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Content Marketing August 31, 2018  |  17032   2   |  20 min read  – Read later

Compilation Of The Best Content Marketing Techniques

Compilation Of The Best Content Marketing Techniques

Joydeep Bhattacharya
Author of the SEO Sandwitch Blog. He has over 8 years of experience in digital marketing
Businesses who blog regularly witness 126% more growth when compared to businesses who don't. This is an excellent proof that content marketing works awesomely well.

As marketers, we all know that content marketing is one of the most ROI friendly marketing techniques and this is the reason we convince our clients to increase their content marketing budget. True, but there are several challenges faced in content marketing.
According to a survey conducted by Optinmonster, 65% find it challenging to produce engaging content and 60% say they find it hard to produce content consistently. This means, more than half of the companies are still struggling to create good content and this is seriously impacting their sales.

For your content marketing strategy to succeed, you need to consistently produce good content that can rank well in the search engines.

I have read several articles that focus on just one technique of content marketing so I decided why not write a post that lists all the top content marketing techniques in one place. This will make it extremely for marketers like us to refer to a single article and implement the strategies mentioned therein to amazingly improve the ROI.

Ready? Let's start!

Viral Content Marketing

Who doesn't want to produce viral content? But, creating content that has the potential to go viral takes a lot of hard work. If you are ready to invest your time, money and effort then it is not that hard to produce super useful, relevant, viral content. Here are some of the attributes that viral content has in common:
  • Longer content having a minimum of 3000 words and maximum of 8000 words
  • Content that can create an emotional experience. Frac.tl did a study on the role of emotions in viral content and found that content that received more than 20,000 social shares are 8 times more likely to include an emotional hook when compared to campaigns that have less than 1000 shares. Frac.tl also discovered the top positive emotions response that helped the content go viral. These are amusement, interest, surprise, happiness, delight, pleasure, joy, hope, affection and excitement. Here are some examples of content that creates a viral loop:
  • Content includes an image and is perceived as trustworthy
  • One or several influencers share the content
  • Content promotion is not stopped after a week. Content is promoted even after weeks or months after it is written
  • Content follows the "SIPIA" characteristics meaning the content is Surprising, Intense, Positive, Interesting and Actionable
  • Content is easy to digest and has clear goal
  • Has great visuals like high-quality images and videos
  • Content is mobile friendly
  • Content that is written by a top influencer. A survey by Daniel Roth says that content written by influencers are 64 times more likely to receive comments and shares as compared to content written by not so known authors
  • Viral content has a reading comprehension level of a ninth-grader. Meaning, the content is easily readable. You can check the readability of your content on a tool like Readability.io
  • Content has power words in the title. Power words are words that instantly make the audience to feel something. Here is a list of the top power words that you can use in your campaigns

Adaptive Content Marketing

Master content marketer, Neil Patel describes adaptive content as "the content that supports meaningful interactions across different platforms. Think of it like water – whatever you pour it into, it takes the shape of that container.".
Adaptive content marketing strategy supports both multi-device and multi-users. The preparation of content is based on the 5 W's which are:
1
Who is your audience and what are their goals? Here, the understanding of the needs of your audience is of prime importance.
2
What type of content is best suited for your users? Based on A/B testing, you need to decide whether the users like text, video, audio, interactive or visual content.
3
When should your content adapt itself depending on the needs/location/preferences of your users?
4
Where do you want to display your content?
5
Why are you preparing this content? What are your KPIs and how will you track those?
Producing adaptive content helps to reduce content clutter and provides users with the exact information they are looking for. It reduces content shock and pushes towards omnichannel publishing leading to improved ROI across all channels.
Here are some ways to produce adaptive content:

  • Identify the needs of your audiences and produce content that provides value and solves their problems.
  • Make sure the content adapts itself irrespective of the channel used.
  • Create tailored content for the people based on their location, demographics, likes etc.
  • Leverage the power of native social selling by listing your products on the top marketplaces. You can use a multi-channel eCommerce solution like Shopify Plus to list your products natively over 20 channels.
  • Create content in a language that is best understood by the user.
  • Publish content natively like on LinkedIn Pulse.
  • Publish content on channels where you are more likely to receive a better response.

Skyscraper Content Marketing

Skyscraper content strategy comprises of the below 3 steps:
1
Find popular and link worthy content.
2
Study the content and produce something even better.
3
Reach out to the people who linked to the original content and tell them that there is even better content than the one they are linking to.
This strategy leads to direct traffic and links. Hence, skyscraper content marketing is one of the most successful content marketing strategies that every SEO should follow.

Brian Dean of Backlinko was able to increase search traffic by 110% in 14 days using the skyscraper content strategy.

You can find popular content pieces with the help of BuzzSumo content analyzer. Simply enter your money keyword and the tool will help to find content pieces with the maximum social shares and links.
Once, you have identified the content pieces with the help of BuzzSumo, then it's time to produce content that is better than the original and start emailing the prospects who can effectively link to them or share them.

Rich Content Marketing

Rich snippets content marketing refers to the kind of content marketing where the job of the marketer is to get their content ranked on top of the search results for question queries.

For example, when I searched with the query "how to fry a fish", Google returned a direct answer. The content was taken from the domain bhg.com. Here, bhg.com is dominating rich snippet results for this query and as a result witnessing a huge surge in traffic purely because of this rich listing.
As a content marketer, you can simply imagine the enormous amount of traffic you should be able to divert to your site if you succeed in ranking your site for question-based queries by way of rich content marketing.

Here are some strategies to follow to make your site get ranked on Google Featured Snippets:
  • Compile a list of questions that your direct audience will ask from Google. You can take the help of tools like Answer The Public and KWFinder. Here is a list of question-based keywords related to my target search query "how to bake a cake".
  • Once you have a list of target questions ready, start preparing the content that specifically answers the users' questions
  • The content should be high quality, entertaining, comprehensive and user focussed
  • Present the answer before the user by breaking it down into steps
  • Include, images, videos, screenshots and infographics in your content to make it stand apart from any of your competitor's content
  • Markup your content with properly structured data so that it helps the search engines to understand your content in a better manner.

Blogging

Although many marketers believe that blogging is different than content marketer, but in essence blogging is the lifeline of content marketing. Every business should have a blog and they must publish a certain number of blog posts each month. This content is then shared by the users across an array of social channels that ultimately leads to better branding and conversions. Hence, content marketing without blogging can't be thought of.

Here are some of the most effective ways to start powerful blogging:

  • Identify your audience and decide what to blog about
  • Create blog posts on long tail broad keywords that are easy to rank for
  • Choose a blogging platform like WordPress as it is extremely easy to start and offers more than 5000 themes to start your blog
  • Follow the below ACCD strategy for preparing and promoting your blog posts. You must create blog posts focused on keywords, add CTA's to create super useful and user-friendly landing pages, bring the visitors using email, SEO and social marketing and delight the users through smart content so that they convert from strangers to loyal customers.
  • Regularly measure your ROI from blogging and repurpose your old content to generate even more traffic
  • Write customer success stories in your blog because each story will be unique and will provide your potential customers with more info regarding your products and services

Infographic Marketing

Infographic is a mix of two words - "information" + "graphics". It is an excellent way to present information to your customers in a visually attractive manner. Infographics have all the capabilities to make your content go viral and offers you the opportunity to get additional coverage.

Here are some tips to create your own infographic:

  • Try to solve a problem or provide stats that changes the audience's beliefs and behaviors
  • Create content on trending topics as this will give you the maximum benefit. You can find trending topics with the help of tools like Google Trends, BuzzSumo and Reddit
  • Try creating content on evergreen topics as this can be useful for content repurposing
  • Add a bit of controversy to get the maximum engagement from your target audience
  • Use stats and numbers and present it in a visually compelling manner. People are highly interested in stats. Here are some data sources that you can use for the accurate creation of infographics
  • Include quotes from thought leaders and industry experts to generate instant publicity
  • Consider newsjacking to prepare something new as quickly as possible
  • Prepare a narrative that covers the entire user journey in a visually compelling manner so that the users feel enhanced
  • The design of the infographic should be clear so try to use the negative space intelligently
  • Determine the best color scheme for your infographic depending on your target audience. Here is a chart that displays the top colors on the basis of the gender
  • Use HTML embed code beneath your infographics to make it easier for your audience to display it on their web properties
  • Submit your infographics on the top infographic directories to gain additional visibility
  • Conduct blogger outreach and reach the top influencers in your target industry to maximize the impact of your infographic
  • Use relevant hashtags while sharing your infographic on social media

Video Marketing

Many marketers still don't use video in their content marketing strategy but it's time we start doing so. People remember 70% of what they see and hear meaning videos always have the upper hand when it comes to text or image-based content.
As per a survey, the internet video traffic will account for 80% of overall consumer internet traffic. Moreover, people want to see more videos from the brands they follow. Hubspot did a survey and found this to be true.
These stats are something that you certainly can't ignore!

Videos help achieve stronger consumer attention, higher engagement, better click-through rates and increased conversions.

Here are some of the best strategies to run a video marketing campaign:

  • Video marketing is expensive so plan your budget before you opt for it
  • Identify the audience pain points and offer a comprehensive solution in the video
  • Make sure you are well aware of the mediums you wish to optimize your videos for
  • Determine the topics and formats to include in your video
  • Take the help of a professional video creation agency because they can turn your boring video into an amazing one
  • Consistency is the key to video marketing so make sure each and every video follows your brand's message
  • Keep the video brief and plan a content that can be repurposed to achieve greater reach
  • Optimize your video and create proper descriptions, add attractive thumbnails, add relevant title and keywords and create captions
  • Double check everything before hitting the publish button
  • Run campaigns on Facebook and Twitter to promote your videos
  • Ask everyone you know to share your videos on their social channels
  • Pin your video to the top of your Twitter feed
  • Take a deeper look into the analytics and measure the important metrics like engagement rate, conversion rate, CTR, viewing time etc so that you know the ROI from your videos
  • Host your videos on LinkedIn, YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia and Instagram depending on your niche audience

Slideshare Marketing

Slideshare offers a great marketing opportunity where all you need to do is to upload and share your presentations online. Slideshare can help you to get traffic to your site, grow your followers, help in brand building and gain more email subscribers. The biggest advantage that Slideshare offers is that it has low competition meaning you can easily get your presentations ranked for the top searches and gain lots of relevant visitors to your site. Slideshare is an opportunity which the content marketers shouldn't ignore.

Here are some top strategies used by experts for slideshare marketing:

  • Navigation to the Explore section under Slideshare and check out the most popular slides under your target category. This will give you an idea about the type of content to prepare
  • Eugene Cheng was able to drive 400 leads each month from the below slide that was shared on Slideshare. What he did was simple! He used Seth Godin as a storyteller and generated instant attention of the audience. The entire presentation taught the audience how to fix bad powerpoint presentations using short but visually knowledgeable slides. The topic chosen was evergreen because almost everyone uses powerpoint when it comes to deliver a presentation. Hence, the slide still generates a lot of leads for the author. Amazing work Cheng!
  • Always remember that your presentations must evoke emotions
  • Use a clear structure for your slides and provide content that is easy to scan through
  • Keep the slides simple to read and use negative space to focus on the main message
  • Try adding YouTube videos in your slide to make your slides stand unique
  • Insert your site URL in the CTA and share your slides on the top social media sites.

Guest Posting

If you can think of just one content marketing strategy that is being used by a majority of SEO companies in existence today then it is guest posting.

The concept of guest posting is fairly simple. You contact webmasters and request them to allow you to become a contributor on their website. You then start submitting guest posts and gain links in return. Sounds simple! Right? But, in reality it is much tougher. Finding relevant and high-quality sites is not easy.

Here is how to find guest blogging sites in your target niche:

  • Search on Google with the query "Your Theme Keyword" + "Write For Us" or "Your Theme Keyword" + "Guest Post" or "Your Theme Keyword" + "Become a Contributor" etc. and prepare a list of all high-quality blogs after sorting them on the basis of DA (Domain Authority) and SEMrush traffic. This will give you an idea about the authority of the website
  • You can also find bloggers in your niche who are already doing guest posting and search on Google by their name, like "Guest post by" + "Author name". This way you can find additional opportunities that are highly relevant
  • Once you have prepared a good list of websites to start with then check out the blog section of individual sites and find out what sort of content they like to publish. Watch the tone and the language they follow and read their contributor guidelines. Once you become familiar with the guidelines then it's time to send outreach emails to the webmasters
  • Prepare an awesome outreach email by describing yourself, giving reasons why you should be allowed to blog, sharing samples of your previous writing so that the webmaster know you are a perfect fit to become the next guest blogger
  • Start sending 3-4 outreach emails daily and after a few days you will start receiving replies from the interested webmasters. In case you don't receive any replies even after 2 weeks then you can send a second email for a confirmation from the webmaster.
Doing content marketing might look easy but generating a good ROI from it is difficult. Your main aim of content marketing should be to generate actual sales and solidify your brand. The above content marketing strategies are the best to follow. Take your time to prepare yourself before you actually start with any of the above strategies. Happy content marketing!

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