10 Content Marketing Tips You Can Employ Now

By Cindy King
Published December 18, 2012 

Are you looking for content marketing ideas?

Need some actionable tips you can put to use today?

We asked 10 content marketing experts for their best content marketing tips.

Here they are:

#1: Leverage the Power of Interviews

Without a doubt, one of my hottest content marketing tips is to do interviews… especially video interviews. In fact, it isn’t just hot… it’s downright freakin’ sexy.

David Siteman Garland

Here is why you should add interviews to your content repertoire(big word!) in a fun numerical order:

1. If you can ask questions and like talking to people, you caninterview someone. No need to come up with blog topics, just ask away.
2. Interviews are an incredible relationship-builder. Want to meet your favorite author? Connect with the influencers in your space? Nothing builds a relationship like a good ole interview (especially on video, as you will REALLY get to know someone).
3. Replicable, replicable, replicable. There are plenty of interesting people out there in your niche to interview. I doubt you will run out of content. Not running out of content? That’s a good thing!
4. Credibility by association. Ahhh, this is a good one. When people see you interviewing awesome people, they assume you are awesome. This is good. For example, people assume I’m probably pretty neat as I can be seen on-screen withTim Ferriss, Seth Godin, Gary Vaynerchuk and more. You can be pretty neat too.
   

   David being seen interviewing Tim Ferriss.
5. You get free consulting/coaching (*wink wink*). Call up someone you want to learn from and ask for 30 minutes of their time to pick their brain for free. Interviewing is the PERFECT excuse and handshake to meet key people in your industry and pick their brains. No bank account required.

Good luck and go get ‘em!

David Siteman Garland, author of  Smarter, Faster, Cheaper and creator of the web show and resource The Rise To The Top.

#2: Embrace Content Curation

Ileane Smith

I’m seeing some real excitement starting to build around content curation platforms right now, and by far my favorite content curation tool is Scoop.it.

I love using Scoop.it because not only does it allow you to curate content and connect with other content marketers, you can alsoshare what you find to an endless number of social media sites and accounts because of the integration with Buffer and HootSuite.

The presentation below is from Scoop.it co-founder and CEO, Guillaume Decugis, which sums up the benefits of human content curation over machine algorithms.

You can leverage a site like Scoop.it to spread your message to a brand-new audience. At the same time, you’re building authority and demonstrating your expertise on important topics related to your niche.

Track the popularity and activity of your Scoop.it topic pages with the summary emails they send out. In the image below, notice the growing number of followers and visits to my topic pages for Podcasts and YouTube Tips and Tutorials—not to mention Basic Blog Tips!

Track the popularity and activity of your Scoop.it topic pages with the summary emails they send out.

Of course you can’t completely leave search engines out of the content marketing equation.

For example, when I check Google Webmaster Tools, I find thousands of links coming from Scoop.it pointing back to my home base, which is my blog.

Use Google Webmaster Tools to track where your links are coming from.

Below, the screenshot from Google Analytics shows that during the second quarter of this year, Scoop.it was in the top 10 referrers of traffic to my blog, actually beating sites like LinkedIn and Famous Bloggers. It’s important to add that the average number of pages visited was 3.4 and the bounce rate was only 12%, so we’re talking high-quality, targeted traffic here.

Google Analytics shows that Scoop.it was in the top 10 referrers of traffic.

The added benefit of using a site like Scoop.it is the community aspect. Users get to know each others’ interests and content is “rescooped” and reshared across every social networking platform.

You might be using a different curation service like Storify or newcomer Spundge, and that’s great. Just be sure that you network and make connections with influencers just as you would on any other social site.

Ileane Smith, founder of Basic Blog Tips.

#3: Use Calls to Action

Heidi Cohen

Use a contextually relevant call to action to nudge your target audience to take the next step.

By its nature, content marketing—whether it’s integrated into your social media or not—is non-promotional, enabling it to get through the clutter. As a result, to get participants to do somethingwithout screaming “Buy, Buy, Buy!”, you must make it obvious and easy so they do it without thinking.

Actionable Marketing Tip: Don’t limit your calls to action only to sales. Include calls to action to get prospects to take steps all along the purchase process.

How calls to action are used on a blog post to get readers to take different actions to read deeper into the blog, share socially and enter the purchase process.

Heidi Cohen, president of Riverside Marketing Strategies.

#4: Create Verbal Tweets

Michael Stelzner

I recently had a crazy idea I call verbal tweets. It’s a way to make it effortless for people to tweet. It’s especially valuable to podcasters or anybody who is recording a video or audio.

If you want someone to tweet something about your show—for example, at the end of your podcast—give a shout out to say something like, “Hey, if you love this podcast, do me a favor and visitsocialmediaexaminer.com/love”. This link repopulates a tweet directly into the Twitter feed.

Here is an example below. When you go to socialmediaexaminer.com/love, this will show up on your screen:

Social Media Marketing podcast’s verbal tweet.

To create a verbal tweet, go to clicktotweet, type in your tweet exactly as you want it to be, with the URL already shortened the way you want and then hit Generate Link. This link will get generated for you and then you can embed it into a blog post, for example.

Use clicktotweet to help generate a custom link.

But if you want to take it one step further and not make someone have to find it, you can use a cool WordPress plug-in called Pretty Link, which allows you to create a custom URL.  Then paste in your pretty link.

Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, host of the Social Media Marketing podcast and author of Launch and Writing White Papers.

#5: Make Content Desirable to Your Customers

Pam Hendrickson

It’s not what you know, it’s how you say it. We’ve all heard that on Web 2.0, content is king. But face it: we’re drowning in content. Every minute, more than 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube and 270,000 words are written on Blogger.com. A Google search on even the most obscure topic pulls up hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of results.

You can use SEO, keywords and other strategies to improve your rankings and get people to find your stuff online—but how effective are you once you get their eyes and ears? How good is your content?

The amount of information available to us as human beings is almost incomprehensible. As a species, we make, store and increase our capacity for information by the second. With the creation and rapid growth of the Internet, almost any information we need or want is available at the click of a single button.

It’s not information by itself that people are coming to you for—or ultimately, that they’re paying you for.  There are three things that will make your content and products desired by your customers:

1. Your perspective: How you use your unique background to shed new light on your customers’ problems, as well as how they can learn from it to get the same or better results faster, with fewer missteps.
2. Your ability to structure and package your content so they can use it: How well you’re able to explain, demonstrate and break down concepts for themand present the information to them so they can apply what they’re learning.
3. Your ability to humanize it: The level of empathy, compassion and connection you’re able to convey and bring out in them in the process.

Pam Hendrickson, producing, launching and marketing highly profitable products for many of the top names in the personal and professional development industry for over 20 years.

#6: Align Your Content Marketing Strategy With Your Email Strategy

Steve Sheinkopf

Although our business is primarily known for blogging and keyword capture, email may be the best part of our marketing.

Now most people blast away at a list once a week or month (or an astounding 14 times during Black Friday/CyberMonday), but they are missing the point.

If you are emailing to a general list, you will have seen diminishing returns over the last few years. It has nothing to do with the message of your email.

Email is about relevance. If you are relevant, people will open your email. Now slicing and dicing a list is good.

There is, however, a better way, which should be incorporated into your blogs and all of your social media. Create buying guides/white papers along different lines of your business. They only have to be four or five pages, but these buying guides will aid your lead generation and sales.

Lets take our induction example below.

Check out the click-through rates on these email campaigns.

About a year ago, I created the induction guide and placed it on all of our induction blog articles. If someone downloads an induction guide, common sense dictates they are interested in induction.

Now guess what I email to the people who downloaded the induction guide?  Induction articles, induction promotions, induction cooking demos, etc. This increased click-through rates to over 45% on the best campaigns.

Blog, guides and email:  Think about aligning the three.

Steve Sheinkopf, third-generation owner of Yale Appliance and Lighting, one of the most unique appliance stores in the country.

#7: Invest in Business Blogging

Gini Dietrich

My hottest content marketing tip for business is, without a doubt,blogging. That said, it’s also the most difficult and most time-consuming.

Here’s how I want you to think about it: How much time do you spend making cold calls that amount to nothing? What about meeting people for breakfast, coffee, lunch, drinks or dinner to no avail?

What if I told you blogging can be one of your top three drivers of new leads, and help nurture and convert them as well, but it will take 10-15 hours of your time each week?

Would you be willing to replace cold calls and meeting time with blogging for a better return?

In the past two weeks, we’ve generated three new clients from Spin Sucks. How do I know that? Easy! Each of them said when they called for the first time that they read the blog.

But sometimes it’s not that easy. Sometimes you have to dig into Google Analyticsand other data to figure out where people are coming from and whether they’re converting to a customer.

Of course, it’s easier when you sell something online. We’re a professional services firm, so in the beginning, to monetize the time we spent on the blog, we created products out of content. Things such as ebooks, webinars and white papers. These things allowed us to track who was clicking on the links we provided in blog posts and on the sidebar of the blog and who bought the products.

Track the performance of your content in Google Analytics.

We used in-page analytics and our ecommerce platform to give us those numbers. For instance, in a blog post last summer, we linked to a webinar we sell for $50. You can see by our in-page analytics 2% of the visitors—or 47 people—clicked on the link. When we compared that to our ecommerce, we saw 43 people bought the webinar.

Measure engagement with in-page analytics.

A pretty good ROI for one blog post, which took less than an hour to write, optimize and distribute.

If you don’t sell online, you have to track a little bit differently. The easiest way, of course, is to ask how people found you. Do surveys, hire someone who understands analytics and data, and pay attention to the content on your blog that is most popular. That’s how you’ll determine how well it works for your business.

Gini Dietrich, co-author of Marketing In the Round and the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich.

#8: Make Content Marketing Part of Your Business Culture

Krista Kotrla

Imagine the impact if you started to utilize every person in your company to create content. Why not have an army of people helping build your digital brand? Want a hot content marketing tip?Make content marketing part of your business culture.

Here’s the deal: Your employees are already content machines… They answer customer questions all day long.

They talk about price/cost. They compare products. They solve problems. They have an opinion about current industry topics. Imagine all of the content trapped in hundreds of thousands of emails, phone calls and conversations over the years that get a one-time shot at return on time invested.

Utilize every person in your company to create content.

Now imagine putting all of that collective knowledge and information to work for you online, helping you get found by more people and building buyer trust 24/7 for years to come!

While every other company is dipping their toes into “going social,” now is the time for you to go all in and utilize the strengths of your entire team. Get ahead of the competition. Give your team a better platform that brings about better long-term results.

Make content marketing part of your culture and you’ll benefit by having an army of great listeners developing strategic content with a more effective platform bringing about significant results for years to come. Unleash the brilliance of an inspired team accomplishing something that matters.

Krista Kotrla, vice president of marketing for Block Imaging International.

#9: Master Integrated Content Marketing

Stan Smith

Content marketing is a giant killer.

In 2013, your challenge will be to combine content publishing with smart planning and marketing automation.

Here are three steps on how to create a powerful integrated content marketing program for your business.

1. Create a Content Editorial Calendar

Usually editorial calendars are simple blog planning tools. The problem is that your business story needs to be told on multiple platforms through a variety of content types.

Instead I suggest creating a Content Editorial Calendar. This calendar’s objective is tosurround your visitors with an immersive multi-content experience. This calendar lets you align content to customer needs and schedule a steady drumbeat of diverse content that will give your customers something to see, hear, watch and experience.

A Content Editorial Calendar helps you surround visitors with an immersive multi-content experience.

2. Use Content to Segment Your Prospects

Integrated content marketing forces you to design content based on what your customers need versus talking points. Customer-focused content allows you tosegment your readers and uncover insights about how to engage and accelerate them through the sales process.

For example, a productivity app developer can create a video series around daily goal-setting and offer a special report on the same topic. Opt-in subscribers for the report can be put on a “goal-setting” contact sublist that gets content focused on their interest.

3. Ramp Up Content-Focused Relationship-Building

Email is still a powerful relationship-building tool. Smart companies use email marketing to engage customers and accelerate their decision-making process.

In 2013, actively tie each piece of content to a robust email campaign. MakeFacebook, Twitter and Pinterest work harder by offering high-quality opt-in content that puts subscribers into custom email campaigns. Track these email campaigns togain customer behavior insights based on platform and content.

These steps create an effective 1-2-3 punch that will leverage your business story, target customer needs and convert reader interest into revenue—a powerful way to market in 2013 and beyond.

Stan Smith, founder of Pushing Social and co-author of the forthcoming book Born to Blog.

#10: Develop Your Content Marketing Mission Statement

Joe Pulizzi

According to the Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs research, over 90% of all marketers use content marketing in some way. Yes, almost none of those marketers have a documented content marketing plan or strategy.

This is a major problem. Without a clear content marketing plan, we are planning to fail.

According to the Content Marketing Institute/MarketingProfs research, over 90% of all marketers use content marketing in some way.

A good start is to develop a content marketing mission statement.

For example, Inc. magazine has its mission statement in the first line of its About Us page.

“Welcome to Inc.com, the place where entrepreneurs and business owners can find useful information, advice, insights, resources and inspiration for running and growing their businesses.”

Let’s dissect this a bit. Inc.’s mission statement includes:

1. The core audience target: entrepreneurs and business owners
2. What will be delivered to the audience: useful information, advice, insights, resources and inspiration
3. The outcome for the audience: growing their businesses

Remember, content marketing is not about “what you sell,” it’s about “what you stand for.” The informational needs of your customers and prospects come first. Although there must be clear marketing objectives behind the mission statement, those should not be outlined here.

The Inc. mission statement doesn’t say anything about selling more advertising or paid events. To work, your mission statement has to be all about the pain points of your readers and followers or it simply won’t work.

Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and co-author of Managing Content Marketing and Get Content, Get Customers.