12 Effective Content Marketing Strategies in 2021

Digital marketing experts always hold content in high esteem. According to them, content is the lifeline of promoting a business. It is the driving force that increases the website traffic and even converts the leads.

As a business owner, you should always bear in mind that your content marketing strategy must be up-to-date to grow your business. Whether you are planning to get started with a catchy campaign or your existing strategy is not producing the maximum impact, it’s time to revisit your strategy.

 

Here’s a checklist to guide you in the right direction: 

1. Create Valuable & Varied Content

First thing first, content creation is key to content marketing. No matter how much effort you put into marketing your content, it will not appeal to your audience if it lacks value. Make sure to create original, informative, and user-engaging content.

Also, instead of only creating blog posts, it’s important to include different types of content in your list. For instance, infographic and video content are quite popular these days as they quickly engage people.

Here are different types of content to help you break the monotony:

• Podcast
• Live event 
• Video Infographics
• Blog
• Slide presentation
• Quiz
• News 
• Interview
• Case study 
• Educational article 
• White paper 
• Ebook
• Comparison 
• Checklist 
• Tutorial 
• Templates
  
  

You can also repurpose a content piece after it is published to appeal to a wider audience. For instance:

• Turn an article into a video or infographic
• Combine multiple short content pieces to create an eBook
  

And so on.

2. Brand Positioning

Defining your brand in the market is a crucial element in content marketing. It will help you to establish the right image of your brand through all the marketing efforts.

Find answers to the following questions when it comes to positioning your brand in the market:

• Who are your existing and potential consumers?
• How competitive is the landscape?
• How are your competitors presenting their brand and how can you do something different?
• What type of content your audience is engaging with the most? 
• What’s the USP of your brand? 
• What problems can your product or service solve? 
• What’s the vision and mission of your brand and how you can convey it to your customers?
  
  

3. Diversify Your Content Channels

This is an extension of the first point we mentioned above - diversify your medium to reach more audience. Use your website blog section or guest blogging sites to publish articles. Leverage social media platforms to share your content. Use YouTube to publish video content.

Remember, the more varied content types and channels you use, the higher goes your brand awareness and chances of conversions.

At the same time, you have to pay attention to the platforms where most of your audience is present. If most of the target customers are on Facebook, you need not focus more on Twitter.

If you are not sure which channel is ideal for your business, engaging digital marketing services is a good idea. The experts will analyze which channels are driving the most traffic and promote your site through the right platform.  

4. Pay Attention to Build Authority

Backlinking was one of the primary factors when it came to developing authority in the SEO landscape, but gradually, expertise is becoming even more important. Search engines are becoming smarter about semantics. Therefore, your content should be in-depth and justify the topic so as to satisfy the users’ queries and earn the search engines’ trust.

As you can understand, the sole rule of using keywords is steadily decreasing. Search engines are no more interested in rewarding your ability to create a piece of content with lots of keywords. Rather, it’s important to underline how the content fits in the context of your business and how much useful it is.

Take Google for example. It is putting more emphasis on the E-A-T (Expertise-Authority-Trust) guideline. Even though it is not a direct ranking factor, it includes a secondary signal that Google’s algorithm will determine how a content aligns with E-A-T.  

5. Audience Segmentation for Increasing Engagement

Smart marketers always focus on segmenting the audience. Not all of your audience has the same intention. Your content cannot suit everyone as people are at different phases of the conversion cycle. For instance, a content designed to create awareness among the new customers is completely wasted on your existing customers. Repeated awareness campaigns may even irritate the existing customers.

Also, if your business spans across B2B and B2C industry, you need to create distinct strategies for each industry type. While the B2B audience is more familiar with technical jargons, B2C customers are not. Do you see how it will impact your copy?

Segmenting the target audience is a challenging task for a blog or website. Instead, you can use it in your email autoresponder or Facebook ad targeting.
Quick fact: 39% of the email marketers who segment their email lists have reported seeing better open rates (source: Emarketer).

6. Content Auditing

There are millions of content available on the web for your audience to click on. In such a crowded landscape, creating content without any understanding of what will work is a waste of resource and time.

Take note of what kind of content has attracted your audience, which content has led to more queries or conversion, whether any content needs an update, and so on.

However, it’s not enough to analyze the data from your pre-published content. You should also pay attention to what’s trending these days. You can use Google Trends to get an insight into the demand for your topic. Simply type the keyword or topic in the search box to know how many searches it has received within a specific time period.

7. Include CTA in Your Marketing Message

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.”

We cannot agree more with Tom Fishburne! However, we should also mention the importance of call-to-action in your marketing message. You need not be too pushy but make sure that the users get a clear direction of what to do next. Do you want them to shop a product from you, check out a new service that you have started offering, subscribe to your newsletter, or do something else? Whatever your goal is, it’s better to add a CTA to direct the audience to the right track.

Remember, a marketing message with too many CTAs may irritate the visitors. Your copy should be compelling enough to trigger their attention and the CTA should encourage them to take the step. Bringing a combination of both in each campaign may not be easy if you are not an expert in the field. In such a scenario, let the experts take care of it while you focus on your business. Yes, we are talking about investing in content marketing services. The learned professionals will create and publish quality content that can boost conversions.

8. Increase Your Relevance for Local Audience

For small businesses or businesses with a local audience, it’s important to create some dedicated copies to drive relevance. As you may already know, local SEO is becoming a prominent element in digital marketing and it’s high time to register and optimize your business presence in Google My Business listing. If you are not aware of the benefits of local SEO, take a look at the linked blog.

Depending on the type of your business, create content that appeals to your local audience. These may include writing a blog about a specific issue in your locality and how your business can help, a social media marketing copy about a discount offer running in your physical store, and so on.

9. Personalized Email Marketing Campaign

Much have you heard about automated email marketing campaigns. 2021 brings a revolution with personalized email marketing.

Craft your email by segmenting your audience, include the recipients’ name, mention a product that may appeal to them based on the products they have browsed in your website, and so on. It has the potential to increase the chances of opening the email, checking out your offerings, and even converting.

10. Prepare for Voice Search & Chatbot

Optimizing for voice search is consistently in the marketers’ mind since 2019. Make sure to optimize your content with long-tail keywords for voice search. WPBeginner has witnessed a lot of featured snippets and an almost 37% increase in website traffic by optimizing content for voice searches.

The chatbot is another tool to include in your content marketing strategy. It has the potential to convert visitors into leads by answering common queries.

11. Determine a Budget

Once you get into content marketing, you may get overwhelmed with numerous practices. that’s why it’s important to set a budget beforehand. Find answers to these questions:

• Do you have to purchase a tool? For instance, graphic design software like Adobe Photoshop, keyword research tool like Ahrefs, etc.
• Do you need to pay for an ad space to run paid campaigns?
• Do you need to engage a professional content marketing service?
  

12. Track Your KPIs

Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) and tracking these regularly will help you to understand whether your content marketing efforts are sprouting the results or not.

Here’s a list of some goals and related KPIs. Check these out

Goal	KPI
Brand Awareness	Website traffic, social media followers, sign-ups, subscription, mentions
Brand Loyalty	Returning customers, product reviews, referrals, recommendation, mentions
Conversions	Conversion rate, subscribers, shopping cart abandonment rate, bounce rate
Revenue	Sales
Customer engagement	Likes, shares, backlinks, followers, mentions
Strategic partners	New partnerships, backlinks

Closing Thoughts

An effective content marketing is one that encourages your target audience to interact with you and increase conversions. We hope that our handpicked strategies have made you understand how to get started.

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comment box below.