can easily conduct an analysis to determine how each piece of content ranks on search engine page result (SERP).
The long-tail keyword “how to make youtube videos” seems to rank well on SERP, with a decent search volume. Based on that information, we could dig further to understand what could be improved to help the page rank higher.
Ask yourself the following question:
- Are they any pieces of content that better answer the search intent in SERP?
- How strong is the backlink profile from the web page ranking higher?
- Is there any on-page factors that could be improved?
- Does my blog post sufficiently cover the topic?
After analyzing these specific elements from competitor pages for “how to make youtube videos”, we could easily develop a strategy to bring the adjustments. After implementation, keep track of the results.
Based on Ahrefs data, we can notice two major elements that could potentially be improved.
Content length
Although it is widely debated in the industry, the content length is known for being a search engine result factor.
In this specific case, we can clearly see that the blog post has a lower word count compared to its competitors ranking higher. It seems that some key elements are missing. Improving the content based on your competitors, could have a positive impact on your rankings.
That being said, we won’t recommend adding fluffy text for the sake of increasing the length only. Always keep a major focus on the search intent.
Backlinks
A backlink is when a site links to another site from an anchor text. Also known for being one of the most important ranking factors.
By taking a quick look at the data in the above example, the article used in this example gathers only 44 backlinks from 29 referring domains while its competitors in SERP seems to receive way more link equity for wider variety of pages.
While there are may be other significant factors impacting these rankings, such as topical authority, internal linking and other site-level factors, it appears that improving the aforementioned elements at a page-level could be beneficial in this specific case.
A thorough analysis could be conducted, but for the purposes of this article we won’t dig further.
4. Optimize your blog content for organic results
Optimizing your blog content for organic results is crucial because it boosts your chances of ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
By optimizing your blog content, you can attract more organic traffic, which is essential for the growth of your blog and website. Relevant organic traffic is valuable as it increases the chances of converting visitors into customers or subscribers.
Do keyword research
Keyword research involves finding and analyzing search terms used in search engines by the users. 1
The research can unveil popular search queries and potential targets based on your content ideas. This process offers valuable insights for businesses looking to improve their visibility and reach.
There are multiple ways to find list of keywords to tackle. You can take a look at “people also ask” featured snippet for relevant suggestions or use any keyword research tools, it will help facilitate the process.
Additionally, you can even analyze how your main competitors perform to unveil untapped opportunities for your own blog.
In modern SEO, ranking for a target keyword without covering related topics can become extremely difficult. Building trust and authority in the eyes of PageRank for a given topic is must. You need to show your trustworthiness and expertise.
Come up with topic buckets (also called topic clusters) that will be filled with keyword ideas later on.
Once you have found enough keyword ideas for your selected topics, you can start your classification based on their relevance and search intent. Make sure you cover all relevant subtopics.
Further Reading: Topic Clusters: How to Create Them to Improve Your SEO
Focus on on-page SEO
Now you have started publishing content keeping in mind your targeted keywords, you will have to put a higher emphasis on on-page seo factors.
A content piece that match the user intent is more important then ever in SEO.
Here are few tips below on how you can optimize your content for search results:
- Go beyond generic content and produce something unique.
- Insert your keywords in strategic areas: Title, subheadings, core content…
- Structure your content pieces with headings & subheadings.
- Pay close attention to internal linking. Make sure your topic clusters are properly linked together.
- Add relevant external links to trustworthy and valuable sources.
- Don’t overlook schema markups.
- Include FAQ section based on long-tail keywords from “People Also Ask”
Don’t let go on off-page SEO
Having other reputable websites pointing to your lastly published piece of content convey votes of confidence to PageRank algorithm.
Off-page SEO refers to strategies that are implemented outside a website to improve its trustworthiness and authority. From link-acquisition to boosting social media engagement and shares.
It’s no coincidence if 79.7% of SEO experts still view link-building as an important part of their SEO strategy. It is heavyweight factor in the set of elements used by PageRank.
These off-page tactics may involve guest posting, publishing link-worthy content, relationship-based link-building, unliked mentions, sky crapper technique…
If you aim to check how your site is performing on search engines for free, Google’s features. Google SEO Checker is powered by the official Google Lighthouse platform, enabling to obtain insights about your site speed, mobile friendliness, and other best practices.
Further Reading: 10 Top Tips to Increase Your Blog Post SEO
5. Go beyond generic content
Nearly 9 million blog posts are published every day. Standing out from the crowd requires genuine efforts and creativity to come up with original content that truly brings value to the readers.
But not only…
Google’s search algorithms prioritize people-first content as a key factor in evaluating pages for search rankings.
Here are few questions you should ask yourself to ensure your online content goes above and beyond:
- Does the quality of your content reflects a firsthand understanding and extensive knowledge?
- Does your site has a primary purpose or focus?
- When reading your content, do you feel like someone will gain sufficient knowledge to achieve what they come for?
If you feel like your approach match the questions above, it may be a good sign that your content is delivering something valuable.
Google recently updated their core concept “E-E-A-T” — The acronym stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
As a content marketer, understanding this concept is vital to producing high-quality content that gets the attention it deserves.
Be original, try to bring a fresh perspective on a topic already covered. Rely on your expertise and experience, add updated information, share your predictions, but most importantly understand your audience and solve their pain points better than anyone else.
6. Don’t overlook your website user experience (UX)
User Experience (UX) encompasses the way users interact with a product, a service or an interfaces. Through its process, UX aims to enhance the user’s journey to optimize overall satisfaction by improving elements such as usability, accessibility and efficiency of user interaction.
In the context of a website, a UX centered-design will create a user-friendly platform that is easy to navigate, convenient, minimize frictions, and avoid any confusion and/or distraction for users.
The question remain. Why does UX matter in content marketing?
Well, simply because having a bad user experience can turn away your readers.
A bad user experience is mostly defined by an unattractive and difficult-to-use interface, which usually lead potential customers to visit another website to answer their query.
Poor user experience can be caused by many factors, such as slow loading times, overly distracting banners, confusing navigation menus, poor design choices.
Let’s dig into an example. Below are two different blog pages:
The first blog page represents a great example of a user-friendly web-page. The page is streamlined, easy to read, well-spaced text, there is a sense of aesthetic and doesn’t contain any distraction aside from the social media icons.
Hence, contributing to a positive user experience and easy absorption of information.
On the other hand, the second blog post below, is fairly difficult to read and way less attractive. It contains many distractions and the text is fairly difficult to read.
It appears that navigating the first blog post will be simpler for the user and more convenient.
Consequently, higher engagement rates lead to longer site visits and better user experience, which may lead to increased loyalty and higher demand.
On top of that, a great user experience can indirectly affect your rankings on search engines. Indeed, given that Google’s algorithm assess how a visitor interacts with a website to determine if it is valuable for its users, it makes total sense to optimize your website for a phenomenal user experience.
In other words, to maintain your content high on search engine results, you must keep visitors on your website. To achieve that level of retention, you need to provide a great user experience.
7. Cross-promote your content & repurpose
Cross-promoting your content and repurposing it is an excellent strategy to expand your reach. The promotional aspect of content is often left behind. Quite unfortunate when you put so much time and effort into the creation of something valuable.
By leveraging your existing content across different distribution channel, such as social media, email newsletters, and blogs, you enable your content to get the attention it deserves.
Gary Vaynerchuk is certainly one of the best in terms of content repurposing. Take a look at his presence on content-sharing platforms like Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitter or Instagram. Gary and his team have the capability to achieve higher coverage thanks to content repurposing.
In the example below, you can see GaryVee discussing on how to build a valuable inner circle in an interview. The section of the full broadcast has been cut and repurposed into a TikTok video on his own channel. Highly probably repurposed into an Instagram Reel and a YouTube Short, too.
By taking advantage of cross-promotion and re-purposing, you can expand your reach without having to create entirely new content from scratch.
Do not be scared of being reluctant. Repetition is crucial for individuals to process and retain information.
Moreover, with all the information flow, it is highly probable that your audience might have come across your content but didn’t have the time to take a closer look at it. So, why not giving them a second chance?
Finally, the promotional part should never be neglected. Re-purposing your content by turning blog posts into an umbrella of different assets like videos, infographics, or podcasts, can help you to adapt to different types of content consumption and keep your content fresh and engaging.
Further Reading: 13 Content Distribution Strategies That Work in 2025
Bonus Tip: Don’t be afraid to take positions
Trigger people’s emotions by giving your opinion on controversial topics. Don’t be hesitant about being opinionated from time to time.
Humans seek companionship and knowledge from others, that’s why online communities and effective customer engagement are key elements. We often tend to forget the human aspect behind brands.
Genuinely share your thoughts and opinion on a given topic. Some people will agree, some won’t, and there is nothing you can do about it.
However, not only individuals who share the same values as the brand may feel a stronger connection with it, but they will also engage at higher-level and fight against contradictory opinions from other individuals in comments.
Final Thoughts on Content Marketing Tips
Content Marketing still have years to come. It’s a constantly evolving beast, but one thing remains true: keep a major focus on your audience.
If you want to create an army of loyal customers and brand ambassadors, you have to serve their needs, solve their pain points, and know them better than they even know themselves.
Although there is no secret recipe for the best content marketing strategy, by applying these different tips, you will be set to strive and prosper in content marketing and take a step ahead from your competitors.
Finally, ensure you put enough effort to bring the spotlight to your mind-blowing content masterpiece and consider breaking it into bite-sized chunks for consumption on the go!
Further Reading: 13 Content Marketing Trends to Monitor This Year
Author Bio
Digital Marketing Enthusiast & Founder of Smartlinking. Hugo specialized in On-page & Off-page SEO. He knows how to refine sharp strategies that drive results. Striving to stay on the learning curve to keep enriching his skills, Hugo nurtures great relationships with people for a mutual harnessing of talents.
Hero photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash
Great article, Nico! Keyword research is definitely important in a content marketing campaign because this will help you identify which keywords are more searchable on search engine. Doing keyword research will also help you avoid using the same keywords as your competitors. This way, your target audience will be able to easily identify your brand from the rest of the market.
Nice article. I am also using Ahrefs and Moz to track competitor websites backlinks.
Good tips to generate traffic. Thanks for sharing
Hi Saiyed. Thanks for the kind words. Ahrefs is a great tool. I don’t use Moz, but I probably should :-)
Hi Nico,
Exciting read. You just helped me find an incredible free keyword research tool, “WMS Everywhere.” If that’s the only thing I get from this article, I’m fine with it. I tried the app and it works just fine.
Thank you for sharing!
Hi Moss,
Yeah, WMS Everywhere is a great tool. It’s handy for finding keyword inspiration. Thumbs up to the developer.