How to Fine-Tune Your Content Marketing Strategy – Ann Smarty

There’s one constant in digital marketing: It never stops changing. What worked two years ago has likely lost any impact today.

If you are doing content marketing the same way as you did two or five years ago, chances are your marketing results are slowing down. That is likely to be the very reason why your site is losing traffic.

Here’s how to fine-tune your content strategy by revising your marketing plan:

Evaluate your current strategy and different content-related data

Part of understanding where your content strategy needs to go is understanding where you currently stand. Google Analytics offers great metrics regarding the success of your content that can help you see what’s working and what’s not.

Of course, there are many different reports you can run in Google Analytics, many of which have to do with content, but keep an eye on the “Pages and Screens” report inside your GA4 “Engagement section.”

Google Analytics

As part of analyzing your content marketing data, take a close look at the performance of your landing pages. These are the pages visitors arrive at when clicking on your content:

Check how effective your landing pages are at converting visitors into leads and customers by analyzing metrics like: 

  • Views per user
  • Average engagement rate
  • Conversion rate

If metrics are poor, it’s a sign that landing page optimization should be a priority. Improve landing page conversion rates by running A/B tests on elements like:

  • Headlines
  • Copy
  • Calls-to-action
  • Layouts 

The better optimized your landing pages are, the more value you will get from your overall content marketing efforts.

 

Landing page optimization and testing needs to be an ongoing process as you continually create new content and campaigns over time.

Introduce new (AI) content marketing tools

Embracing new technology always helps marketers get to know innovative tactics and discover new marketing channels.

AI tools are in great variety these days, so it is a good idea to start there. There are:

Discuss with your team what needs work and what is going well

Looking at your data and metrics will give you a huge clue as to what is working and what isn’t working in your current content marketing strategy, so it’s important to go over this with your team and think of ways to help or reasons why something may not be working.

However, it’s also important to open the discussion up to new ideas that maybe aren’t shown in the data. This is where creative new ideas will come into play and how you will make sure you’re moving forward and not just improving upon what already exists.

Have a brainstorming session about topics, tone, etc. for future content

When meeting with your team, encourage them to share their ideas as to where your content strategy needs to be heading. After all, every person in your company is somehow connected to your company’s content strategy. 

  • Your social media team knows what spreads more. They also get to see your competitors’ and peers’ content on a daily basis, so they are aware of the recent content trends and memes that attract more engagement.
  • Your customer service team talks to your customers on a daily basis so they know what type of content will be helpful to your target audience.
  • Your product development team knows how to position your product in a way that stands out in the crowd of competing products, etc.

Every part of your team can contribute unique insights and help one another brainstorm more content ideas. This is a good time to try and introduce new collaborative technology that can make it possible for all your employees (in-house and remote) to contribute ideas. There are some solid phone apps that enable team collaboration through VR and social networking.

This will take a lot of brainstorming and will be a fluid effort throughout the year, but the sooner you can put a plan in place the easier it will be.

Identify community outreach goals and influencers to work with

There are bound to be new publications and influencers in your industry since last year (as well as some that you might see as up and coming), so create a spreadsheet to keep track of where you want to reach out and create relationships. 

This is something that you should be doing throughout the year, but spend some extra time on the task when creating a new plan. Knowing who influences your target audience can show you a new direction where your content strategy should be heading.

Delegate who will be in charge of what metrics, SEO, social, etc.

Of course, once you have all of your planning and goals set to go, someone has actually to make this happen.

If you are the only one in charge of the blog then you will need to create a list of what needs to be done each day, but if you own a small business you will hopefully have a few writers and other online marketing experts working with you to help your blog succeed. 

This means deciding who will be in charge of every little thing, which may include:

  • Who will be writing articles on the blog and other publications?
  • Who will be managing what relationships or going out to create certain relationships?
  • Who will be optimizing each piece of content for SEO?
  • Who will be monitoring and/or analyzing Google Analytics and the content metrics?
  • Who is in charge of managing social media accounts and/or YouTube and video?

Extra Note: If you don’t have an editorial content calendar in place yet, it is a great time to get started. This will help you stay organized and delegate work run much smoother. There are quite a few plugins that make delegating easier. If you’re getting advanced with your content and more frequent (which you should be), an editorial calendar will be incredibly helpful.

Conclusion: Set goals for your content plans and revisit this in frequent meetings

As always, you have to set goals for your content strategy and stick to them. Talk with your team and determine what you want to accomplish and where you want to be in one year, and then use these goals to help fuel your content strategy throughout the year.

A few great goals could include:

  • Specific metrics you want to hit, such as page views, clicks, a lower bounce rate, etc.
  • Types of content such as more videos or infographics
  • A certain number of articles per week
  • A certain number of social shares, and many more.
 

About the author

Ann Smarty is an SEO analyst at Internet Marketing Ninjas and the founder of Viral Content Bee. Ann has more than 13 years of experience creating and promoting content to help brands gain more visibility online. She writes about SEO, branding, competitor monitoring, and social media. You can see more of her articles here and here.

Tags: Business Reputation Marketing, Reputation Marketing, SEO.

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