82 percent of online marketers use content marketing. 48% of small organizations and 41% of large organizations have documented content strategies.

But not all content strategies are successful, are they?

If you are struggling to produce the desired results with your current content strategy, perhaps it is time to make some adjustments.

In this blog post, we share six tips that will help you improve your content strategy.

Let’s begin.

1. Think like a publisher

Content marketers have to wear a lot of hats: writing, editing, analytics, inbound lead generation, social media marketing, SEO, and digital marketing. 

Amidst all the chaos, it is easy to be overwhelmed and lose sight of one of your primary duties, i.e., to provide the content your audience is looking for. However, if you start thinking like a publisher, things may become easier.

Here are a few things that you should be doing as a publisher would:

  • Build a content team that:

    • You can rely on, and
    • Have the expertise to tackle the different areas of digital marketing, e.g., SEO, analytics, social, lead generation, etc.
  • Delegate responsibilities among your team members
  • Build a comprehensive content calendar that includes everything and stick to it.
  • Build workflows to ensure everything is predictable and easy to understand. From assigning tasks to setting up approval stages, the workflow should have everything.
  • Collaborate with other teams for insights and feedback. For example, talk to the Customer Support team to see if they are getting a lot of queries about a certain topic. See if you can create a Help Center support article to answer that query.

2. Build your content strategy upon SEO principles


No content strategy can succeed without a robust SEO foundation. All successful content strategies need to build upon SEO principles. That includes:

  • Conducting keyword research
  • Conducting detailed competitor analysis
  • Using keywords strategically
  • Creating content as per the searcher’s search intent

And more.

3. Tie everything with your sales funnel

Ultimately, the success of a content strategy will be measured by how much revenue it helps generate. Over 60 percent of marketers measure the success of their content strategy through sales. That’s why it is important that your content strategy completely ties everything with the business’s sales funnel.

The content strategy cannot succeed by working in isolation.

Seek answers to the following questions:

  • What type of content do you create?
  • What is the search intent for the content topics you pick? Is it informational, navigational, or commercial? 
  • Are you creating content for each phase of the sales funnel?
  • Is there a logical path for users to move through the sales funnel and convert?
  • At which stage of the sales funnel do you see the highest exit rate? And why?

Thinking more holistically would allow you to successfully tie in your content strategy with the overall marketing and business goals. And that is a crucial component of a self-sustainable and effective content strategy.

4. New vs. old content

The focus on a successful, long-term, and sustainable content strategy is often evergreen content. With evergreen content, you can establish a stream of passive search traffic. It can help you set up a foundation to build upon and, eventually, increase your organic traffic by gradually publishing more and more evergreen content.

However, sometimes, these evergreen content pieces drop out of search rankings. That’s known as content decay. Successful content marketers do not just create new content; they also minimize content decay.

To ensure that all the different content pieces you have created are firing on full cylinders and driving traffic, clicks, conversions, and revenue, you need to adopt a 3R policy. 

The 3 Rs are:

  1. Review
  2. Refresh
  3. Replace

Before you start updating or deleting the under-performing content, you should first start by reviewing the under-performing content pages. Find the answer to “why is the content not performing as well as anymore?”

Sometimes, the topic just isn’t relevant anymore. In that case, there isn’t much to do. You can use a tool like Google Trends to see if the topic is still relevant.

Other times, while the topic may still be relevant, the keywords that people use to search for that topic may have changed. In that case, you should revisit and refresh your web page accordingly. Change the text and include relevant keywords, so it starts ranking for relevant search queries.

Ultimately, you need a balance between creating new content and refreshing older pieces that are not performing as well as they used to. 

By minimizing content decay — while also targeting new keyword groups with new content pieces — you can grow your site’s organic content sustainably.

5. Leverage networking and connections


No man is an island.

You may often need help from other websites and content publishers to help you out. In the online content marketing world, that help usually comes in the form of backlinks, social media shoutouts, and referral traffic.

Guest blogging, in particular, is an excellent way to achieve all three of the aforementioned goals simultaneously. You create a high-quality piece of content that ties in with your overall business and marketing goals (e.g., mentions your products) and publish it on another website that has an audience group that you want to target.

Publishing a blog that points back to your website gets you backlinks. In addition to sending referral traffic to your site, backlinks also help with domain authority and search engine rankings of your website — both crucial factors in achieving long-term and sustainable organic success.

Last but not least, when the publishing website shares the content on its social channels, you may also get shoutouts. If they tag your Twitter handle, for instance, you may also get new followers and fans, which can increase the social media traction and traffic you usually get.

A successful content strategy seeks help from every corner and creates synergy by ensuring all the different pieces work in unison. Leveraging connections and networks can help you do just that.

6. Dive into analytics

It can take a while before content strategies start paying off with desired results. And sometimes, strategies may even fail.

You’d never know unless you closely monitor analytics and key metrics. That’s why diving into analytics, especially for content marketers, is an extremely crucial part of the puzzle.

Google Analytics is an excellent free tool that you can use to learn more about your website traffic visitors. You can see how you are getting traffic, who the visitors are, and how they engage with your website content once they land on your site.

Check out the following links if you want to learn more about Google Analytics and how to use the various reports and tools it offers.

Conclusion

Content strategies do demand a lot of work, but they are capable of producing steady streams of organic traffic, sales, and revenue with a little bit of effort.

Follow the tips mentioned in this article and improve your content strategy to produce. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us or share your thoughts in the comment section below.