Content Marketing Services companies are always innovating ways to capitalize on your content marketing efforts.

Are you looking for ways to breathe life into your content marketing strategy? Wouldn’t it be great if you could find a few useful hacks to create content that skyrockets website traffic and conversion? Don’t you also want to leverage the latest trends and developments used by top content marketing services?

Here’s the thing – most modern businesses realize the importance of content marketing for their overall success. However, only a handful of them knows how to do it right.

While 77% of today’s businesses have a content marketing strategy, 38% of them believe it’s only average. That’s why such companies are always on the lookout for trusted content marketing service providers.

If you want to attract these potential clients, you must develop a rock-solid content marketing strategy for your company. If your content doesn’t stand out from the crowd, other businesses won’t trust you with their content marketing campaigns. This can be challenging considering the volatile, ever-evolving, and competitive nature of the content marketing industry.

The good news is that we’ve curated a list of the most effective content marketing hacks that successful content marketing services use. These hacks will come in handy, irrespective of whether you’re creating content for your company or your clients. However, before delving deeper, let’s first take a closer look at the concept of content marketing.

Decoding What Content Marketing Services Do

First things first – content marketing isn’t just about publishing a few blog posts every month. It requires a consolidated approach to outline your goals, identify your audience, and publish content that resonates with them.

It’s also essential to identify the right channels to distribute and promote your content. It isn’t surprising that 69% of the most successful B2B marketers have a well-documented content marketing strategy.

Apart from blog posts, you can use a diverse array of effective content formats such as:

• E-books
• Case studies
• Whitepapers
• Checklists
• Ultimate guides
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Infographics
• Animations
• Memes

The key to achieving content marketing success is to select the right content formats based on your target audience, goals, distribution channels, and budget. Commonly used content distribution channels include your company website, social media platforms, streaming platforms, emails, etc.

It’s crucial to perform keyword research and develop a robust search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. You can also use paid techniques such as social advertising and search engine marketing to reach a wider audience. It’s also crucial to monitor your content, measure its performance, and regularly update it.

Image Source: Simplifie

Why Content Marketing?

High-quality content breathes life into every successful inbound marketing strategy. Whether you want to amplify brand awareness or establish brand authority, content marketing is often the most cost-effective solution.

Content marketing also offers various additional benefits such as:

1. Increased audience engagement
2. Improved customer retention
3. Qualified lead generation
4. Increased conversions and revenue
5. Reinforced brand trust and loyalty

What sets content marketing apart is that it offers long-term results. For instance, a well-researched, relevant, and eye-catching infographic will continue to garner social shares for weeks or months. Likewise, a comprehensive and valuable e-book will generate leads even years after you’ve published it.

A powerful and well-executed content marketing strategy offers extremely high ROI and ensures that you get the biggest bang for your buck.

Now that you’re aware of the excellent benefits of developing a content marketing strategy, you must be yearning to build one.

Before you get started, let’s take a look at a few tried and tested hacks that content marketing services often use.

Top Hacks Used by Content Marketing Services

If you provide content marketing services to business owners, you’re likely already familiar with the latest best-practices. Nevertheless, it always helps to keep an eye on what tactics other content marketing services companies are deploying. While there isn’t any shortcut to achieving content marketing success, you can use certain hacks to improve the performance of your content.

From repurposing existing content to utilizing guest blogging – you can use various techniques to strengthen your content marketing strategy. Without further ado, let’s jump right into the best content marketing hacks.

1. Select the Right Topics

Most content marketing services would agree that the topic you select for your content dictates its future. You can’t publish content on any random topic and expect it to find its footing. Whether you’re writing a blog post or designing an infographic, you must identify topics that’ll resonate with your target audience. It’s also essential to identify the latest trends and leverage topics that have the potential of becoming viral.

But how do you find topics that’ll immediately garner traction?

The simplest solution is to ask your audience. If your brand already has an active social media presence, you should regularly conduct audience polls. Likewise, if you have a mailing database, you can ask your subscribers to participate in an online survey.

Image Source: HubSpot

You can even host live Q & A sessions on your social media profiles to directly interact with your audience. The idea is to delve deeper into their mind to understand their needs, preferences, aspirations, and pain points.

Additionally, you must keep an eye on the comments sections of your blog and social media posts. Your readers/followers will often express their concerns and struggles in their comments. It’s also a great way to understand how your audience perceives your content.

It’s also recommended that you identify your top-performing content across various distribution channels. These topics have already struck a chord with your audience and will likely deliver great results in the future too. Think of ways in which you can repurpose your best-performing content assets into other formats.

You should closely monitor your top competitors’ content strategies. Take a look at the topics they’re using and watch out for gaps/loopholes in their existing content. You should also analyze how their audience is reacting to their content. It’s an easy way of identifying the topics that are presently working in your niche. You can use tools like Buffer to find the number of social shares a particular topic has garnered.

Lastly, it’s essential to watch out for the latest trends and news in your industry. Capitalizing on these trends can quickly amplify your reach and establish your brand as an industry authority. When you use such trending topics, your content even has the potential to become viral. You can use Google Trends and Answer The Public to spot the current as well as emerging trends in your niche.

Now that you have a substantial list of awesome content ideas and topics, it’s time to start creating great content. Here are a few more useful tips you should follow before taking the plunge:

• Choose topics that’ll help you accomplish your content marketing goals.
• Identify the right content format based on each topic.
• If a topic garners quick traction, repurpose it in other formats.
• Make sure it stirs emotion in your audience.
• Focus on topics that educate, inspire, or entertain your audience.

2. Craft Hypnotic Headlines

This hack is particularly useful for blogging-related content marketing services. The headline is likely the first thing your readers will notice about your blog posts. You should, therefore, ensure that immediately grabs their attention. It must pique their curiosity and compel them to read further.

Let’s say you’ve selected the following topic for a blog post: “SEO tips for startups”. The most obvious headline for this topic would be “X Effective SEO Tips for Startups”. While it’s a great topic, the headline isn’t particularly attractive. Instead, you could use the following title: “Tried and Tested SEO Hacks That Will Skyrocket Your Startup to Success”.

The second title immediately seems more captivating and inspirational than the first one. It creates a sense of urgency and compels readers to find out what’s in the blog post. Here’s how Neil Patel has crafted the headline for a similar topic:

Image Source: Neil Patel

Here are a few tips for writing intriguing and irresistible headlines:

• Make sure it clearly conveys what the blog post is about.
• Avoid divulging too many details about the content.
• Create a sense of urgency by making it actionable.
• Highlight the benefit or value that your readers will derive from the content.
• Keep it simple, snappy, and to-the-point.
• Use a tool like Headline Analyzer to validate and improve your headlines.

3. Prioritize Keyword Research

Any successful SEO content marketing service will vouch for the importance of performing thorough keyword research. Simply put, keywords are the terms and phrases your potential customers will use when searching for information related to your product/brand/niche. Identifying and targeting the right keywords is an effective way of ensuring that your content reaches your audience at the right time.

You can easily identify relevant and popular keywords in your niche by using keyword research tools such as:

1. SEMrush
2. Keyword Explorer by Ahrefs
3. Moz Keyword Explorer
4. Google Keyword Planner
5. Google Search Console

Make sure you analyze the search volume, competition, cost, and other parameters associated with each keyword.

Additionally, run a Google search with a selected keyword and find out if it’s being targeted by any established brand. You should also take a look at the “Searches related to:” section to identify relevant keyword variations. Try adding modifiers such as “best”, “top”, “easy”, etc. to your keywords to get more variations.

Image Source: Google

Now that you have a list of keywords, you need to start utilizing them. Start by naturally including a target keyword in relevant sections of a blog post.

Here are a few sections where you should include the target keywords:

• Introduction & conclusion
• Page title
• Subheadings
• Image alt tags
• Meta description & title
• URL

Judicious use of keywords will give increased visibility to your content in relevant search engine results.

Keyword research also helps you identify topics that’ll attract your target audience. Each related keyword that shows up in the search is a potential topic.

What’s more?

Even if you aren’t keen on blogging, keyword research should be a part of your content strategy. This is because your target keywords will come in handy when you’re adding hashtags to your social media posts. Likewise, keyword research is crucial for the success of your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns.

4. Create Well-Researched Content

Here’s the thing – your content will yield the desired results only when your audience derives some value from it. Successful content marketing services know that if you want to create content that’s meaningful, relevant, and valuable, you must invest significant time in research.

Irrespective of the topic and format you’ve selected, dig deeper to firmly grasp the subject. Otherwise, your content will come across as flimsy and superficial.

It’s also crucial to ensure that your content adequately covers different aspects of a topic. It is, therefore, recommended that you prepare a thorough outline before you start writing a blog post. Additionally, you should select a target length that does justice to the topic.

According to HubSpot, the ideal blog post length should be between 2,100 and 2,400 words. However, you must assess whether a given topic demands more than 2,000 words. While a comprehensive 3,000-word blog post might provide more value, you must have sufficient material to write about.

5. Outline a Content Calendar

Consistently publishing high-quality content in different formats across multiple channels isn’t a cakewalk. It requires a coordinated effort between different members of your content marketing team. That’s why it is essential to create a content calendar that defines your content creation, repurposing, and distribution schedule.

Make sure you assign specific responsibilities to individual team members as well. If you’re creating a content calendar for the first time, you’ll find plenty of nifty customizable content calendar templates online.

Additionally, you can use tools such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets to create the calendar.

It’s also recommended that you create a content marketing playbook to keep your team members on the same page. It acts as a quick-reference guide that helps anyone easily grasp your company’s content marketing practices. If creating one from scratch seems like a herculean task, you can even get a free content marketing playbook made online.

6. Judiciously Use Calls-to-Action (CTAs)

The fact of the matter is – if your readers exit your website after reading an outstanding blog post, they may not return. As a rule of thumb, you should always try to encourage your readers to take specific actions during or after reading your blog post.

You can ask them to:

1. Download an e-book
2. Register for a webinar
3. Subscribe to your newsletter
4. Check out a new product
5. Follow/Like your social media profiles
6. Subscribe to your YouTube channel

However, your readers won’t take the desired action unless you use clear, attractive, and strategically placed CTAs. Make sure you test a few versions of a CTA and select the best-performing ones.

Additionally, you should ensure that your CTA stands apart from the rest of your content. Use eye-catching colors that’ll easily pop out in your blog’s overall color palette.

It’s also crucial to write a crisp and interesting copy for each CTA. Make sure the copy immediately compels readers to click on it. It should be actionable, witty, and snappy. For instance, if you want your readers to subscribe to your newsletter, you can use “Get Free Tips in Your Inbox” as the CTA. Here are a few more examples:

Here’s an example of how Brian Dean uses a clever CTA on the home page of his website:

Image Source: Backlinko

7. Don’t Ignore Guest Blogging

Every SEO content marketing service will recommend that you harness the full potential of guest blogging. While it’s often perceived as a link building technique, guest blogging can be instrumental in building your authority.

It also helps expand your audience and targets new readers who would’ve remained inaccessible otherwise. It also helps drive increased traffic to your website.

For guest blogging, start by running a quick Google search to identify the most popular and authoritative blogs in your niche. Next, analyze their top-performing content to find out how it’s faring on different platforms, including social media.

Once you’ve shortlisted a few target blogs, delve deeper into their content and identify a suitable, relevant, and traction-worthy topic. Lastly, you need to reach out to the respective bloggers/admins with a spectacular pitch.

8. Leverage the AIDA Model

Whether you’re writing a blog post or creating a video for YouTube, you want your audience to take specific actions. However, you can’t expect them to take those actions unless you specifically ask them to do so. In other words, you must use the AIDA model to attract your audience and convert them into subscribers or customers.

Simply put, AIDA stands for:

• A – Attention
• I – Interest
• D – Desire
• A – Action

Here’s how you can implement the AIDA model while writing your blog posts:

Conclusion for Content Marketing Services

Whether you’re running a local business or a large corporation, you need a robust content marketing strategy to grow your business. Start by identifying topics that’ll address your audience’s pain points or resolve their problems.

It’s also crucial to come up with catchy headlines to grab the attention of your audience. Most content marketing services also use techniques such as keyword research, guest blogging, social listening, etc. to strengthen their content strategies.

Creating a content calendar and then publishing high-quality content is equally important. Finally, make sure you supplement your content with meaningful and hypnotic CTAs to drive conversions.

Are you looking for the right content marketing services company to grow your business? Take a look at what we do and feel free to get in touch with us to accelerate your growth online.