Are you not getting the results that you expected when you create content? Do you wonder if your content is generating any results? Do you have a brand new content marketing strategy in the works?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you are probably curious about how to create content your customers will love.

This is a great question that marketers often don't ask enough. Is it possible to create content your customers love reading, instead of just creating content to tick a box. They'll save it and even share it.

It is possible, we have good news.

You need these things to do it:

• Well-defined goals
• Deep understanding of your audience
• Alignment with your buyer journey
• High shareability and visuals
• Monitoring performance results
• Plan to use insights to improve your content

We'll be covering all the details in this article so you can create content that keeps customers coming back.

Quick Take-Aways

• Companies can use tools such as the SMART goal framework or buyer personas to help them set goals and understand their target market.

• To create relevant content for your customers, keyword research and SEO optimization are essential.

• Customers will receive the best content when they are following the buyer's journey.

• Engaging with visual content is exponentially more engaging than text-only content.

• You can easily share your content using social sharing buttons.

• To build more content that customers love, brands should evaluate their current content.

Great content is what you need

Your customers are using search engines to find information about your brand, before they actually contact you. 81% of consumers say that brand research begins online. 93% of online experiences start with search. Your content is often the first contact your customers have with your brand.

They might not love it. They'll most likely look elsewhere if they don't love it.

Digital marketing is also very crowded. It is not enough to create content to be noticed and to attract new customers. Content must be written well, designed well, high-value and targeted to the right audience. Your content should address the needs of your ideal customers.

This means that you must know how to create content that your audience enjoys. We'll show you how to get started right away.

How to create content that your customers love

Know your goals

You likely know your business goals, which is a good start. Do you know what your content goals are? Every company has different content goals. While there are common goals, such as higher Google rankings or more organic traffic, they should all be included on your content goals.

However, some goals might be more important than others for certain companies. For B2B companies, lead generation is a priority. Driving direct sales through your website is a top priority for a B2C eCommerce company. Brand awareness is a key goal for a startup.

It is important to understand what is most important for your company in order to ensure that your content aligns with these goals. The SMART goals framework can be used to set specific goals that will keep you accountable and help you drive results.

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Define your target audience

Who is the audience for which content you are creating? You won't be able to answer this question and most of your content will seem like a shot in dark. It won't be clear if it is relevant. There are many tried-and-true methods to identify your target audience and customer. Personas are the most popular and effective way to define your target customer or audience.

You can gain insight into the motivations, needs, and goals of your customer or buyer personas. If done well, they can help you create content that is highly relevant and valuable for your audience. This will ultimately increase your leads and sales.

Do keyword research

Are you confident in your ability to know the needs of your customers? This is a common trap for many brands. You can't know your customers well enough to be certain about their search needs without actually doing keyword research.

You'll be amazed at the results of keyword research related to your industry, company and customer. You'll likely find words and phrases that you already knew were there, but you might also discover surprises you didn't know about. You'll find surprises that will open up new opportunities for you to create content your customers will love.

Keyword research has never been easier. To find out which keywords are ranking well for you and to discover new ones that you can add to your strategy, I recommend using the SEMRush and Ahrefs tools.

To give you an idea of the functionality of SEMRush's keyword search tool, here's a quick demonstration:

Align content and the buyer journey

Understanding your buyer journey is a key part of a solid content marketing strategy. This alignment is crucial when it comes down to creating content that customers love.

This is why potential customers are seeking different information at every stage of their buyer journey. You risk making them unhappy or worse, causing them to turn to other brands for the information they require.

Your content should be aligned with your buyer journey to ensure that the right information reaches the right audience at exactly the right time. This not only makes users more likely love your content but also makes them more likely take the next step towards becoming a paying client.

This is a great example for buyer journey alignment and detailed content:

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Visualize it

Visual content can include images, videos, infographics, and any other visual content that enhances your content. It improves content engagement across all channels and is essential if you want your customers to love your content.

Let's see:

• Images get 94% more hits than articles without images
• Images receive 150% more retweets per tweet than posts with text only
• The average person will spend around 100 minutes per day watching video content this year.

The way that our brains function is also affected by visual content. Visual content accounts for 90% of all information sent to our brains.

img alt=”90% information sent to the brain is visually-based” class=”aligncenter” height=”425″ src=”https://marketinginsidergroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Visual-content-10.png” width=”570″/>

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Visuals don't have to be complicated to add to your content. Some projects, such as longer infographics, may require the assistance of a design team. You can find images and videos online from trusted sources or make your own using tools like Canva or your iPhone's camera.

Make it shareable

Content sharing is a joy for people. Online conversations are taking place about all topics and industries. Content is used to spark discussion and to add to the conversation. Engaging content is also a popular way to have fun and share it. Buzzfeed is an excellent example of how sharing fun and casual content can increase brand awareness and drive traffic. Their listicle articles have become a standard in internet culture.

Encourage sharing by first covering topics that interest them (but they already know this) and then making it easy for them to share. You can do this by using social sharing buttons in your blog posts or sharing your blog articles on social media.

Take what is working and build on it

Quick tip: You don't need to reinvent the wheel in order to create great content that your customers love. Instead, use Google Analytics to track your success, or your data-driven process to measure content performance, to find out what your customers love most.

You will be able to continue creating this type of content once you have learned. You can make more infographics if they love your infographics. It's time for more content on a topic or author that customers are responding to.

You can also do it the other way. You can identify what is working and what isn't by monitoring your performance and regularly evaluating your content metrics. You can then make the necessary adjustments in real time to ensure that your content strategy is always fresh and effective.

Great content can increase customer engagement.

It takes experience and time to create content that customers love. Marketing Insider Group's team of SEO experts and writers can provide you with customized, SEO-driven content every week that will deliver results.

To get started, check out our SEO Blog Writing Service or book a consultation to find out more.

A Google spreadsheet for content marketing planning is one of most efficient ways to keep your strategy on target.

There are many powerful technology tools available for content marketing. Google sheets is not to be overlooked. Google sheets is a collaborative, free and centralized place that allows you to have complete control over the way you create tracking systems and manage content.

You don't need to start over if Google sheets is part of your content management system. This article lists some of the most popular templates for SEO and content marketing.

Quick Take-Aways

• Strategist-oriented templates such as data dashboards or goal trackers will help you keep your content marketing efforts on track.

• Content calendars are useful for managing content publishing. You can use them for one channel, such as social media, or multiple channels at once.

• Google sheet templates are also useful for SEO-centric tasks like keyword research, following featured snippets and identifying content gaps.

10 Google Sheet Templates to Help with SEO and Content Marketing

Content Strategy

MIG's Content Strategy Dashboard

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Let me start with the tool Marketing Insider Group uses. This Google sheet template was created over time by me to address all the important elements of your content strategy. This template aims to consolidate all your strategic and operational initiatives in one place. This template includes the following sheets:

• SEO Audit: Find out where you rank in comparison to your competitors for the most important keywords.

• Metric Benchmarks: Track key KPIs in content marketing before and after content marketing efforts.

• Idea – Track article idea by keyword, category, or level of priority.

• Editorial calendar – Keep a detailed publishing schedule, which also includes keywords, CTAs and categories, as well as descriptions of content type.

• Analytics Dashboard Monthly tracking of key KPI metrics.

Growth Machine's Wiki Strategy Spreadsheet

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This template is great for goal tracking. It is a great way to hold your team accountable and keep your efforts focused by setting clear goals and tracking how they progress.

A good goal tracker can help you identify when strategies aren’t working, and when it’s time to pivot or do more of what’s working.

This template comes with three sheets.

• Goal Tracking: Set your conversion, sales and traffic goals monthly.
• Article Ideas – List ideas based keyword research using tools such as Ahrefs or SEMRush
• Track your guest posters to earn backlinks and increase visibility

Builtvisible's Content Strategy Discovery tool

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This tool uses data from the most important news and content sites around the globe to help you keep track of what's hot and to inspire your content niche. The template also includes three sheets.

• Ideas – Find the most popular content on your topic. This spreadsheet pulls content from Reddit and YouTube as well as sources such Google News, YouTube, Hacker News Yahoo Answers, Data.gov, Reddit, Reddit, Reddit, YouTube, Google News and Hacker News.

• Source and Place – Find out more about the most influential bloggers and content creators in your field. This information will allow you to make guest posts and other content partnerships.

• Trending – What is the most popular topic on the internet right now? This helps you to see how your content might connect with current events.

Content calendars

Hubspot Editorial Calendar

Source: Hubspot

Hubspot's editorial template for calendars is used by over 140,000 marketers. Although it is simple, this template covers all bases. It is useful for tracking deadlines and topics as well as authors, keywords and target audiences.

ClickMinded Editorial Content calendar

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ClickMinded's template is perfect for editorial calendaring. It is simple and straightforward, but it works well. It tracks author, topic, channels, keywords, deadlines, authors, and topics.

This template can be used separately from the larger content strategy templates.

Vertex 42 Content Calendar

Image Source: Vertex

The Vertex 42 content calendar template is an excellent option for collaborative teams involved in content creation and publication. It was created by the Excel and Google Sheet experts at Vertex 42. This template provides details about the project status, who is responsible, due dates, priority level, and deadlines.

This template could be the right one for you if content accountability is a top priority. Additional features include multiple calendar views, a hashtag organizer, and more.

Hootsuite Social Media Editorial Calendar

Hootsuite, a popular social media management software program, is a favorite among content marketers. This template is free for everyone to use to plan their social media posts. This template is especially helpful if you have a lot to post on multiple platforms.

Google Sheet tracks your activity by month and week. It also notes the title, author and deadline. This will help you keep your team accountable for posting on time. Hootsuite allows you to schedule your posts automatically so that nothing slips through the cracks.

SEO Strategy

SEO Monitoring Dashboard by Distilled

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The Distilled SEO monitoring dashboard template covers the most important metrics that you should be tracking. It includes a map of current rankings, rank changes over times, and page CTRs. It is useful because it combines your daily tracking data with long-term KPI metrics. This is the step-by-step, detailed guide to how it works.

Content Gap Finder

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Content gaps refer to keywords and topics for which your brand isn't ranking well. This Google Sheet Template can be used in conjunction with Google Search Console to identify content gaps and create new strategies to fill them. It uses Console to find keywords and queries that rank between 20 and 100+. The tool organizes them using CTR data to ensure you pursue the most lucrative opportunities.

Once you have identified the content gaps, you can take action to create more content, update old content, pursue long-tail keywords and refocus your strategy to close them.

Featured Snippet Opportunity Locator

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To quickly answer questions and provide quick answers, featured snippets are displayed at the top of SERPs. These snippets are especially popular for queries that include question words. They take up half the screen of users after they make a search. This is a great way to increase traffic and give you an edge over your competitors. Your SEO strategy should include a proactive approach to achieving featured snippet positions for search terms related to your brand.

Overthink's complete guide and Google Sheet template will walk you through the steps of finding featured snippet opportunities.

Take your Content Calendar Template to the next level

Content marketing can be a difficult task. You must be committed to creating great content. While templates can be helpful, sometimes they are not enough. If you can't do it all, a partner can help you keep your content flowing. We are here to help.

Our SEO Blog Writing Service can help you get more visitors to your website by providing quality content that is consistently published. Get in touch with me to schedule a consultation and receive a PDF copy of my books for free. Get started today to generate more leads and traffic for your business.

Hubspot claims that Content Marketing is 62% cheaper than traditional marketing. It still takes time to produce. Time is money, they say. Every piece of content you create, photograph, or film should be counted. You can increase your website traffic by using more efficient content distribution strategies.

Average content marketing generates nearly three times as many leads than traditional marketing, so it's not unreasonable to expect it to do even more. It can, in both quantity and quality.

Optimizing your content distribution strategies will not only increase your web traffic and therefore your leads, but it can also improve your quality leads. Your content will reach more people that need it by using targeted content distribution strategies.

You will have more visitors, and for most of them, qualified prospects. This is a game changer in any industry. Let's take a look at four of most successful content distribution strategies.

Here are some quick tips:

• To maximize your ROI, repurpose content
• For the best reach, target specific customer segments.
• Keep your customers in mind by providing them with relevant and authoritative content.
• Use your employees' enthusiasm and energy to share content that inspires trust within their networks.

Content Promotion vs. How to tell the difference between content promotion and content distribution

It's crucial to understand how and where you can promote the blog posts or infographics you have sitting on your desktop. You can gather the demographics and behavioral data that you need to reach your audience by conducting a systematic research on them.

Effective content promotion and distribution are key to a successful content marketing campaign. It is not about spending money on great content creators, producing valuable content and sharing it on social networks. A content marketing strategy that succeeds should prioritize the foundation for expanding your content's reach, exposure and visibility.

Sometimes, the terms content promotion or content distribution can be interchangeably used. Content marketers need to know the difference.

Content promotion refers to the act of making your content available on as many channels and platforms as possible in order for your target audience to find you. Simply put, content promotion is making your content accessible to the public.

Content distribution, on the other hand has more specific goals. Instead of sharing your content and hoping that everyone will engage, you distribute it to targeted communities and individuals where engagement is higher.

(Content Promotion Example).

Content distribution and content promotion are different because of the objectives. Content promotion involves sharing your content with the entire world. Content distribution focuses on targeting only the “high-potential” accounts to maximize conversion rates.

(Content Distribution Example).

Content promotion includes publishing content to your blog, optimizing the content for search engines and sharing it via various social media channels. Content distribution includes sending your content via email newsletters, outreach emails, and SMS messages.

Questions to ask to get content distribution right

You now know the difference between content distribution and promotion. Now you must ask these questions in order to decide where and how you can reach your audience.

What's your purpose in creating this piece of content?

Each piece of content needs to have a goal. Before any activities can begin, it is important to establish your goals.

Are you looking to get people to visit your online shop, even if they are just browsing? Or do you want them signing up for your newsletter to be notified about future discounts or store events?

Your content sharing strategies will be influenced by your goals. These include where you are promoting, when and how. No matter what your goal, avoid distractions and focus only on the activities that will help you achieve it.

Who would you like to see or read your content?

Identify your target market and understand why you are trying to reach them. Your target audience should be clearly defined. This information is essential to your overall content strategy. Your strategy will not be optimal for the right audience if you don't have a clear understanding of their needs.

Do you want to reach potential clients or existing customers? Are you hoping to reach millennials with your content? Do you hope their social sharing power will increase brand awareness? Are you trying to reach high-ranking executives and managers responsible for purchasing and business decision making?

You should either create buyer personas or take into consideration the psychographics and demographics of your target audience.

(Buyer Persona Example)

Demographic data

• Which is their gender and age?
• Where are they located?
• Are they married or single? Are they married?
• What are their jobs?
• How much do they earn?

Psychographic Data

• What do they think?
• What are their goals
• What are their biggest challenges and pain points?
• What are their likes and dislikes?

What content does your target audience consume?

Once you have a clear picture of your target audience, it is possible to determine their content consumption habits.

Do they spend more time on their smartphones or their desktop or laptop computers? Are they more drawn to short videos than long articles? What keywords are they using to search for content online?

Be present in the context of your audience and communicate with them using a language they can understand. You can determine how, when, where and why your audience consumes online content, and then plan your content promotion strategies and distribution strategies accordingly.

What time do you want your audience see your content?

Some content is timeless, while some are more time-sensitive. If you create a Christmas piece, your content must reach your audience before the holiday season. It's crucial to remember that time is critical when creating content such as this.

You can always refer to your buyer persona data again to determine the best way to reach your target audience in time for holiday rush.

12 Tips and Strategies to Improve Content Distribution

Now that you have answered all the relevant questions, the information is now clear. Now you can start to create and implement a content promotion and distribution strategy.

1. Perform a Situational Analysis

This is where the real work begins. Audit your content and all available channels. It is important to identify all platforms, software, and tools that you want to include. Analyze the channels that you have in place to promote and distribute your content.

If you have a blog, Facebook or Twitter page, find out how many subscribers and followers each channel has. Also, check if your audience interacts with your brand through that channel.

Do these channels and tools provide enough support to help you achieve your goals? Do you have the resources and manpower necessary to launch a large-scale promotional campaign across multiple channels?

If you don't have the budget, determine what you can afford and remove, modify, or add to existing channels. You should review your marketing budget to determine which content strategies are generating the most results.

2. Optimize your Content for Search Engines

SEO can help narrow down your audience. Long-tail keywords are those that people use to search for content. You can use tools such as Ahrefs Keywords Explorer and Semrush Keyword Magic to find keywords that have significant search volumes.

To narrow your search engine ranking and target the right keywords, you should only focus on one or two pillar keywords. Search engines will find your content easier if you focus on just one or two keywords.

It is important to include your keyword on every page. On-page SEO can make your content visible and easier to index and crawl by search engines.

3. Social Networks: Share Your Content

Some of the most popular social networks for content promotion are Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Post your content on social media channels that are most popular with your target audience.

You can reach your target audience by joining groups and communities. If you are creating content that is specifically targeted at mothers, it would be a smart idea to search for social media channels mothers use to find information. Are they more active on Facebook than they are on Pinterest?

You need to look at your buyer persona again to determine which channels are most relevant to your target audience.

You should link to your blog posts via your social media channels. These posts will most likely appear in the feeds of your followers. You can also repurpose content on channels that target your market.

Let's take, for instance, that you make boho chic women's jewelry. Your target market are millennial and Gen Z females.

You have just published a blog article on the legends and history surrounding this month's birthdaystone. You want to give that content more traction. Therefore, you need to reach people outside of your social media network.

What is your target market?

Most likely on these sites:

• Instagram: This site has a lot of visual pop and interesting photos. You can stage your jewelry by dressing up in period clothing. Learn more about the stone's legendary power and include the link in your blog post.

• BuzzFeed: This online magazine attracts half its readers between 18 and 34 years old. It features newsworthy, quirky stories that appeal to the majority of its audience. To make your blog post more provocative, you can rework it. A great place to start is “Were emeralds responsible for Cleopatra’s powers?” You could explain these to your audience, as many people still believe in gems' healing and spiritual powers. Make sure to include a disclaimer stating that you are not claiming these powers for your product.

• Pinterest: This site is a visual bulletin board that showcases one's favourite things. This site is popular with women and it is a great place for you to display your products. Make sure to link back to your blog post.

B2C companies are likely to have a target market that loves to browse the internet. It's crucial to find out where your target market is for B2C businesses. You need to promote your content to new and interested audiences, whether you are a B2C company demonstrating your widget on YouTube or a dealer using your blog post to explain why your Chevy needs oil changes.

You will need to reuse content in places that your target market frequents if you are a B2B business. You'll reach new businesses by providing content that discusses industry developments or that solves difficult problems for them.

You can reuse your content on platforms like LinkedIn, SlideShare (make sure you have professional-looking infographics), Forbes, Inc., and Huffington Post. Try to get your content onto regional B2B platforms if you are unable to access the national publications.

However, one word of caution. Be sure to publish your repurposed content only on the best quality website. If you don't, your prospects in B2B will think that your products or services aren’t of high quality.

Brent Barnhart, Sprout Social's founder, advises that you must nurture relationships online and offline regardless of whether you are targeting the B2B market or the B2C. We couldn't agree with you more.

Organic shares can increase your content reach exponentially. Through industry-related LinkedIn groups, forums and forums, you can expand your online network and reach potential customers in each sector. Meet with industry leaders in person. They'll be happy to share your content and help you solve their problems.

4. Semi-Automated Social: Unlock the Power of Semi-Automated Social

Automating your posts is a great way to stay efficient and not overwhelm when posting content to social media. However, it is important to adhere to automation etiquette. It is important not to appear robotic; you want your audience to believe there is someone behind this presence.

You have many options to automate your posting. These are great places to begin:

• Socedo allows you to find relevant leads on Twitter, and then nurture them with automated engagement.
• Social Jukebox allows users to create collections of social posts that link to their evergreen content. There are rules that allow you to repost them according to your schedule.
• You can grow your audience with Narrow on autopilot.

These tools allow you to monitor and analyze social media activity, so that you can decide what is most important for your brand.

To track conversations about your delivery methods and reveal your best leads, you can use social media management tools such as Tweetdeck or Hoot.

Keep an eye on social media activity in real-time. Keep your social media accounts active. Relying solely on automation can lead to serious consequences. To get the best results, you will need to experiment with different settings until you find the right balance between automation and manual engagement on social media.

5. Do not forget your employees

Your employees are one of the best ways to spread your content. Your employees are the best way to spread your content. Only a third of people trust brand messaging, and nearly 90% trust recommendations from friends.

Engaging employees at work and encouraging them to share content that will benefit their contacts is a great way to build trust in your products and services.

This is huge, regardless of whether you are primarily B2C- or B2B. This and other content distribution tips will help you increase your web traffic, which will lead to an increase in revenue.

6. Payed distribution channels are worth considering

Paid advertising can now be more targeted than ever. Retargeting ads can be used to give your content a second chance at reaching users who have either searched for your keywords, visited your site, or any other trigger.

You might think that you own a valuable piece of content, and that people shouldn't pay to see or read it. You're not paying to make people aware that it exists. It doesn't matter how amazing your content, if it isn't seen, it doesn't exist.

7. Send an email newsletter to current customers and subscribers

Email is a great way of building and maintaining relationships with existing customers and followers. It is also an extremely effective channel for content distribution.

If you have email subscribers, you can repackage content for email and inform your subscribers that new content is available on your blog.

Segment your email list to ensure that you only send content to those subscribers who want it. Personalizing your emails will help you build a relationship. Email marketing is an option to reach your target audience.

Send your blog posts to customers or subscribers that can use them in their day to help run their businesses more efficiently.

Don't stop there. These people are interested in your products and have become subscribers. Customers have shown an interest in your products and services by purchasing at least one product.

You can reward them with more content that will help them solve their biggest challenges. Include a link at the end of your email to download a whitepaper or e-book which will provide more detail about your blog post. You can also include a YouTube video they can bookmark and return to later.

If you don't have a goal, you shouldn't be distributing content to valuable subscribers and customers. You should ensure that your goal is aligned with your business goals and, more importantly, theirs.

Many companies send subscribers every piece they publish on their blogs. This is a mistake. Send only content that is relevant to your subscribers. You risk irritating them by sending irrelevant content to their inbox.

8. Get to know your sources about your content

You will most likely have cited references when creating content, particularly if it is an article or whitepaper.

Reach out to these people and tell them that your article featured their expert advice. This will encourage industry leaders to share and support your content marketing efforts.

9. Reach out to industry leaders

Influencer marketing can be a great way of distributing content. Influencers are known for their niche followers. You should research to find influencers who have audiences similar to your buyer persona. This is your chance to convince these influencers that they are your brand ambassadors, and help you reach your target market.

Influencer marketing is a great way to gain exposure to your target audience and build trust by associating your content or posts with trusted authorities.

10. Reach out to the Most Engaged

The people who are most interested in you are your most engaged customers. Based on the information you have gleaned from the tools, you can target those people who are sending signals of interest. These people can be converted into brand advocates, which will foster low-cost marketing with high returns.

Keep your audience engaged by putting forth your best effort. Provide valuable content consistently and make sure you use a variety of media formats to reach your audience. This includes videos, podcasts, and case studies.

You might also want to look into tools like Intercom that encourage onsite interactions. You can communicate directly with customers via this customer engagement app, whether they are on your website or in mobile apps. This application focuses on two-way communication. You can further nurture your leads by answering customers' questions in real-time.

It's important to remember when you interact with anonymous site visitors one-on-one, that they aren't ready to hear your sales pitch. Keep the conversations light-hearted and helpful. You can make your brand a leader in your industry and offer valuable advice. This will help you keep people coming back, ultimately leading to a sale.

11. Keep Nurturing Your Leads

Are you consistently creating great content and publishing it on your website? Although you are on the right path, your content marketing strategy must include plans to get relevant eyes on those pages.

Your lead generation efforts will depend on the quality of your content. It should be interesting, well-researched, and truly valuable. Your audience should feel empowered to overcome their problems and reach their business goals through the articles, whitepapers, webinars, podcasts, whitepapers, and blog posts you provide. Your content should build trust and make you a reliable and knowledgeable resource.

Even the most targeted content won't reach the right audience and will not help you move your leads through the sales funnel. B2B buyers often reach 57% of the purchase decision stage before reaching out to a person. It is imperative that you ensure that your content resonates with them at all stages of their buying journey.

Social media posting, triggered emails, and syndicating blog post are all solid ways to start showcasing your content to a large audience. Knowing the basics of ToFu, MoFu, and BoFu will help you decide which content to promote at each stage in the sales funnel. Your content distribution ROI can be greatly improved by learning as much as you can about your target audience.

78% of consumers trust personalized content. Therefore, it is important to gather intelligence about your target audience and ensure that only the best content is delivered to them.

12. Analyze your Results

Your practice must include measuring your marketing ROI. You are likely to mix up your content distribution using social media channels as well as other tactics such SEO, PPC Advertising, and email marketing. It is important to identify which practices are most effective in nurturing your leads. CMOs are feeling more pressure than ever to deliver tangible ROI. It is important that you gather statistics about your success.

Track your site visitors' referrals, engagement, and conversion. Google Analytics is the best onsite traffic analytics tool. It's free and covers everything, from reverse funnel visualizations to segmented browsing journeys to demographic data. Its findings can be used to monitor your site traffic and, more importantly, the behavior your referred visitors.

Another useful tool, Leadfeeder, which is integrated into your Google Analytics account can gather detailed information about individual website visitors. Is your content distribution strategy attracting the right leads? Leadfeeder gives you information about the companies that your audience members work at. It also provides insights into your audience's interests based on how they navigated through your site, and what products, features, or pieces they read.

HotJar is another excellent tool to illustrate user analytics. You can create heat maps to show where users spend the most time, giving you complete access to their behavior. HotJar will create screen recordings that allow you to see exactly what each visitor does on each page. These screen recordings provide insights into three key elements in user behavior: what brought a visitor to your site, what caused him to leave, as well as what persuaded him to take action.

Tracking and analysis are key to quickly identifying areas that need improvement in your content distribution strategy, and sales funnel.

A new distribution strategy is needed for new products

You need to make and distribute content to appeal to new customers if you have a product or service you are developing. Brody Dorland, DivvyHQ's director of marketing, says that you need to research their needs and pain points.

He points out that finding influencers in a new market can help you jumpstart your content marketing for your target market. You should pay an influencer to create content for your target market if you have the budget. If you are unable to pay an influencer to create content, then find a way for them to do so.

Dorland says that you must not only distribute the content on new channels but that you should also publish content that is targeted at that customer base every week, rather than adding them into one of your existing customer segments.

A personalized, customized content increases trust in new customers by a factor of 78%. Do your research on your buyer personas to ensure you have the right information to help you place smart content and target topics that will keep them moving through the sales funnel.

Strategically Distribute and Create Value

Content marketing plays an increasingly important role in the success of any business. It is crucial for community building, lead nurturing, customer engagement, and other aspects of customer satisfaction. It is important to recognize that quality content is just the beginning of a content marketing strategy. Content distribution is crucial. Use all tools available to you, from social media reach to customer analytics. Increased sales will be possible by gathering as much information as possible on your audience and speaking to them via every channel.

Our Content Builder Service can help you get more traffic to your website with high quality content that is consistently published. Contact me to set up a consultation and I will send you a PDF copy of my books. Get started today to generate more leads and traffic for your business.

While 82% of businesses will use content marketing in 2021 as part of their overall marketing strategy, only half of them feel their efforts have been successful. Why?

This problem could be attributed to brands focusing too much on creating new content and not assessing what they have published. A content audit is a way for brands to fix this problem.

A content audit can be like giving life to your entire content strategy. This helps you evaluate your current content and make improvements to improve its performance. You can also use the information to discover insights that will help guide your future strategy. Content audits answer important questions like:

• What content performs best? What can I do to optimize it?

• What content is performing poorly? What can I do to fix it?

• Are there any pages on my site that are no longer necessary or relevant?

• Which topics resonate most with my audience and what are their favorite?

• What are the gaps and new opportunities in my content?

A content audit can help you identify the root cause of your problems. Even if your content strategy is working, a content audit can help you improve it and make your future strategies more effective.

A content audit is a great idea at any time.

This post will walk you through the steps of performing a content audit. It will optimize your content and help to drive a future strategy that produces even greater results.

Let's get started.

Quick Take-Aways

• Content audits improve the performance of existing content, and allow data-informed strategies to create new content.

• A content audit starts with a comprehensive content inventory.

• Screaming Frog and SEMRush are content audit tools that can automate processes and give advanced insights.

• Each asset and each content category should be rated using a predetermined rating system.

• Without a clearly defined action plan, no content audit can be complete. This plan should include periodic progress evaluations.

Why content audits are important for brands

Let's start with the basics: What exactly is a content audit and how can you use it to improve your business? Why is it important to include them in your strategy?

Content audits are data-driven evaluations of all content on your site. To help you understand the performance of your content, they use qualitative KPIs (key Performance Indicators). These insights will help you make informed decisions about your content and future marketing activities. They make your content strategy more strategic by providing a comprehensive view of all your content libraries.

This is crucial. Why? You can increase traffic, leads and conversions by simply updating your content. HubSpot for instance, doubled leads generated by historical optimization and increased organic search views of old posts by 106%.

You run the risk of creating content that isn't helping you achieve your bigger goals, such as subscriptions, conversions and sales, if you don't conduct content audits.

It is not worth the risk. Although content audits require time and resources, the ROI they deliver when done correctly is well worth it.

This guide will help you complete a content audit.

Set goals

Setting goals for your content audit is an important step in any strategic initiative. Although most companies have the same goals, such as increasing organic traffic or generating new content ideas, brands will have different priorities depending on their brand and the time of their audit.

If your website isn’t performing well, then consolidating webpages and eliminating irrelevant content might be your top priority. Your top priority may be to identify the most relevant topics to your audience if you are launching a blog. You might want to keep identifying gaps and new opportunities if you have done content audits before.

You may also want to achieve the following goals during your content audit:

• Optimize SEO performance
• Convert more subscribers or increase conversion rates
• Increase content sharing
• Increase SERP rankings for specific topics
• Refresh existing/evergreen content
• Get a better understanding of all your content libraries

Whatever your goals may be, the first thing you should do is to identify which are most important for your brand. Prioritize them and then start. You won't be able to evaluate whether your content audit was successful if you don't establish goals.

Define metrics

The next step after defining your goals is to determine how you will measure them. This is usually done using the SMART goal approach.

Source: Image Source

You'll be more accountable if you set goals and define metrics. This will allow you to measure how effective your content audit was.

Let's take an example as an example. If my primary goal is to generate ideas for future content, then I could make it a SMART goal.

Original goal: To generate new ideas for future content

SMART goal: Create 10 blog titles under each of the 3 primary topics, to be published in the next 6 months.

Now I know exactly what my goal is, and how to determine if I have reached it.

Take stock of all your content

A content inventory is often confused with a content audit. Although taking inventory is only one aspect of an audit, it is the most important. Your content audit is incomplete if you don't have a complete picture of your content inventory.

Two steps are generally required to take inventory of your content:

Make a spreadsheet listing all content assets

This applies to all content. This includes webpages, blog articles and newsletters. Videos, ebooks, PDFs, and downloadable content. This can be done manually but it is worth looking into tools like Screaming Frog, which can crawl your site and collect content for you.

Here's an overview of how it works.

Once you have everything collected, you should put it all in one master spreadsheet. I recommend either an Excel Worksheet (or a Google Sheet). This will make it easy to add columns as you do your data analysis.

Your content can be categorized

Next, you need to categorize the content in a way that is valuable to your audience. You don't have to categorize your content by author name if it is all published under the same author. It's best to categorize blog content that has multiple authors so that you can determine who is doing well.

You may also wish to categorize content types (e.g. You might also want to categorize by content type (e.g. blog content, videos or webpages), so you can sort and analyse each category using their own data points (more details soon) and/or compare the performance metrics of each category.

Use content auditing tools

The content audit tools improve your audit by automating steps and using technology for insights that are difficult (or very time-consuming) to discover manually.

Screaming Frog is a useful tool for crawling websites and gathering content. We have already covered it. These are just three of the other tools I recommend.

SEMRush Content Audit Tool

The Content Audit Tool by SEMRush allows you to review your entire website and select sections. This tool can be linked to your Google Analytics account and allows you to update, merge or remove content.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is free. It provides tons of information about organic traffic and user demographics. I highly recommend you use Google Analytics immediately if you don't already.

Here are some tips to help you get started.

Website Grader

HubSpot's Website Grader grades your website based on key metrics like SEO, mobile optimization, and traffic. This is a great place for understanding how visitors navigate your website and why they are experiencing certain difficulties.

This is a detailed guide on how to use this tool.

Analyze your data

Your priorities will determine which data points to focus on. However, it is a good rule of thumb that you should analyze as many data points as possible. Although data analysis may seem daunting, it is essential for gaining real value from your audit.

Here are some tips to make it as easy as possible.

Each data point should be added to your master spreadsheet.

Each data point that you are analyzing should have its own column in your spreadsheet. These data points are worth considering:

• Date last updated
• Page views
• Average time per page
• Word count
• Social shares
• Comment
• Content condition (outdated, evergreen, etc)
• Image/visual count
• Mobile friendliness

Make sure you have a uniform rating system for each asset and assign a grade to it

There is no single way to do it, but consistency is the key.

You may not be able to rate all content categories the same. For example, blog posts may be given a high score for visual content that includes 3 or more visuals. Videos are visual content. They don't require that score. It may be difficult to keep your content consistent across categories, but you should try.

Common methods of grading content are to use a 1-5 scale, or assign A-F letter grades. The metrics that determine the grade can be set.

It takes time and dedication to grade each asset in each category. You can get insights in several ways:

• To give an asset an overall grade, average its scores across all data points.

• Compare each category's scores and average them. Ex: Are your blog posts better than your videos? Which topic is getting more traffic? Are some authors more successful than others?

• You can make individual notes and comments for each asset to ensure you don't forget them as you make updates

Your action plan

A simple way to incorporate action planning into your content audit is to assign a clear action for each asset in your spreadsheet.

Take, for example:

• Keep it as it is

• Remove – Incorrect or out of date. Website needs to be removed

• Update – Content that is outdated, poorly SEO'd, or for other reasons must be updated.

However, in most cases, planning action isn't that easy. It's important to assign actions to each asset. Marketing and management teams should also look at audit results to gain greater insight and develop future strategies. These strategies could include:

• Creating more content around a topic or type of content
• Ideas for new SEO titles
• To gain deeper insight into a specific topic, you might plan to do additional research.
• Add new activities to your marketing plan
• Larger changes to the website structure or UX

Keep your eyes open

It is important to keep your audit accountable long after it is completed. This will allow you to get the best value out of your content audit. A strategy meeting, like the one in the previous section, is a great way to start. It is a good idea also to assign deadlines and team members to each action item, and to schedule regular check-ins to evaluate your progress.

The most important thing is to include content audits in your content marketing strategy. Over time, Google ranking factors, SEO standards and marketing trends change. Statistics and data change. A content audit every year ensures that your content does not become outdated or go out of date. You can also get the best ROI possible on existing content.

Jumpstart your content strategy today

Marketing Insider Group's Content Builder Services includes a content audit. Our team also includes SEO writers and SEO experts who can provide you with optimized content ready to publish every week for a year or more. ).

You can save time and money by outsourcing your content creation and auditing. This will allow you to concentrate on your core business. To learn more about MIG and how it can help you reach your content marketing goals, schedule a consultation with me.