8 Ways to Hit a Home Run In Content Marketing, by Brian Newmark

Content marketing is great when done in the right way.

It can get you traffic.

It can get you sales.

It can boost your social presence.

Content marketing can enhance your entire online business and can make a brand out of your business. It can, however, fall flat and bring more trouble than any benefit – if it is wrongly done.

In this article, we will discuss 8 tips to make sure you score a home run with your content marketing campaigns.

1) Content

Here are 4 steps that you should absolutely follow while creating content for your content marketing efforts.

Step 1 – Analyze: Analyze your business. See what works. Build content around it.

Remember, this content will be shared freely and will be promoted heavily. The content should be interesting, helpful, must have proper facts and stats to backup it up and should absolutely be related to your business in some way.

Step 2 – Once you have all the data ready, start working on the content. The primary format is preferably text and should

be proof read and polished to make sure it is absolutely spot on.

Step 3 – Release it in various formats. In addition to text, make a slideshow, PDF, video, infographics etc. formats.

Step 4 – Get some guest posts ready on topics that are close to your primary content.

2) Check up of your content: Even if you have the best experts in-house or hired who have prepared your content so far, you still need a content marketing expert to take a look at it.

Hire a content marketing expert to check your content before you move further with your plans.

3) Landing pages:

Get a few landing pages ready to dive in traffic from your content marketing activities. Make sure to have an email service like aweber or mailchimp connected to your landing page.

4) Social Media

Your content is ready, it is time to promote. Social media is preferably the best way to promote your content. Promote it on the primary social sites like facebook, G+, twitter, linkedin, pinterest, reddit etc. Get the word out. Go for the 2nd tire social sites like fark, care2, bizsugar, inbound etc. Target as many as you can and try to reach their homepages.

5) Start paid promotions.

Free marketing methods can give you the initial boost but to take it off, one has to resort to paid advertisement.

Go for PPC ads like adwords, try CPA to get some downloads on your content, buy paid social ads from the official Blog Engage, facebook, twitter, linkedin, stumbleupon etc. advertisements.

6) Track your progress.

It is important to keep a track of how things are going. Is the content well taken by your audience? The comment section on your social channels and your blog should be enough to tell you that. Some of them will even take the trouble to email you. Do go through it all and see if the content is allright.

Next, you need to analyze your promotions so far. Is the targeting all right? How’s you’re CTRs on your ads? Are your CPM ads generating enough clicks?

If the down votes on your Reddit are going too down, no need to worry about it. People are just insane on Reddit. Social media is hard to use as a system to analyze opinion as sometimes the negativity is too much. Check the overall

social activity – see how many people are positive about it. If the number is considerable, it should work.

7) Do more of what worked so far:

Try to get rid of things that are not working and do more of the things that have brought good results.

If adwords is not working, ditch it. If stumbleupon is giving 100% bounce rate, stop using it. Check what brings good results and do more of it.

Same goes for the content. If a particular type of content is working out nicely – get more such content. Perhaps it is the format that is being liked; if that is the case then start working more on that format.

8) Check conversions:

Traffic, social reach etc. are great, but it should all somehow convert into sales to make the entire activity worth it.

See what converts and what does not. Analyze other benefits and see if that particular effort if worth it or it should be dropped. Focus on things that are converting better. Perhaps particular social channel is converting more – if that is the case then dedicate more time and resources to it.

Content marketing is a long term process and requires persistence and consistency to gain substantial results.

One needs to keep doing things over a longer period of time and stop looking at short term gains if one has to achieve great results.

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