Content Marketing Strategies to Prevail in 2019

In order to compete in the digital world, it is important for companies to implement a well-crafted content marketing strategy. 

Many marketers often consider content as a tool to rank higher but in reality it communicates a message to your target audience.  Creating content is not a difficult job but to promote engagement and drive profitable consumer action from it, is difficult. No matter how creative and popular your content is, it will ultimately be judged by the impact it made on your ROI.  

To boost the value of your business, you need to rethink and redesign your content marketing strategies.  To help you out in this regard, here are some of the tactics or plans that will make your content “king” again in 2019:

Create a Detailed Buyer’s Persona (with their content needs and preferences)

A comprehensive representation of your target audience based on their demographics, needs, irritants, psychographics, and other behavior patterns is very important.  After you gain insight into your customers, you can engage them with a more effective website experience (including content). 

Keeping a close eye on the buyer’s journey, mapping  important touch points and selecting a preferred communication channel, all comes under content strategy. You can further optimize your content (messages, offers, and call to action), especially for your target audience to gain a competitive advantage and attract better quality leads.

Personalization and Interactive Content for Effective Engagement 

To grow brand awareness and customer loyalty, it’s important for marketers to come up with innovative ways to reach and engage with customers.  With the maturation of marketing tactics in the last few years, many marketers across the globe are implementing innovative and interactive tactics to interact with customers more personally. These tactics come under interactive content strategy. 

Marketers are creating a two-way dialogue- which increases personalized and customer-focused experience from the initial to the final point of the buyer’s journey.

How personalized and interactive content promotes effective engagement:

1. Users can find more relevant data in interactive content.
2. Increases brand loyalty.
3. Provokes users to share their personal information like email which increases the chance of a successful lead.
4. Makes customers more receptive to buying.

Develop Content Marketing Metrics and KPIs 

KPIs help to measure content marketing campaign performance which helps in improving future strategies and developing new tactics.  

Following are two ways to develop effective content marketing metrics and KPIs:

1. Identify your content marketing goals.
2. Make connections between on-site and off-site metrics.

Some important KPIs you should know:

• Reach (unique visits and geography)
• Traffic volume
• Engagement (heat maps and click patterns)
• Comments
• Social Sharing
• Content Effectiveness
• Resolving Customer needs

Influencer Marketing

In a world that is saturated by advertisement, it’s very difficult for consumers to trust the claims made by marketers.  This cynicism is often eroded by influencer marketing. 

Influencer marketers have already earned the trust of a large section of your relevant audience (whom you are targeting). When they amplify your voice, your message naturally becomes more receptive to sharing and liking.  

How an influencer has an impact on your business:

• Influencers can allow you to guest post on their website.
• They can write a blog about you and your business.
• They can share information about your business in their social media circle.

To ensure a successful influencer marketing campaign, the following steps should be taken:  

• Set a goal.
• Find the relevant influencers.
• Plan an effective influential marketing campaign.

Impact of Artificial Intelligence

AI plays an important role in the field of content marketing.  It helps marketers to examine user data and makes the process more effective during a time of massive content overload. 

How can AI help Marketers?

Content Creation and Planning

The world famous news website, Washington Post has a robot named Heliograf which creates hundreds of articles on its website.  

The Associated Press and Fox also take full advantage of AI to generate content. 

AI, not only helps in creating content but also helps in planning content by examining and evaluating what customers are after and what their future needs could be? 

Chatbot (an artificial intelligence) mimics conversations with users on various social media channels. With the help of machine learning, Chatbot learns from every conversation and streamlines the process of customer support. 

Take Advantage of Micro Moments

Micro-moments help marketers to establish brand loyalty, nurture conversions and strengthen customer relationships.  To leverage micro-moments, you have to be in the right place, at the right time, and with the right type of content. 

Following are some of the strategies which help you to cash in micro-moments:

• Focus on the visual content.
• List your business locally
• Opt for an integrated approach
• Provide solutions 

Content Cluster

Content Cluster helps Google to understand the relationship between different pages and pieces of your content.  On the basis of it, Google determines your authority on the topic overall. 

How to create a Content Cluster?

There are three steps in creating a content cluster that will bring value to your business:

1. SEO Keyword Research: You can only create relevant and google friendly content if you add keywords that have high search volume. You can conduct keyword research through tools such as keywordtool.io and Moz keyword difficulty tool.
2. Create Article Topics: It’s very important to come up with the core article topics in the cluster. Also, the title of the topic should have the long-tail keyword in it. For example: if you are creating an article topic around the keyword: how to grow muscles fast, your title could be “The ultimate guide on how to grow muscles fast”.
3. Write a high-quality long-form article and do internal linking: The average length of the article should be between 700-2000 words. Also, you should link web pages through anchor text.

Benefits of a Content Cluster

1. Builds Authority
2. Improves Search Results
3. Grows Revenue

Conclusion

In content marketing, consistency in implementing best practices is the road to long-term success.   Effective content marketing strategies can help you build customer relationships by providing them the information that they are looking for. It draws traffic to your website by boosting your performance on search engine pages and help visitors to make an educated purchasing decision. Obviously, creating a rewarding content marketing strategy is not easy, but if done well, it will certainly pay off.