A Practical Guide to Killer Marketing Content.

When it comes to Marketing Content in 2016 you need to don your ninja suit and hone your spy skills alongside a ruthless marketing nature. Simply hoping for the best isn’t good enough anymore. Marketing Content needs to be strategized, planned and reviewed to ensure it is consistently meeting your marketing goals.

Your Ninja Marketing Content Toolkit

There is a deluge of information on the net about what you need to remember and action when it comes to marketing content. Unfortunately it’s not all consistent. How do you know what really matters for you and your business? This handy guide collates all that information together in one, simple, easy-to-digest list. You can dive in and out, take each of the points in time and incorporate them in to your Marketing Content Strategy to ensure you’re keeping pace with what’s needed in 2016.

These tips are designed to be easily actionable, yet tactical ideas to improve your content, how to implement them in order to increase traffic and ultimately drive sales.

Weapon 1: Know Your Audience

It’s all too easy to dive in to producing content without taking the time to really evaluate and assess your audience.

The first step in your mission should be to determine who your audience are and what they are looking for. This enables you to generate ideas that meet their need. Do this and you take a giant leap off the starting block.

By identifying your audience rather than your customer, you aren’t shutting any doors before seeing what is behind them, and it enables you to align the right content to your brand.

This stage of our Practical Guide to Killer Marketing involves you focussing on the first stage of marketing: attracting and educating your target audience. Content Marketing success starts with Audience Relevance (link: http://www.slideshare.net/hschulze/b2b-content-marketing-report-40688285).

Weapon 2: Know Your Style

Once you’ve got a good idea of your target audience and what they like, the themes and subjects that will attract them, it’s all too easy to put fingers to the keyboard and bash something out. However, this needs to be thought through in the bigger picture of your marketing content.

What’s your brand’s style? Consistency is important here and applies not only to tone of your content (chatty, informal, professional, etc.) but also presentation and formatting of your articles.

All content needs to speak inherently of your brand’s style and personality without any direct reference.

Added to this, your content needs to be consistently readable. Small paragraphs, plenty of images and charts, white space and headings as well as consistently good grammar make your content readable.

It’s a visual world and with a dearth of information, your content needs to be visually attractive in order to keep a reader’s attention.

Weapon 3: Evergreen All The Way

‘Evergreen’ content is that which stands the test of time. Given that marketing content has a flywheel nature, whereby it takes a great effort to get things moving, but once momentum is underway it’s easier to maintain, it’s worth getting your content to last.

You are unlikely to see an immediate effect from new content, it can take months, so making sure it can stand the test of time is important. Therefore, whilst news and articles have a place, they also have a distinct shelf-life.

Aim for content that is informative, gives useful hints and tips and aims to answer complex questions.

Weapon 4: Recycle

To help with the above, don’t just go evergreen, go green and recycle some of your best content.

By re-using and re-purposing already existing high quality content you can get best bang for your buck. If something is popular see how you can spin it for another ride and make sure to share content more than once.

Go back and optimise older content, update links and enter new data.

Weapon 5: Plug the Data

The biggest new trend on the marketing content scene is the ability to use Data Analysis and Content Marketing Metrics to your advantage. Whilst you have to be careful not to assume that something isn’t working because it simply hasn’t had enough time, analytics enable you to see exactly what is working in order to best target your approach.

Gap Analysis (e.g. Google Analytics) can help you identify valuable search positions which you don’t currently occupy. Content Marketing Tools (e.g. Google’s Keyword Planner) can help you to assess competition and exactly what content is needed. Using analytics enables you to steer your marketing approach in the most worthwhile direction.

Weapon 6: Quality over Quantity

Ninja Training School is unrelenting when it comes to keeping the pace. Whilst it can seem you need to keep churning out the content in order to give search engines something to tangle in their web, it is far more important to focus on quality.

Over time your quantity will increase as old content proves to be valuable, but for the short-term quality is essential.

With an overwhelming amount of competition, your content needs to be original and stand out from the crowd. There is a vast amount of re-blogging tangling up the web. Content that uses your own voice, your own opinions and thoughts will be highly valuable content that stands out. You need to keep meeting and exceeding your own standards, so make sure it is sustainable.

Weapon 7: SEO

Search Engine Optimisation matters from a traffic point of view. Whilst there may be many myths and tales flooding us about SEO, they all agree: it matters.

Improving your search position is vital to the visibility of your business. For a free review of your SEO then Request a Free SEO Analyis from Xploited Media to get you started (link: https://www.xploited.media/request-a-free-seo-analysis/)

Weapon 8: Focus on the Social

Don’t forget the importance of Social Media when working on your marketing content.

Increasingly, Social Media is the super-charge for effective content. By using your Social Media channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to promote your content you get additional bang for your buck. People love one-on-one customer engagement over force-fed sales, so establish yourself as a reliable source of info on your social media channels, and you’ll gain respect and admiration.

At the end of Ninja training, you’re well on the way to killer marketing content. This topic is growing at an exponential rate and if you’re looking for more info, check out this useful Guide from Quicksprout (link: http://www.quicksprout.com/the-advanced-guide-to-content-marketing/). In the meantime, select your weapon of the moment and get cracking.