Content marketing plans often have a way of falling behind, don’t they?
It’s never that we as marketers, content managers, and business owners mean for it to happen. “Stuff” just comes up. And let’s be honest, there’s only so much time in a day.
Fortunately, kickstarting your content marketing with high-value content your audience and customers want is easier than you might think.
As we’re more than half-way through 2019 already, I thought I’d share 5 tips you can use to get your content program going again and increase the value of what you already have.
Tip #1: Your Customers Have Questions. Answer Them.
Answering questions is the fastest way to build an expansive content list. All you need to do is identify your customers’ most pressing questions and create content around them.
Here are a few ways you can quickly identify those questions.
– Have you introduced a new product and service this year? Do you have an FAQ for it?
– Do you have a sales team that engages directly with customers? If so, ask the team what they’ve been asked. Common questions or general questions make for excellent content. You might find you only need to answer the question, or you might find an opportunity for a new article, web page or social post! Question-answer content is great for several reasons: 1) it validates your sales teams’ answers, 2) it builds credibility with your audience, and 3) it tells your prospects that you understand what’s important to them.
– Customer service questions. Your customer service team gets questions every day. Commonly asked questions make for great website content. More importantly, customers who get quicker answers become happy customers. Online content that addresses customer service-related questions also present casual opportunities to introduce cross-sells and upsells.
– Do you have seasonal or end-of-year holiday business? Creating content around common questions concerning holiday shopping will give you a customer service edge when the holiday season arrives. This content also works 24 hours a day for you answering questions when consumers may be shopping at all hours of the day or night from the comfort of their homes.
Tip #2: Update Cornerstone Content.
Once you’ve answered questions, check out your most popular cornerstone content. This is the content that is “the core of your website. It consists of the best, most important articles on your site; the pages or posts you want to rank highest in the search engines” (as defined by Yoast).
Cornerstone content usually needs regular updates to stay current with technology, new products, industry evolution, or even simply your own brand positioning. Updating cornerstone content doesn’ t take long, which makes it a high-value effort where simple updates can lead to big results and boost the SEO value of your page. Plus, updates like this give you another reason to share it again with your audience.
Tip #3: Keyword Updates.
Shifts in user search terms (keywords) can cause stellar content to lose its SEO impact. By looking at current high-performing content and giving it a keyword refresh, you can keep its value, remain ranking competitive and again use the update as a way to reconnect with an audience.
Start with your best performing content. Tools like Google Trends, Soovle and Word Tracker are excellent (and free) ways to check your keywords and find new ones. If you have a paid keyword research tool, all the better as they often have advanced features that deliver greater audience insight.
After evaluating current keywords, take it one step further. Find keywords related to the content that would enhance the article. You can add them by expanding the detail of a paragraph or adding an extra section or two in a pre-existing piece. For example, an article about ‘Technical SEO’ should include content about page speed, redirects, and backlinks.
Tip #4: Add/Update Useful Links in Every Piece.
Forget for a moment that links are good for SEO.
Instead, think about the value of each link to your audience. Add links that make your reader’s life simpler. Connect to new content and share useful tools. An update is also a great time to introduce new and relevant products, offers, and services. It doesn’t have to be a hard push, just a “here’s something else we thought you might be interested in.”
Don’t worry too much whether you’re adding internal links or external links right now. Focus on the user experience. And of course, don’t overdo the links.
Tip #5: Get Everyone to Share.
Once you’ve updated your content, share it. Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Share it wherever your audience engages with you. If it’s relevant to the sales process and you have direct sales teams, make sure they are aware of it as a tool to share with prospects.
Ok, Here’s One More Bonus Tip…
Run a technical SEO audit. Sound technical SEO is to online content as having paper, a good printer and accurate mailing addresses are to physically published material. If you don’t have these, your audience won’t see your content.
Technical SEO lies underneath all your wonderful content, telling search engines what it is and guaranteeing your audience can interact with it. Elements like slow page speed, improper redirects, and broken links ruin the user experience. Even if you have awesome content, if users can’t find you or if a page simply loads slowly, well, that’s a proven killer.
Avoid these. Run a technical SEO audit. You’ve invested the time in your content, make sure your audience can find and engage with it.
It’s Content Marketing, Simplified for Speed
Following a content marketing plan is definitely the way to go. Still, stuff happens. Fortunately, you can restart it without a major plan.
While these 5 tips aren’t the only way to kickstart your content marketing, they do present some of the easiest, especially as they use the content you already have with content ideas coming from your customers.
If you have any questions or comments, feel free to message me.