Content Strategy That Packs A Punch — Part 3
Content Strategy Tips For Your Toolkit
In part one of this series we defined content strategy and why it’s important. Next, in part two, we provided the steps to a content strategy that will help you be more successful. Now, in our final part, we’ve got three tips to help you rock your content marketing strategy. If you follow the advice in all three of these posts you should see a marked increase in engagement over time.
Tip #1: Diversify, Diversify, Diversify
Whether you do a single topic per post or write in series, be sure to include a variety of media within each post and throughout the series. For example, if you write a series of posts about car stereo trends in 2017 find high quality, related, infographics, videos and images. A good rule of thumb is two different media per post.
Diversification is not just in the content of a blog post. Content should also be diversified across social media platforms. By analyzing how users interact you’ll quickly learn how things that work across one social media platform fall flat on another. Be sure that you share information in a way that is suited for the platform and your followers.
Tip #2: Never Forget That Content Is SEO
We can’t tell you how many times we get offers to post guest posts that have great information, but have been written by someone who didn’t know how to optimize content for SEO. That’s right, all content should follow SEO best practices. And, anyone in charge of this should recognize that SEO best practices change.
How do you learn these things? The easiest way is to check out Yoast, which provides guidelines based on what Google is looking for when crawling. There are two sides to this: SEO and readability.
SEO includes:
Keyword density
Titles, h1, meta descriptions, alt tags
Length
Readability looks at:
Grade level at which piece is written.
Transition words.
Sentence length.
Active versus passive voice
Believe it or not, a good writer is not enough when it comes to content! You need a good writer who knows how to implement SEO.
Tip #3: Be Patient And Share
The goal of content strategy is to engage. But just like it takes a while to trust a new friend with all of your secrets, it takes a while for potential clients to trust you and your site. Develop and follow a strong content strategy that is consistent and includes all of the components we’ve shared and you’ll notice improvements.
Content strategy is a vital piece of your puzzle but it is not a quick fix. It takes time and commitment to develop the strategy, research topics and produce high quality pieces of content that your clientele finds useful.
In addition to creating and posting content as part of your content strategy, be sure to share it. Whether through emails or social media sites, you’ll find places where engagement is high and learn, through assessment, how to tweak your process to yield better results.
Content strategy isn’t easy but it can be learned, especially when you have a partner like us helping you along the way. What are some changes you’ll make to your strategy? Need help? Contact us for a free content evaluation and let us help you take your content strategy to the next level.
Nancy Koziol knows two things like the back of her hand: SEO and good writing. She uses these, and her B.A. in English from a small liberal arts school, to write killer content for Digital Firefly Marketing and its clients.