Content marketing helps your brand build an organic relationship with your target audience. Whether you’re sharing blogs, videos, or something else entirely, high-quality content is a way to engage potential customers and build brand authority.
To create great content for your brand, you’ll need to keep your finger on the pulse of the internet and understand exactly what your audience wants to see. Content marketing is always evolving, and you’ll need to adapt as trends ebb and flow. Here’s how to build a stellar content marketing strategy for your brand.
Key trends in content marketing to know
Internet trends change quickly. Your content marketing strategy needs to be highly responsive to these trends to stay relevant. Some top trends in content marketing right now include:
- Video: Short-form video content is all the rage right now thanks to TikTok, although you can post it on many different social media platforms. These bite-sized videos are dynamic and will help you grab your audience’s attention.
- Personalization: This involves creating content that’s personalized to suit specific buyer personas or demographics.
- Artificial intelligence: AI tools can help you generate and personalize content at scale. However, adding a human touch is crucial to ensuring your content resonates with your target audience.
- Augmented and virtual reality: AR and VR technology is becoming more popular and accessible to consumers, especially with the recent release of the Apple Vision Pro. With these technologies, your brand can create an interactive, immersive content experience that stands out from the pack.
- Social search: Many people are turning to social media rather than search engines. This is particularly true among younger audiences. For example, 51% of Gen Z women prefer TikTok for search. Optimizing your social media posts can help you generate more engagement.
- Podcasts: Long-form audio content is trending right now as many brands are creating their own high-quality podcasts.
Tips for crafting strategies that resonate
Today’s consumers are inundated with digital content. The average person is exposed to as many as 5,000 ads each day, and that’s not even counting organic content. For your content marketing efforts to be successful, they’ll need to connect with your customers on an emotional level. Here are tips for building content marketing campaigns that resonate with your audience.
Developing a data-driven content strategy
Collecting and analyzing consumer data will help you better understand your target audience’s needs and behavior patterns. There are many different types of data you can use to inform your digital marketing strategies. For example, analyzing search data can help you choose content topics to cover. Analyzing metrics for your social media, email newsletters, and website can help you identify the most effective content distribution strategies.
Bitly Analytics will help you collect data to inform your content strategy. You’ll be able to track engagement levels for your shortened links and QR Codes. This will help you identify which pieces of content send the most traffic to your website.
Enhancing content engagement through personalization
Personalizing your content will help it resonate more closely with your target audience. Start by identifying customer personas or segments to base your personalization strategy on. Customer segments can be based on demographics or the customer’s place in the sales funnel. You can then create content to target each customer segment.
Depending on the data you have available, you may be able to fully personalize email newsletters or landing pages with your customers’ names. You can also add interactive content like games or quizzes to your website to keep visitors engaged. If your website visitors have looked at a specific product or service, you can also use retargeting ads to keep them coming back.
Leveraging multimedia content for greater impact
Everyone has their own unique preferences for the types of content they like to consume. Some people prefer reading written content, while others connect more with video or audio.
To connect with a wider audience, create multimedia content. For example, try including infographics in your blog content or repurposing ebooks and white papers as a video series. With this approach, your audience can engage with your content in the way that is most effective for them.
Tips for reaching your target audience effectively
One of the most challenging parts of building a successful content marketing strategy is connecting with your target audience. Your content needs to reach the people who are most likely to benefit from it. It’s not enough just to put content out into the world—you’ll need a precision strategy to make sure each piece reaches its intended audience. Here are content creation ideas to draw your target audience in.
Optimizing content for search engines
Search engine optimization (SEO) should serve as the backbone of your content marketing strategy. Consumers rely heavily on search engines to find the information they’re looking for, so your written content should be developed with search algorithms in mind.
This starts with conducting keyword research to identify what users are searching for. Use this information to create a content calendar, and post frequently to generate consistent engagement.
In addition to adding keywords to your content, you’ll also need to follow other SEO best practices. This includes adding internal and external links to your posts, as well as promoting your posts to generate backlinks from other sites. Each post should be formatted with Google’s standards in mind, with high-quality imagery and graphics and fast load times.
Utilizing social media platforms strategically
Sixty percent of the world’s population uses social media, making these platforms one of the best ways to reach your target audience. The key is to choose the right social media platforms for your brand, whether that’s Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, or something else entirely.
Each social media platform supports different content formats and appeals to a unique mix of demographics. While you can post similar content across multiple social media platforms to broaden your reach, make sure that each post is tailored to the platform that it’s on. For example, you can repurpose content from YouTube videos on TikTok and Instagram, but you’ll need to shorten the videos and make them more dynamic.
Exploring emerging platforms and technologies
Creating content with new technologies and platforms helps your brand stand out from the crowd. It shows your users that you’re unafraid to explore uncharted territory and get ahead of the curve to create the best content possible.
One of the best examples of this is AR and VR technology. These technologies give your audience a novel, inclusive experience. AR apps are particularly popular among home decor and beauty brands, as they help users visualize how each product would look in their life. Another exciting example is blockchain technology, which helps businesses create NFTs and other exclusive experiences for customers.
Podcasting to deepen audience engagement
Podcasts are becoming an increasingly popular kind of content marketing. By creating your own branded podcasts, you can use long-form audio to tell exciting stories and establish your brand voice.
Podcast audiences are very discerning, so high-quality content is a must. Your podcast should go beyond showcasing your brand’s products and services. Popular podcast formats include interviews with subject matter experts and narrative reporting. When developing your podcast, you’ll need to consider what themes and formats will resonate most with your audience. Don’t be afraid to explore innovative and novel podcast concepts.
Utilizing email newsletters
Email marketing is a particularly effective way to reach both existing customers and potential leads directly. Of all the digital content types available, email newsletters are some of the easiest to personalize, as you can break down your email list into segments based on where they are in the buyer’s journey.
Many companies use email newsletters to showcase the latest products and sales. However, you can take your marketing a step further by using these emails to share other types of content relevant to your industry.
Tips for measuring success and optimizing performance
You should always be monitoring your content strategy closely to identify which pieces of content are most effective. With this data, you can optimize your future content for better performance.
Setting and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs)
KPIs are specific metrics that will help you track the performance of your content. KPIs should be specific to your organization and based on your business goals. For example, you might set a KPI of earning a specific number of new social media followers or email subscribers in the next six months. KPIs should be realistic for your business and serve as a benchmark for the success of your content marketing strategy.
Utilizing Bitly for performance analytics
Bitly’s tools help you drive organic traffic from one part of your content marketing strategy to another. With Bitly, you can build custom shortened links and QR Codes to use throughout your marketing assets. Bitly Analytics helps you identify which links and QR Codes are getting the most traffic, so you can determine which aspects of your content strategy are most successful.
Continuous optimization based on analytics
To make the most of your content marketing campaign, regularly review and update it based on the analytics you have available. For example, this data might show you that short-form video marketing performs better for your audience than written content. In this scenario, you could focus on pairing each blog or infographic with a corresponding video to increase your web traffic.
Elevate your content marketing game with Bitly
The internet is constantly changing and evolving, so your content marketing plan should evolve along with it. Great content consistently keeps your audience engaged, whether that’s through valuable thought leadership, product information, or entertainment.
Use Bitly’s analytics tools to build a data-driven approach to content marketing. Monitor traffic in real-time to identify which types of content are most impactful. Get started today to see how Bitly helps you elevate your content marketing game.
