In this digital era, businesses are moving towards content marketing. However, due to the trend of people toward content marketing, the competition in this field is getting stronger daily.
Considering the growing competition in content marketing, now, if you want to survive in this field, you must adhere to some specific rules. And that’s what we’ll cover in this blog post.
Here, we’ll share a comprehensive list of dos and don’ts that every content marketer must follow to succeed in 2023. But first, we’ll talk about the things included in content marketing. So, let’s begin this discussion.
What Does Content Marketing Include?
The term “content marketing” involves the creation, promotion, and distribution of content. The content can be in the form of blog posts, case studies, infographics, videos, webinars, white papers, website content, etc. These content types will be handy in engaging the target audience, eventually leading to lead generation and building loyalty.
Dos of Content Marketing
Now that you’ve understood the things that fall under content marketing, it’s time to discuss the rules of this field. So, here is a complete list of dos that every content marketer must adhere to:
Develop and Document a Content Strategy
Content strategy is a plan for creating, curating, and distributing content. Developing this strategy is essential in content marketing for the following reasons:
- It helps create compelling content, which is essential to drive engagement and interest in the target audience.
- It ensures that the created content meets the business’s overall goals.
- It ensures that the content created is search engine-optimized.
- It makes sure that the created content is effectively distributed to multiple channels.
- It ensures that the success of the content is tracked and measured.
Considering the above reasons, it is clear that developing an effective content marketing strategy is a significant success factor in this field. But besides developing a content strategy, it’s also essential to document it. This way, you can quickly determine the topics and types of content that work best for your business.
Identify Your Audience
Content strategy is a plan for creating, curating, and distributing content. Developing this strategy is essential in content marketing for the following reasons:
- It helps create compelling content, which is essential to drive engagement and interest in the target audience.
- It ensures that the created content meets the business’s overall goals.
- It ensures that the content created is search engine-optimized.
- It makes sure that the created content is effectively distributed to multiple channels.
- It ensures that the success of the content is tracked and measured.
Considering the above reasons, it is clear that developing an effective content marketing strategy is a significant success factor in this field. But besides developing a content strategy, it’s also essential to document it. This way, you can quickly determine the topics and types of content that work best for your business.
Identify Your Audience
Identification of the target audience is another crucial step in the journey of being a successful content marketer. This step is vital because it will help you create and distribute content according to the wants and needs of your audience.
Content created with a specific audience in mind will be more likely to be engaged with and shared. So, creating content tailored for a particular audience will increase conversions and ROI (Return Of Investment). And both these things are crucial for the success of a content marketing campaign.
Create Content Around the Interest and Values of Your Audience
A successful content marketing campaign revolves around its target customers. That’s because most people use the internet to find solutions to their problems. And if a marketer can solve the target customers’ problems, he will more likely be successful in content marketing than others. However, let’s elaborate on this more through an example.
Let’s say you are looking for a MacBook instead of a Windows laptop. In such a situation, you will prioritize Apple-centric stores instead of others because they have the solution to your problem. That is why content marketers should create content that revolves around the needs and interests of their target audience.
Quality Over Quantity
As we’ve already mentioned, content marketing is about helping your audience by informing or providing them with solutions. But only high-quality content will be able to achieve this purpose. Therefore, content creators should focus on investing in the quality of content. However, let’s talk about this more through an example.
Suppose you create ten mediocre-quality blog posts in one month to achieve your goal instead of helping your audience. Such content will be less engaging to your audience, so the chances of its conversion will be slim to none.
On the other hand, if you set some realistic goals for yourself and prepare only 2-3 quality blog posts in one month, your content’s engagement will automatically increase. That is why it’s necessary to focus on quality over quantity to succeed in content marketing.
Vary the Type of Content
Monotony gives rise to boredom. And boredom of audiences is a killer for content marketing campaigns. Therefore, keeping your target audience engaged is one of the essential factors for the success of a content marketing campaign. And one of the ways to keep the target audience engaged is to use a variety of content types. However, let’s elaborate on this more through an example.
For instance, readers can quickly get bored while reading an all-textual post. Therefore, to keep the readers’ interest, you can appropriately use infographics, GIFs, and pictures (like we’ve done here). In fact, you can even use meme marketing to keep the audiences engaged in your content. Similarly, if creating videos is your primary content type, you can use relevant memes to keep the audience engaged with a lengthy video.
Thus, that’s how you can vary the type of content, which is a crucial step to becoming a successful content marketer.
Make Your Content More Readable
The quality of the content itself is another crucial success factor of an effective content marketing campaign. Therefore, as we’ve mentioned earlier, every content creator should prioritize investing in the quality of content. However, let’s understand this from the perspective of textual content.
Suppose the content of a blog post or website is jump-bled or the writer has used fancy vocabulary. In that case, such content will be less engaging to readers. That’s because easy-to-read wording is the key to writing content for a website or blog post.
Hence, content writers should write high-quality content by using simple words.
However, if you need help with appropriately using easy-to-read wording in your content, you can try paraphrasing. This can be done either by yourself or by using an AI paraphrasing tool by Rephrase.info as it paraphrases text accurately. We have entered a sample sentence into the tool and see how the tool rephrases it:
The tool has accurately rephrased the sentence by changing words and phrases with simple and easy words. Apart from paraphrasing, you can also divide lengthy content into different portions with the help of subheadings. And inside each subheading, use bullet points to explain complex information easily. Doing so will also help in writing a reader-friendly piece of content.
Provide Factual Information
People like facts, which is why they appreciate content containing factual information. So, you must include factual information in your content.
Including factual information has a lot of benefits. For instance, it shows that the content creator has conducted extensive research, which will eventually build trust with the audience. Similarly, before including factual information, creators make sure that the information is up-to-date. So, up-to-date factual information is an indication of up-to-date content.
All of this will help you develop as an industry leader, which is the goal of every content marketer.
Use Social Media to Distribute Your Content
According to a study, people’s average time on social media has increased from 90 minutes (in 2012) to 147 (in 2022). This number will keep rising because businesses are now prioritizing social media in this digital era. Therefore, you should do the same.
For instance, when you write a blog post, you can share it on social media to bring traffic to your primary channel via social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, or Pinterest). But this technique will only be helpful if you have used the correct way of finding your target audience.
Similarly, if your primary content type is video, you can crop the intriguing sections from it and post it as a reel on Instagram or Facebook. This technique is another modern approach to growing your audience in this digital era.
Make Sharing Easy
Sharing your content over social networks is the most obvious way of distributing content through social media. But there is another way to increase the social media reach of your content. And that is by making sharing easier for your audience.
For instance, you can integrate the functionality of social media buttons on your platform. This way, when people like your content, they can easily share it by clicking on any available social network sharing options.
However, people will only share your content on social media if they like it. Therefore, you must invest in content quality to increase the likelihood of getting more social shares.
Connect With Leaders and Experts in Your Industry
According to a study, networking increases business opportunities by 70%. So, to be successful in content marketing, it’s essential to grow your network. And the best way to grow your network is to connect with industry experts and leaders.
Connecting with industry leaders and experts will provide valuable insights and information about current trends. And information on current trends will help you stay up-to-date, which is another crucial success factor in content marketing. Besides, connecting with industry leaders can open new doors for businesses.
Thus, connecting with industry experts and leaders is essential for the success of a content marketing campaign.
Don’ts of Content Marketing
Now that we’ve discussed the best practices for content marketing, it’s time to talk about what you mustn’t do to become a successful content marketer. So, here is a complete list of things you must not do in content marketing:
Skimp on Your Platform’s Design
Undoubtedly, content is king in content marketing. But you shouldn’t underestimate the power of an eye-catching interface. Therefore, besides investing in content quality, you should also invest in the sleek design of your platform.
A sleek and catchy design will make your platform more appealing to the audience, as it’s human nature to get attracted by eye-catchy UIs. It can even lead to more conversions and avoid the lack of trust that could arrive due to poor design choices.
Here is an example of a website with an eye-catching design:
Rush Through Establishing Goals and Deadlines
One of the biggest mistakes content marketers need to improve is setting unrealistic goals and deadlines. This mistake increases the risk of making errors and getting ineffective results, eventually leading to disappointment. And disappointment is one of the primary reasons for the failures of beginner content marketers.
Therefore, while setting objectives or deadlines, content marketers mustn’t rush through. Instead, they should take time and properly plan out everything. Doing so will increase the likelihood of getting effective results.
Stuff Your Content with Keywords
There was a time when SEO was all about putting-in keywords in the content. But now, that’s not the case.
Now, the game of SEO has changed a lot. Therefore, if you stuff your content with the unnatural placement of keywords, search engines will penalize your content. That’s because search engines have become advanced enough to understand the human language, courtesy of Natural Language Processing (NLP).
Thus, content creators should focus on content quality and the natural placement of keywords.
Go for Hard Sell
Undoubtedly, every content marketer aims to drive sales. But as we’ve already mentioned, people search the internet to find the solutions to their problems. So, if a content marketer directly starts promoting his products or services instead of providing value or information to audiences, people will never return to his platform.
That is why content marketers should focus on providing information and entertaining their audiences instead of becoming overly promotional. This approach will prove helpful in building a relationship of trust with the target audience.
Forget a CTA or Leave Dead Ends
Undoubtedly, you want to help or entertain your audience through your content. But that’s not the end goal of a content marketer. Generating leads and conversions is the end goal of every content marketer. And including CTAs (Call To Action) is one of the easiest ways to generate leads in content marketing. So, you must include it.
For instance, with a CTA, you can ask your readers to read more of your content, purchase your product or service and join your mailing list. And here are some examples of a CTA:
Mimic Your Competitors and Plagiarize Work
Undoubtedly, keeping an eye on your counterparts is essential in content marketing. But while keeping an eye on competitors, some content marketers start mimicking them. Doing so can ruin the entire content marketing campaign because people appreciate uniqueness.
Thus, content marketers should focus on unique content production instead of mimicking or plagiarizing their competitors.
Act As if You Have All the Answers
No one knows everything. Therefore, content marketers should not act like they know everything despite being industry experts or leaders. Instead, they should ask for feedback after providing their expert’s opinion.
For instance, content creators can ask for feedback by writing or saying, ‘comment your thoughts on this.’ And if a content creator promises to reply to comments, he must do so. Otherwise, the audience will not engage with the content the next time.
Expect Short-Term Results
Content marketing is one of those fields that test your patience. Therefore, if you are new to this field, do not expect short-term results.
Generally, a content marketing campaign starts bringing results around the six-month mark. But this period can vary from the content type, audience size, and campaign goals.
Turn a Blind Eye to Your Published Content
Content marketers often think their job is done once they publish the content. Therefore, they forget the published content.
However, content marketers need to realize that the published content is on the internet to help or entertain people. And since these are the times of evolution, changes can come quickly. Therefore, it is essential for content marketers to keep an eye on published content and update it if needed.
Conclusion
Like any other field, content marketing has a set of specific rules and regulations. Those rules will help you create compelling, high-quality content, which will further prove handy in increasing engagement with your target audience. So, every marketer must follow those rules to increase the likelihood of getting successful in this field.
But with every passing year, the dos and don’ts of content marketing are changing. To cater to this, we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of the latest rules and regulations of content marketing. So, please read and follow them to increase the likelihood of becoming a successful content marketer in 2023.
