Content marketing can produce great results for your business. However, it can also take a lot of content, and therefore time and money, before you start to see those results. With a smart approach, you can improve the ROI of your content marketing campaigns and get more out of the content you’re already producing without the need to invest more money into it.
1. Update Your Content Regularly
Content can go out of date quickly online, particularly if you’re in a fast-paced industry. Even so-called “evergreen” content, which should be relevant for several years, in theory, may not be as appealing to readers or to Google in a couple of years time.
To keep your content fresh, relevant, and reap the SEO benefits that come with new content, update your old posts regularly with new information.
Keeping your posts updated has a few major benefits:
- Your readers will see that the information is current and that you take the time to provide high-quality and relevant posts.
- Google pushes fresh content to the top of the search engine results. For example, you can see in the Google search below for “marketing automation software” that some of the top results were published or updated in March and April 2019 (this article was written in May 2019).
- Updating your old content gives you a great excuse for promoting it again. This will get you more likes and shares on social media and it means you can reach a new audience plus those who may have missed it the first time around.
2. Re-purpose Your Content
To maximize your content marketing ROI you need to squeeze as much as you can out of every single piece of content. This means instead of publishing a single blog post and starting work on the next one, you should think about how you can use each piece of content in multiple ways.
For example:
- Multiple blog posts can be compiled into an ebook.
- Data used in a blog post can be used in infographics.
- A blog post can be re-published in the form of a video or podcast, or vice versa.
Posts you publish on your own blog can also be submitted as guest posts on other blogs or published on article sharing sites like Medium.
3. Promote Your Content Regularly
Content promotion could be the key to improving your content marketing ROI. Rather than focusing on simply producing more content, make sure you’re getting the most out of your promotional activities.
Successful marketer Derek Halpern spends 80% of his time promoting content, and only 20% on creating new content. In his words: “It’s smarter to find another 10,000 people to consume what you’ve already created as opposed to creating more.”
Of course, there is a limit to how frequently you can promote one piece of content without annoying your audience, but with a sufficiently large repository of content, you won’t have this problem.
Don’t just promote your content when it’s newly published – go back to old posts and link to them from your social media accounts and emails. You may also find that a topic you wrote about a few years ago has become newsworthy again, which is an excellent opportunity to push it to your following.
4. Don’t Skip the Research Phase
Over 60% of businesses don’t have a documented content strategy. If your business is one of them, there’s a good chance you’re not making the most of your content marketing.
Image source: https://www.slideshare.net/mprofs/b2b-content-marketing-2018-benchmarks-budgets-trends-north-america
Successful content marketing is more than simply writing blog posts that you think your audience will be interested in reading. Thorough research is essential to a successful strategy. Without proper research, you’ll be going in blind and simply guessing at what you should be writing about.
Research comes in many forms but the two types of research that are arguably most important to your content marketing plan are:
- Audience research
- Keyword research
Audience research ensures you have a true understanding of who your audience actually is, not who you think they are. This will help you to determine their needs, problems, and motivations, decide on the type of content that will best resonate with them, and assist you in clarifying a brand voice that is both appropriate and appealing.
Keyword research is essential for SEO – the process of ensuring that web searchers can find your content easily and search engines list it prominently in their results. But it’s also vital for identifying topics to write about.
You can use keyword research to find the questions that people are asking in your industry and the information they’re interested in learning more about. You can then use your content to provide this information, rather than simply guessing what to write about.
5. Analyze and Optimize Your Content
Content production and promotion is only part of your successful content marketing journey. To really get the most out each piece of content, it’s important to monitor it after publication. You can use analytics software to measure its success over time and identify potential improvements for your future content production.
Optimization can occur in many forms. Some things you may want to experiment with include:
- Wording of headline
- Type and placement of images
- Different types of content (long-form vs. short-form for example)
- Timing of publication and promotion
- Format and wording of CTAs
Analysis, experimentation, and optimization can be a time-consuming process but it’s one that’s sure to pay off. Marketer Brian Dean managed to boost his organic traffic by over 260% in just two weeks, simply by optimizing his existing content.
There are also tools and software available that can help you with this task. AI-powered optimization software can optimize your content in real-time based on the actions of every individual interaction. This means there’s no lengthy testing and optimization phase, but instead your content naturally optimizes itself over time.
Boost Your Content Marketing ROI Whatever Your Budget
These examples are just a few of the ways you can get more out of your existing content and resources without the need to spend more money or grow your team.
While it takes more time and a well-planned content strategy to achieve the best results, the effort will speak for itself in the form of better engagement, higher traffic, and an increased conversion rate.