More than 5000 words, more than 50 marketers and content experts. That is what you’ll get in this article – a lot of inspiration, a lot of actionable tips you never knew you always needed, a lot of knowledge that is not accessible anywhere else
Without further ado… happy reading!
____
Repurpose your best performing content. A hard fact you will come to realize as a content marketer is every piece of content you publish won’t be a good fit for repurposing. There are just some pieces that haven’t resonated or that are too dated to be successfully recycled. The beauty of repurposing content is that your options are practically endless. You have the flexibility to transform any content asset you have into another format that appeals to the different segments of your target audience. You can effectively reach even more people and add value in a new way while saving you time and effort in the process. Whatever format you chose to repurpose your content — video, infographics, checklist, webinars, ebooks, and more, just remember the golden rule of repurposing content: create less, promote more.
Tope Longe, Content Marketer, Biteable, https://biteable.com/
I bet most of the tips here will be about creating more video content in 2021. No wonder: Marketers know that 72% of consumers prefer videos over text, so it’s worth focusing on YouTube this year. At the same time, if you’re looking for more traffic from your content marketing, I’d recommend publishing that which Brian Dean calls “Be the Source” content. It’s research-backed pieces, full of new data, that other bloggers and journalists would want to cite in their article. No need to say that such content assets (if high-quality and done right) will bring you more links, traffic, and shares. So, ensure you choose the right topic for your “Be the Source” content, focus on validity, visualize your data, and remember to promote it so that a broader audience could reach it.
Lesley Vos, Content Strategist at Bid4Papers, https://bid4papers.com/
Talk to Customers Customers are great sources of knowledge on suggestions and issues surrounding material. They’re typically pleased to let you know about the stuff they think about, if you question them in a consumer study, a focus group or a one-on-one environment. Listen to popular responses that can direct you to major developments that you want to keep track of.
Eliza Nimmich I’m the Co-Founder and COO of Tutor the People, https://tutorthepeople.com/
2021 is the year of optimal medium and content matching. Historically, you could write a post or answer a question in written form and still compete in search results and exposure when video was the best medium to convey the answer. No more. Google and social media algorithms will continue to optimize for the best medium for the answer. These days when you Google search how do certain things, videos are starting to dominate more and more, even taking over the entire front page. Video will continue to be one of the most engaging mediums, and content creators will need to get comfortable with video and know when to use it. This doesn’t mean video is always the right answer – sometimes it’s a quick blog post or a helpful tool – but you must think deeply and create the optimal content experience to win.
Joe Robison, Green Flag Digital
With the rise of AI writing tools, many writers that companies contract to or hire are taking shortcuts in their content production. Using a plagiarism checker tool is a great and inexpensive way for companies to ensure that their content is original and doesn’t hurt SEO.
Ali Ali, founder Alisquared
3 things you need to remember when writing content marketing articles
1) Purchasing process – what our consumers are looking for and how they make a purchasing decision.
2) The most important thing is the consumer and his needs. Therefore, personas – portraits of representatives of the target group are a duty in copywriting.
3) Content marketing supports SEO activities, so keywords should not be forgotten.
Andrej Csizmadia, Growth Marketer, Post Affiliate Pro
Run-of-the-mill articles are all too common on the internet today. If you want to stand out, put extra work into your content. Include images and videos in your written, on-site content. Do in-depth research and invite experts to contribute. If you do all of these things, your content will be a world ahead of your competitors.
Garit Boothe, SEO Consultant at Garit Boothe Digital, https://garitboothe.com/
One of the best tricks that has worked for us is using social media proof in the sales pitch. We come up with a list of past and present customers who resemble the qualities of our potential buyer. We anticipate the fact that our leads want to know who else we have worked with and what were the results. We back up our customers’ testimonials with stats and numbers from social media to prove our claims and work on a great storytelling approach to get our lead excited hearing more from us. This has absolutely worked for our team in terms of converting cold leads into paying clients.
Michael Hammelburger, CEO @ Cost Reduction Consultants, http://thebottomlinegroup.com/
In 2021, you want to focus on two things when creating content: (1) Topics your target customers are interested in contact center software guides and (2) Usefulness of your content. These two go hand-in-hand. The former will help make sure your topics get attention and the latter will help you hold customer attention. And the longer you hold their attention, the more your chances of converting them.
Victor Ijidola, Content Strategist, Growth Baker
My tip for content in 2021 is to level-up the content creation. I know it can be time consuming, hell, it can even be expensive. But in the long run, it will benefit your business. Don’t just write long and boring content, but give a lot of focus to the quality (easy to say, hard to do). Meaning; be sure to bring the reader all the thing he is looking for in terms of what he searched for, and don’t explain the obvious just because you think google will like it (you need to understand where your client is their buyer’s journey). Don’t write useless intro’s just as a filler content, but find a unique angle to attract your reader to keep on reading. Images are good, try to make the extra mile and make them your own original photos. Same as with video. Make sure to back it up with real research as much as you can. to add higher credibility.
James Miller, Founder at Photographer Touch, https://photographertouch.com/
Start with user intent and human readability. If you are trying to drive traffic for a specific keyword, why are people searching for that keyword? Make sure to cover that in your content. One easy tool to figure this out is to simply ask Google. You can do this by typing in the keyword you are targeting and see what is ranking in the top 10 already. Google has spent billions of dollars trying to figure out what people want so do not try to recreate the wheel.
Justin Grau, Founder, Bizdig.co, https://bizdig.co
Accepting guest posts. Seriously.
Everyone’s doing guest blogging, but accepting guest posts is not that popular. In fact, most people think that only PBNs take guest posts.
The truth is you can make quite a source of a good content out of third-party guest posts. If you do it right.
If guest bloggers are willing to pay $100+ for publishing their article, most of them should be able to put some more effort in the article quality instead.
Here are some proven rules you can incorporate:
– Never accept already written article. Most probably it got rejected elsewhere. Or worse – it got published and the author doesn’t care about duplicate content.
– Always ask authors for example publications and check the quality of their content.
– State your requirements in details – topics, tone of voice, usage of titles/paragraphs, illustrations, word count, etc.
– Limit the number of external links to say 3 per article. Don’t count links to high authority websites, like forbes.com.
– Allow only relevant links. No linking to gambling or essay writing sites in the author bio below an article about programming in Python.
– Never link to low-authority websites. Set a minimum DA or DR value that the target URL domain has to reach or exceed.
– Tell the author to include some internal links as well.
– Always check the uniqueness of the text with Copyscape or similar tools.
– Reserve yourself the right to reject the article at any stage.
Konrad Caban, CEO Supermonitoring
2021 is here. We’re not living in an age where we can rely on advertisements to lure in new customers anymore. This year, it’s crucial than ever to produce content that provides your audience value. In other words, if you stick to a hard-selling content strategy and insist on bragging about your products through content, chances are you’re going to get lost in the crowd. Instead, you need to focus on what the audiences will benefit from your content. The reason is that people seek educational content each day. They want to consume seamless, fast, and entertaining content across all channels. Here, you need to be a good storyteller. If your audiences can learn something from your content, they’ll have no problem trusting your brand in no time. Therefore, providing audiences with highly-valuable content is much more effective in generating leads and building audience trust, which is absolutely essential for inbound marketing.
Andre Oentoro, CEO, Breadnbeyond
My best content tip for 2021 is to spend at least 30% of your time revisiting and improving your old content. There is a big chance that some of it dropped in rankings and that it needs to be revamped to perform well in the future. Moreover, Google will appreciate your content updates when indexing your website and you’ll have an additional SEO benefit from it.
Petra Odak, CMO, Better Proposals
Simple as that: long form content that follows the Google EAT principle: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, will rank higher.
Keerthi Rangan, Content Marketing Strategist, Adaface, https://www.adaface.com/
Google wants to surface the best and most authoritative content possible. In 2021, you have to rely on subject matter experts in your space to come up with the best content. Whether it be a historian or a PHD, work with people who have unique insights and access to information to help you create content that isn’t out there. You’ll stand out and you readers will rely on you as a unique source of information.
Neal Taparia, Co-founder, Solitaired, https://solitaired.com/
Evergreen content for the win! In my opinion, one of the main reasons for creating evergreen content are the SEO aspects. Such content has a good chance of generating traffic from organic results over a long period of time. The more articles that generate several dozen or several hundred sessions a month, the greater the “base” that guarantees constant website traffic. Thanks to this, the business becomes more resistant to the negative consequences of updating algorithms. It is also worth remembering that the longer an article functions on the web (it is visited, commented on, shared, etc.), the greater the chance that someone will link to it on their website, blog or forum. Evergreen content is reusable on social media. Articles, videos or infographics created for a specific occasion are usually suitable for one-time publication. With evergreen content, we can publish them multiple times (e.g. when there is no time or resources to create new material). In addition, there is a good chance that people who later found the content from another channel (e.g. search engines) will share it without paying attention to the date of its creation. Sometimes such content can reach more reach than the first time.
Lukas Mehnert, CMO Smartlook
I am condensing my 2021 content strategy into a C.R.E.A.T.E framework. Goal = create with intent ⤵ • C – Create authentic content by understanding people and writing for them instead of obsessing about algorithms. Remember the litmus test for content: How will this bring value to the reader? • R – Repurpose content to build repetition around your core ideas Think like an environmentalist. You have to keep recycling to give the knowledge you create new meaning. • E- Empathy-infused collaborations Show empathy to foster collaborations and learn from everyone regardless of their background. • A – Ask better questions Think like a journalist and apply the 5Ws 1 H methodology to gather information. Anchor ideas in people’s experiences; find the best person to interview and use their insights. • T – Think out of the box to keep biases and assumptions in check Ask for feedback regularly to bring a pair of fresh eyes and perspectives to your ideas. Separate your ego from your work and make it a practice to get more eyeballs over your content. • E – Expand writing to a company-wide activity There’s a limit to what you can do with a brain, a keyboard, and 24 hours as a writer. Explore your team’s expertise by scheduling time for them to write around topics that matter.
Andreea Serb, Content Strategist at Storyteq www.storyteq.com
Copywriting is 80% research, 5% writing, 15% rewriting. You need to consume a lot of content about the topic before writing. If you want to create outstanding content instead of spending hours improving the structure of sentences, talk with experts and you will get real pain points that will be important for your readers. If the writer just doesn’t have enough real experience to write compelling posts, content can look good on the surface, but returning visitor’s numbers won’t grow in long term.
Evaldas Mockus, Director of SEO, blogger at growingsaas.com
If you are ever tasked with writing content on a topic you are not an expert in, here is a workaround: interview experts and leverage their knowledge. The process is straightforward: 1) Find and interview a subject matter expert 2) transcribe the conversation 3) use the raw material as your content foundation. And when you do point 1), remember not to ask basic questions such as “what is X” and “how does X work”—you can probably find out on your own through some preliminary research anyway. Act like a journalist and dig deeper, with questions such as *What’s something that non-experts believe about [topic] that they’re wrong about? * What’s the most common reason people fail to succeed with [topic]? * How do you overcome the most common [topic] roadblocks or pain points?
Fio Dossetto, Content Marketing Manager @ Aula, contentfolks.com
Don’t get swallowed up in the top of the funnel. Great SEO efforts are necessary, particularly for ToFu, but it’s a mistake to ignore content that moves prospects down the funnel.
Victoria Fryer, content marketing manager, BigCommerce
The web is full of guides that add nothing. The authors dwell on irrelevant things, speak in general terms, as if they wanted to hide their ignorance and the fact that the text was probably written with SEO in mind, not the reader. The second sin of most guides is navigating too high a level of abstraction in the description, the lack of simple instructions like click here. Many people get lost in the guides and are unable to apply the advice they describe for such a prosaic reason as the lack of a screenshot that will show you exactly, step by step, what to do. Create each tutorial you write with one thought in mind: after reading it, the reader should be able to immediately implement the advice / guidance into practice. If the text is not structured this way, it means that it is worth correcting.
Sona Pisova, Content Specialist, LiveAgent
There’s a lot of content already on the web. Focus on creating effective content pillars. Work on updating the content. Make all your content as fresh as possible. Also, focus on content distribution.
Vikas Kalwani, SEO Specialist at uSERP, https://vikaskalwani.com
Marketers should begin to take advantage of AI-generated content. Platforms offering this feature have already allowed marketers to better streamline copy, scale PPC efforts, and optimize on-page SEO. Although this trend has always been on the horizon, the large increase in GPT-3 tools will make AI-generated content more of an asset in the coming year. Natural language generation will provide a great starting point for social media, blog posts, advertising copy, and even full-fledged landing pages. While AI-generated content will still require some human oversight and editing in 2021, adopting these tools in an everyday workflow can help free up large amounts of time and money usually tied up in content creation. Plus, the data-driven nature of AI will allow marketers to take advantage of lucrative keywords that may be difficult to find without the help of machine-learning. As companies attempt to market in the crowded digital marketing space, the use of AI-generated content will emerge as a competitive advantage.
Isabelle Wisco, Marketing & Growth Analyst, Lido
20% is the maximum total time I suggest you spend writing an article. The rest is pre-post research and post-publication promotion. Imagine your blog is a free newspaper booth, passersby are potential users of your site, and your published post is a printed journal. You have to gag a lot to get passersby to download your free copy. Where are the users? In real life, in the city, you will find passers-by almost everywhere, but really large clusters are found, for example, at train stations, and that’s where stands with free newspapers are usually placed. In virtual space, social platforms are potential train stations, so remember that what you are gagging is important – try to be interesting and unique. Instead of tweeting the title, come up with something catchy related to the content of the article you are promoting.
Andrzej Bieda, CMO Landingi
When you think about your blog and content think about topics your audience are trying to find information about where the top 10 search results on Google are crappy and low quality.Ask yourself: Where do you see a problem in results displayed when you google a topic and what is the specific problem? What is wrong with the search results? These questions will help you dig and find the right keyword and topic to write about for your blog. This should be your start to keyword/topic research.
Dmitry Dragilev, owner of SmallBizTools blog which reviews the best business software tools, such as sales productivity tools.
Focus on building content projects that can be repeated by just tweaking 30% of the page. We generated 5,000 pages through code and that ended up giving us 300,000 impressions every month.
Deb Mukherjee, Head of Marketing, DelightChat
Invest your time and efforts (or budget) in creation of valuable materials. The longer and more in-depth your content is the higher chance it has to rank higher. In your chase for top ranks always remember about usability and user experience. Use data to be smarter than competitors. Forget about the useless content. Be informative and patient. Create tutorials, how-to articles and screencasts – show your target group how to get more from your products and solutions. Remember about your existing customers and create the content they will be looking for in their search engines. You don’t want them to find competitors’ materials, do you? Educate them in order to become more loyal and brand aware. SEO-oriented content – analyze and plan your content calendar according to the search results. Base your content on the actual needs of your customers. Trust analytics, but run them through your customer care team. And don’t forget about the long tail searches!
Maja Wiśniewska, Marketing Manager, SMSAPI – www.smsapi.com
Produce epic content which is 10X better than your competition, that’s all! It’s easier said then done, but think of it this way: if you had to go to court and prove that your piece of content deserves to be #1 for the search term you are trying to rank, what would be your argument? That’s how you need to think when you write your content.
Gaetano DiNardi, Director of Growth Marketing at Nextiva a small business phone system company.
Use video content to build efficient communications. The impact of video streaming on businesses is much more significant and will soar in 2021. Webinars, small master classes, video chats, and other more interactive approaches to communicating a marketing message to a broader audience and varied demographics will be on-trend.
Irina Weber, Content Strategist at SE Ranking, https://seranking.com/
This year is all about creating content that can be repurposed into multiple formats. For example, a video interview can be turned into a podcast, a long YouTube video, several shorter YouTube videos on individual topics, a whole host of social media content and then transcribed and put onto your blog. Squeeze every last drop of value from the content you create!
Nelson Jordan, Content Strategist, www.nelson-jordan.com
Content marketing has become one of the most reliable channels to create brand awareness and generate leads. The quickest way to get started with content marketing is to do competitor research using tools like ahrefs or semrush, find all the relevant topics/keywords which are bringing them the traffic, and note them all in Google sheet or whichever tool you like. Once you have a list of articles or landing pages start preparing the detailed content outline by analyzing the other pages ranking on page 1 of SERPs. Once the outline is ready share it with the writer. Alternatively, you can also look at the XML sitemaps of your competitors, just visit any site and add sitemap.xml at the end, like this: domainname.com/sitemap.xml – this will give you the list of all the landing pages and blogs hosted on your competitor’s domain. This gives you a big list to pick and choose the relevant topics for you to target. Also, clearly guide the writer to focus on sharing the benefits more than the features of your product/service and to write with the intent to help a user and not for bots. A well-planned content marketing strategy can go a long way in improving your brand’s online presence and helping you reach your target audience.
Vineet Gupta, SEO Specialist, 5 Minutes SEO, https://5minutesseo.com/
Design a comprehensive content strategy: Include a mix of informative top-funnel blog posts and connect each new blog post to a designated keyword related to your product or service. Also target 3-5 secondary keywords with each blog post.
Matt Bentley, Founder & CEO at CanIRank, canirank.com
Thanks to better and better algorithms, the search engine can “see” the content not only through the prism of individual keywords contained in it, but also as a larger whole. The context of queries is better recognized and the relevant search results are presented on this basis. When preparing the content, we should therefore think holistically, instead of focusing only on the most important phrases. Algorithms are also getting better at “understanding” a website as the user sees it. If the website is user-friendly, it will also be rated well by the search engine.
The third element is, of course, the reputation of the site as seen through the prism of the links leading to it. We know that it is not the quantity but the quality of the links that is crucial.
Gaetano Caruana, CEO EarlyParrot
My one tip is to focus on being the last click. Yes, we all want to be the first so we get the highest CTR. It’s great to be the number #1 choice for web visitors. But then what? What if a user clicks on our result, spends 2m on a page (good dwell time), but then they go back and pick another result from the same SERPS? It’s a clear sign to Google that our page didn’t give them what they wanted. If this happens many times over, then Google will demote our result from the first page into obscurity. How to beat this? The solution is to create content that’s both comprehensive and matches the keyword’s user intent to the tee.
Nikola Roza; CEO of Nikola Roza – https://nikolaroza.com/
Embrace multiple content formats, While most marketers usually think of content as written blogs and articles, content is far beyond written words. Video content is being embraced more and more, with Facebook going out of its way to change the platform to help people engage with them for as long as possible. Whereas years ago Facebook couldn’t even host content, now it has a dedicated area to it, with new videos popping out as soon as you finish watching the first one. More and more people are listening to podcasts too. Podcasts are quickly becoming the main thing people listen to when they’re commuting, traveling, or doing chores. They keep users informed about the topics they want to know about, so it’s common to see strong engagement there. The best part is that you don’t need to start from scratch. Use your best content to transform it into different formats and re-release it so people can engage with it. Then, simply see what people respond to, and create similar content to repeat its success.
Will Cannon, CEO at Signaturely, https://signaturely.com
In-depth knowledge base articles When it comes to content you often see companies write about the same things all the time. They either replicate others’ content to produce quantity, or they are trying to outperform the competitors by length and quality. Neither of these is a smart investment of time and resources. For 2021 I recommend working on your product articles more. Trying to attract new customers with generic articles might work to some extent, but it’s your product that solves their problems. Brainstorm all the things your product was built for and write in-depth articles to your knowledge base so showcase how great is your product. Basically show everyone that not paying and using your software will be a mistake. When writing this kind of content make sure it servers well. Be as informative as possible and focus on your customer needs. It’s a great strategy because you can forget about all these things you have to meet when writing long-form blog posts. Now, your only focus is your customer and this is how top content is usually written.
Martin Bloksa, CEO, StreamBee, https://streambee.io
Always have a plan B, After living through 2020, we now know how quickly plans can change. We’ve all have to change our work style to accommodate new necessities, and even adjust our content accordingly. That’s why, when developing content, you should always have a plan B. If your marketing campaign revolves around, say, a playful meteorite allegory, you need to have a plan B in case an actual meteorite falls from the sky. Plus, with the ever-changing state of the world, you need to know how you’ll backpedal if your content strategy doesn’t land as well as you’d expect. To achieve this, always keep a backup content plan. If anything happens that makes you unable to publish your content at the last minute, you’ll want to have something to replace it at a moment’s notice. And, when talking about sensitive topics, make sure to always have a way out. Conduct a crisis analysis to predict potential fallout, and know exactly how you’ll react if that happens.
James Davis, Head of Marketing at Messagely, https://messagely.com
Do a complete content audit on your website and update content that has become outdated or is not performing. If your website does not quickly grab the viewer’s attention and engage them, they will move on to the next. You must do more to compete for their attention and to elicit the desired response. To implement killer conversion rate optimization, your call to actions must grab the viewer’s attention. Take an offer and highlight every takeaway the customer will receive. This shows prospects what they will miss if they do not buy from you. When value stacking, overcome customer apprehension and make the benefits of your business obvious.
Brian Hong, Founder and CEO, Infintech Designs, https://www.infintechdesigns.com
Create streaming content, People aren’t meeting for conferences and business chats anymore. However, the need for live customer engagement is as prevalent as ever. That’s why multiple companies have changed to create video streams that look to replace those customer interactions. Many companies hosted virtual conferences and events in 2020, and that trend isn’t stopping anytime soon. There’s a kind of engagement that you get from users observing live content that you simply cannot get with a pre-recorded one. However, not any stream will do. Live streams are as important and valid marketing tools as any other, so you should be investing just as many resources into them. It’s not enough to set up a webcam and start streaming. Remember: what your users will see will be what they perceive your company to be. Invest in solutions that will allow you to engage your viewers as much as possible. You want to create visually-appealing content, so, if you’re live streaming, make sure to plan everything out to the T. Rehearse and avoid any kind of technical failures. Make sure your live streams always reflect the best of your company.
Lisa Dietrich, Founder at Let’s be crazy, https://letsbecrazy.de
Use dynamic web stories, Temporary stories aren’t just a thing from Snapchat anymore. Stories have become a prominent feature on Facebook and Instagram, with videos and animated images in a vertical format that disappears after 24 hours. Their mobile focus and short time range makes it perfect for people to browse anywhere, anytime. To start with web stories, make sure you know your user persona, what they like, and what they respond to. Then, look for tools that can help you make the most out of your web stories. You don’t have to make web stories on your phone for them to be publishable, so why would you? Places like Canva offer great design capabilities to help you create dynamic and visually-appealing stories with minimal design training. Use your analytics to see what customers respond to, and make sure to include web stories in your marketing campaigns to give your customer a consistent message.
Max Benz, Founder at BankingGeek, https://bankinggeek.com
Reach out to your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) prospects and offer to feature them in your articles. It will help you create quality content, get more exposure and build great connections.
Helena Ronis, Co-founder and CEO, AllFactors
Don’t craft content to impress people, craft it to help them. Writing optimized content for search engines & users is an art. Write the content by keeping in mind, whatever I write will it be useful for my readers? Will they be able to understand the crux of the article? This will help you craft a well-written original piece to educate readers.
Shrey Gupta, Sr. SEO Executive, ProProfs, https://www.proprofs.com/
Content Remarketing: Buyer journeys are becoming more and more complex. That means pulling in actual sales from your content is getting increasingly challenging. Sadly, the bulk of site visitors will simply get the info came for and forget about you. That’s where personalized content remarketing comes in. This means retargeting visitors with more relevant content via Facebook ads to keep you top of the mind. For example, if someone visits an article on your site about ‘How to Remove Powered by Shopify’ but doesn’t convert, offer them a ‘Complete Shopify Set-up Guide’ to pull them back to your brand and keep them moving down your marketing funnel. Re-engaging visitors across multiple channels and nurturing the budding relationship will produce a healthier ROI on your content than simply focusing on driving more traffic.
Ruth Haim, Co-Founder, Reconvert.io
Curating content I am a huge fan of content curation. When I try to find information, I always look for an independent source that lists pretty much all options I am considering. You know that feeling. You always want to choose the best product for your money. And that’s how content curation works. Look for the topics that are at least partially connected to your business and can be your open doors for a new type of traffic to the website. Are you selling front doors? Create a list of technicians in your area. Are you selling domains? Give a list of nice expiring domains every month. You get a point. Create a comprehensive list that nicely organized and people will love your resource. You will both helpful and relevant. And this kind of content is the easiest to get links for. Magazines love complex sources and if your directory will contain specific businesses, they will be very happy to link to their own profile.
Matej Kukucka, Founder, Marketing Player
______
Visit our blog for more insights!