CONTENT MARKETING FAQ's

Both long-form and short-form content play an important role in content marketing.

Long-form content like ebooks, guides, and blog posts provide in-depth information while short-form content quickly engages audiences on social media. It’s important to have high quality long-form content on your website, while short-form content is best to share on social media platforms to grab your audience’s attention and direct them to your website.

Content pillars are recurring themes and broad topics that organise your content strategy and production. They ensure you consistently create relevant, focused content tailored to your audience’s interests and informational needs related to your brand.

Effective content marketing strategies are built upon strong content pillars. Without them, you will struggle to create content that really resonates with your target audience.

A content calendar outlines content types, posting dates, associated marketing campaigns, and responsible team members. This ensures consistent posting and coordination of blog posts, social media updates, emails, etc. Content calendars provide an organised overview of your strategy.

User-generated content (UGC) includes reviews, testimonials, customer photos and videos etc. It can be highly effective as it builds credibility and authenticity, and resonates well as “social proof”. Curating and featuring UGC shows you deliver on promises and meet your customers’ needs.

You can measure success through key metrics like total reach, website traffic, lead generation, conversions, sales attributable to content, and ROI. Monitor engagement, social shares, backlinks, and search rankings to optimise efforts.

When developing content, it’s important to align the content format and messaging to the different stages of the typical buyer’s journey. 

For the initial awareness stage, focus on introducing your brand, clearly explaining the key challenges your customers face, and positioning your company as an expert in solving those pain points. 

During the consideration stage, create detailed comparison articles, product/service guides, and influential thought leadership content to showcase your offerings versus competitors. 

For those closer to a purchase decision, educational how-to content, product demos, and customer case studies are very influential. 

Finally, retention content like email newsletters, customer surveys, and loyalty programs will help continually engage your existing customer base.

Repurposing existing long-form content into new formats can significantly extend the reach of content while saving time and effort versus creating new content from scratch every time.

Some easy ways to repurpose include turning sections of in-depth blog posts into short social media posts, transforming posts into infographics or animations, extracting key statistics/facts/quotes into visual infographics, and promoting old evergreen content on new channels.

For brands with smaller marketing budgets, here are some cost-effective content techniques:

• Focus energy on organic reach through search engine optimisation and viral social media engagement
• Guest post on industry websites to expand visibility
• Do podcast or video interviews instead of paid ads
• Develop an employee advocacy program to spread branded content
• Heavily promote relevant user-generated content and customer testimonials
• Optimise all content for maximum SEO and social shareability
• Prioritise long-term value and audience relationship-building over big glossy productions.

To maximise your content’s search visibility:

• Research relevant search terms and optimise pages/titles accordingly
• Naturally work key phrases into content
• Use headings, lists, images, videos, etc. to boost on-page SEO
• Interlink topics with relevant backlinks from other owned pages
• Actively promote new content across social media
• Continuously monitor search rankings for keywords
• Proactively re-optimise low performing content until it climbs the first page

With high mobile usage today, ensuring content is fully optimised for mobile-first is extremely important. Here’s how to ensure your content is mobile-optimised:

• Test all content across varying device sizes
• Implement responsive design, browser caching, fast load times, readable fonts/sizes, easily clickable elements etc.
• Navigation should remain simple and intuitive on mobile to avoid too many popups or complex menus.
• Enable easy mobile commenting and social sharing.
• Check Google Analytics for mobile performance data.

Mobile optimisation is key for high traffic, engagement and conversions.