8 Content Marketing Tips That Will Make Your Business Stand Out

When it comes to B2B marketing, content will always be king.  That’s for two reasons. First, it is essential to turn your brand into a useful resource for your audience, especially prospects. Next, high-quality content is the cornerstone of search engine optimization. Notice, I said “high-quality” content. That doesn’t mean every asset needs to be a masterpiece, but each should be well optimized for people and Google. Here are seven tips that are born from hard work, experience, and industry knowledge.

1. Give People “Reason”

Your website and your content has to be useful. Google itself is always harping on about how “useful” content is ranked the highest but being useful only scratches the surface of your content. Your content needs to give people a reason to consume it, even if there is not a direct call to action.

Useful content is not a list of why someone should buy your product. Useful content is about the issues and challenges your audience faces. By providing information that is helpful, even if the visitor doesn’t immediately become a customer, you begin to develop trust and create a connection with your brand.

2. Call Out What Are You Offering That Nobody Else Can?

If you don’t have competitors, you don’t have a market, so it’s likely that someone else is out there with similar messages for your audience. Content marketing gives you the opportunity to highlight what makes your brand different. If everyone is out there saying “x” successful marketers will say “x + y” or better yet, “z.” Look for ways to sing off-key and bring more attention to your brand.

3. Never Underestimate the Power of a Headline

A top-notch headline is the way to get your content read and shared. It should be direct, accurate, and compelling to your readers. You should spend almost as much time crafting the headline as you do creating the content.

Of course, you don’t want to go over the top with spammy headlines or promise something that the content doesn’t deliver. Internet users are sick of the “You won’t believe this…” headlines and the “TED speech breaks the internet…” nonsense.

4. Don’t forget about technical SEO

There’s no sense in creating great content with outstanding headlines if no one can find it. If I had a dollar for every book or article written about on-page search engine optimization, I could buy a small island, but it doesn’t have to be overly complicated. To check your technical SEO strategy just check every post or other asset and ask:

• Does the content have a theme that ties to a keyword? (This does not mean stuffing your content with repetitive keywords.)
• Does it have a meta description?
• Is there an H1, and one or more H2 tags?
• Do the images have descriptive alt text?
• Are there relevant internal and external links? (No more than one link for every 100 words.)

5. Throw in an Infographic and a Listicle from Time to Time

Infographics were very popular at one time because they were drawing a lot of traffic. They have dimmed in popularity in recent years, but they’re still a good way to draw in lots of inbound links. Maybe work them into your campaign plan where you create two or three per year.

You should also leverage listicles for more web traffic. Listicles are also good for drawing in inbound links and they are great cornerstone articles that draw in lots of people, are nice and long, and lead your new visitors to the different corners of your website.

6. Stick to What You Do Well

If you are not brilliant at creating YouTube videos, then don’t do them. If your photographic images are amateurish, then create and promote your content another way. A generic campaign plan may suggest that you dip your finger into every pie, but if you do not have the skills in-house, then leave certain content types alone or use outside services. Always remember that quality matters.

7. Guest Blogging is Your Friend

There are many reasons why guest blogging is so popular these days. One reason is the search engine benefit, another is the trickle of traffic each guest post draws, and another is because of pingbacks, trackbacks, and the positive effect a good guest post has on you or your website’s online reputation. Guest posting can be used as a way to draw people from other websites to your website and it can be used as a search engine optimization tool.

8. Consider content syndication

Not every potential customer is out there Googling your keywords. Content syndication is a great way to get your assets in front of them on the websites they visit every day. Yes, there is a cost associated with syndication, but you might be surprised how low the entry point is.

Content Marketing Tips Are Useless Unless You Have a Plan

Planning may feel like a waste of time, but it is useful as an exercise because it helps to identify possible problems at an early stage. Your plan should explain how you are going to attract visitors, gather information, create interactions, and create conversions. Content marketing involves a lot of hard work near the beginning, during the promotional phase, where people are drawn in. But, you need a plan for what to do with those people and where you are going to funnel them to.

Test and Jump on The Ones That Work

One of the finest content marketing tips is to keep trying different things until you discover what works. For example, you could create a fantastic Infographic that you decide to post on social media. You post it at the same time on Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook. Yet, it only gets attention from Instagram and is almost completely ignored on the others. Why is this? Why would the same piece of high-quality content do so well on one platform and not on all the others?

The reason doesn’t matter so much as what you do with the information. In the future, you heavily promote similar content on Instagram while moderately supporting it on other platforms. Find what works through testing (and luck), and then double down on what works.

Are you having trouble ticking your content marketing checklist? Are you looking for more concise and knowledgeable information about content and digital marketing? If so, why not book a demonstration to see how we can help you?