Shift Content to Meet Target Audience Needs
Getting started with a content marketing strategy can be overwhelming. It’s not easy to produce quality content on a regular basis. In addition to brainstorming topic ideas, conducting research, and writing/creating the content you also need to spend time promoting it once it’s been published and then monitoring its success. In the beginning, it may be hard to pin point exactly what kind of content is really going to hit home with target audience members. It’s OK to start with a broad approach. As long as content is relevant to your industry, it’s a great starting point. However, as time goes on you are going to want to create content that is more focused in order to attract the right people.
Yes, content marketing has SEO advantages. Publishing quality content that includes targeted keywords is a way to attract the search engine spiders and generate organic search traffic to interior pages of the site over time. Yet, most importantly, you should be writing for your readers. You want to create content that speaks to their needs, establishes your business as a trusted source of information, and improves the chances that a target audience member will convert when the time is right. The inbound links are just an added side benefit. Once you’ve been creating content on a regular basis, it’s important to see what content is working and what isn’t.
In order to do so, take a look at your Analytics for insights about how website visitors are interacting with your content. Analytics will tell you what your most viewed content is, what content is getting social shares, bounce rate of content, and where your traffic is coming from to your site.
This data can help guide your content strategy going forward in a few ways. First, take a look at the content that is getting viewed the most, getting lots of social shares, and has a low bounce rate. Since this content is obviously the “best” you will want to create content going forward that touches on similar topics. If a majority of your “best” posts are on a few topics, focus your content on those topics the majority of the time and write about other topics only infrequently.
Analytics can also improve your content strategy by telling you where visitors are coming from. A good content strategy includes publishing content on other sites in order to attract a wider audience and earn inbound links from relevant sites. If you see that a lot of traffic is coming from one site, like a blog that you submitted a guest post to, and you are barely getting anything from a video sharing site it makes sense to shift the focus away from video and more to guest blog posting on that site. After all, it’s likely that you have a limited amount of time to dedicate to content marketing. It’s important to make sure that you are spending your time as wisely as possible and only submitting content to sites that are worthwhile.
Of course, things can change. Keep tabs on your content in Analytics at least once a month. A topic that may have been “hot” a few months ago may cool down and you don’t want to continue to focus your efforts there. Also, keep an eye on the industry and current trends. Follow other industry thought leaders in social media to see what kinds of content they are sharing and what’s getting lots of social attention (comments, shares, Likes, etc.) You can give these topics your own spin, but remember to focus on evergreen content the majority of the time. Timely topics are OK to focus on when the need arises, but it’s the content that will be just as relevant in three months as it is today that will have the most benefits over the long term.
Target audience needs are always shifting, which means that your content strategy needs to shift as well.
Categorized in: Content Marketing
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