It takes a lot to create high-quality content. It’s even likely that you’ve already implemented some strategies. To ensure consistency in your output, however, it’s good to look at easy and actionable ways you can improve your overall content strategy approach. 

Here’s how you can take your content to the next level: 

1. Remember to always lead with the benefit

In a lot of traditional advertising platforms—think traditional TV commercials—storytelling starts slow. They try to build up towards an exciting story, a big reveal or a story climax, and it ends with what the brand can do for you. Introducing the brand last, in theory, allows your brand to have better customer recall. 

And it often works. 

However, in the digital world, attention spans are shorter and the option to simply bounce off a page takes even less effort than pressing the button on the remote.

This kind of data will greatly impact the kind of content you will produce.

This is why digital content should always start with the benefit. 

Imagine recipe videos. They will usually start with an image of the final product—a delicious-looking dish that helps you understand why it’s worth spending the next five or 10 minutes learning how to make it. 

The same strategy should be used for anything you publish online—start with a clear benefit, say it in your headline, and be clear about what’s in it for your audience. Draw the reader’s attention and maintain it with high-value, quick-moving content.

2. Don’t focus on a single form of content

When it comes to content marketing, blog posts are the easiest to produce and publish. Videos statistically get the most engagements, while email marketing has proven to be effective by generating $42 for every $1 spent. 

With so many more people online in 2020, video became essential for marketing and communication. 

All things considered, if you’re only focusing on one format because that’s what you’re most comfortable producing, you’re missing out. To reach as many people as possible and communicate your message, you have to mix up your content. Some people will read your blog, others will appreciate your videos, some will zero in on your promotional offers via email. 

3. Automate key processes

Keeping everything organized is important to ensure the success of your overall content marketing strategy. For that reason, key aspects of your content marketing strategy can be automated. For example, editorial calendars to keep content production consistent and trackers to make sure your material gets posted in a timely manner.  

It will also help you free up more time to attend to core business practices. For example, instead of posting on social media daily, you can use Buffer to schedule everything ahead of time. You can also automate tracking metrics to systematically improve your strategy instead of manually tracking every single aspect that could contribute to your success.

4. Build testing into your overall strategy

Many marketers still don’t incorporate testing into their content marketing, or they do so only as an afterthought. 

In truth, evaluating your content plan effectively relies on accurate metrics. A good testing plan can help you decide on better headlines, visuals, buttons, and other ways to optimize your content to get engagement that converts. 

Testing is not only cost-efficient but you can easily get actionable results in less than a week—and it gives you clear next steps that take the guesswork out of marketing. You can use it to understand what audience group is more receptive to your message or what concepts or ideas resonate more with your core consumers. It can also help you understand how best to tweak your main messaging to maximize your ability to communicate with your audience and improve small elements that can boost your engagement.

5. Give your content better reach across new channels

Take a look at your current portfolio of content. At the very least, you will have blog posts. A lot of blog posts, probably. 

Don’t let them go to waste. 

As you review the content that you’ve created through the years, be sure to see if there are opportunities where you can repurpose the material on different channels. 

For example, this entire post could one day also work as a presentation. Take the key messages and combine them with appropriate visuals on SlideShare and you have yourself a new piece of content that you can use as a lead magnet. 

To improve your content strategy, consider taking your best-performing posts and repurposing old content and turning it into infographics, social cards, videos, GIFs. Creating these smaller, bite-sized media content types can boost your views over time and help improve your ranking on search engines. It makes it so much easier to cross-post as well on different social media platforms to gain even more ROI.

6. Don’t ignore the potential of new formats

We’ve talked about the value of diversifying your content format, but this goes beyond exploring tried and tested platforms like images and video. 

Think outside the box and explore what newer formats can also do for you if you want to improve your content strategy. 

For example, Stories or TikTok videos are great for informative content. If you can find your niche on these platforms, you’ll tap into a wider audience. Collabor8 is a social media network that helps connect brands to micro-influencers who can create exclusive, original content for you. There’s no harm in exploring any of these new platforms, especially since they’re all cost-efficient ways to improve your content marketing strategy. The results might even surprise you.

7.  Make SEO a key part of your overall strategy

There is no point in producing awesome content if it’s not ranking on search engines. No one will be able to find your content if you’re not making an effort to boost your SEO. You and your audience aren’t the only ones reading your content. 

Fact is, Google and other major search engines are reading what you’re creating and trying to decide if you’re worth showing to other interested readers. 

If you’re new to all this, something as simple as adding an SEO plugin to your blog post can help take care of a lot of the technical SEO details. Keyword research is critical and should always be an integral part of your content production process. 

Give these tips a try and let us know if the helped improve your content strategy. The great thing about them is that they can be easily implemented and it won’t take too long before you reap the rewards of your efforts. We would love to hear all about it. 

If you want to learn more, reach out to us. Book a consultation or get started with Leadspanda to find out how we can help you. 

For any questions, leave a comment below or check out our LinkedIn or Twitter.