An A to Z of Content Marketing Best Practices
There’s a lot to know about content marketing. You’ve got the content creation part, the social media part, the SEO. The audience growth, the influencers… Sometimes it seems like it just goes on and on.
That’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good because it means there’s always more to learn. There are always new techniques to master, new technologies to try out. It keeps things interesting, and keeps your skill sets sharp and growing.
The bad part? Well, if you’re the type who’d like to just learn something once and then keep doing it the same way forever … that’s not going to work very well.
To give you a broad view of the content marketing best practices now in being used in the industry, we thought we’d package them up like ABCs. Odds are good you’re already doing most of these. But maybe there’s one or two you could add to your quiver. Keep reading to find out. 
Audience
You know how real estate is about “location, location, location?” Content marketing is about audience, audience, audience. That’s because the whole point of content marketing is to attract and engage an audience. It’s “owned media”, as the agency folks would say.
Audience is also a factor in persona marketing – the technique of breaking up your customers into different profiles, and then creating content and a sales funnel that’s tailored to each group.
Blog
The anchor of many content marketing programs. Use your blog as a content engine by reformatting what you publish there into ebooks, infographics, SlideShares and more. Also make sure you’ve got your blog set up for maximum lead generation. Blogs are particularly effective for that.
Call to Action
And its sister best practice – conversion optimization. Every piece of content you publish should have a call to action. Even if the call to action is just to like, comment or share. Using the call to action to lead people to another piece of content works well, too.
Data
As in data-driven marketing. Smart marketers are data-savvy. They know when to trust their data and when to question its limits. They are genius at shifting it for maximum actionable insights. They obsess about data quality. Their data wisdom gets applied to every aspect of their content marketing, from strategy to choosing a blog post title.
Engagement
It’s the thing we’re all focused on. Unfortunately, engagement rates appear to be in decline. To stay ahead of that trend, apply what you can from these best practices.
Say what you will of the social Goliath. It’s the master of sharing. Recent research showed Facebook drives more referral traffic than even Google for the top 400 digital publishers.