10 Ways to Get More for Less From Your Content Marketing

By Taylor Ryan

Everyone knows that content is king, but why is content marketing so important? And what can we do to get it right?

A majority of companies (84%) include content marketing in their overall marketing strategy. While content marketing has a number of benefits, cost-effectiveness is regularly suggested by marketers to be one of the biggest ones.

Content marketing has a high return on investment, making it good value for your money; 37% of companies stated that they invested $10,000 or less on content marketing in 2020, according to one study.

In this article we’ve outlined 10 ways to get more for less from your content marketing. We’ve also highlighted the benefits a strong content marketing strategy provides any business.

10 tips to get more from your content marketing efforts

1. Find out what your customers need

If you want customers to stay on your website and read your articles, you have to find out what they are interested in, and create content they will love. You can do this with a very small budget by simply asking customers directly through the following channels:

• Comment section of your social media accounts—Your audience should have the chance to give direct feedback on your content as well as leave suggestions and questions for upcoming content.
• Email marketing campaigns—Measure which campaigns have a high conversion rate or have a call-to-action that is linked to a survey. Offering feedback options will help you customize your content to your readers' needs.
• Customer satisfaction surveys—Surveys can be phrased to show you what topics interest customers.
• Product reviews—Product reviews not only tell you what customers think of your product, but also the topics they are interested in. For example, if your company sells electronics and multiple customers ask the same question about a certain product in their reviews, this question is clearly a topic customers are interested in and that you should develop content around.

Getting content ideas from your audience allows you to directly answer customer questions, which makes your content invaluable to them, while also making your brand more interesting and trustworthy. It also strengthens your relationship with your customers by directly involving them in the content-creation process.

2. Deliver your content at the right time

Posting or uploading your content when no one is online is, needless to say, a waste of time. The optimum days and times for posting content will vary, depending not only on the platform that you are using, but also on your type of business. Tweets from a B2B business, for example, will have higher engagement on weekdays, while a B2C business will have higher Twitter engagement on Wednesdays and weekdays.

Experiment with different posting times and discover what works for your brand. You will need to monitor engagement rates and, subsequently, adjust your publishing time frames based on the data you collect.

Different kinds of content work for different stages of the customer journey and it is important to match your content to those stages. For example, while social media contests are a great way to raise brand awareness to prospective customers, newsletters are more useful for retaining customers.

3. Provide helpful information to your readers

Content marketing only indirectly promotes your products and services—it’s primarily a user-focused technique. For your content to be successful, it needs to target the readers’ interests.

You’re not going to satisfy your customers’ needs, like finding out how to use a particular tool or design a campaign, by simply brushing over a topic. Long-term content, a piece of writing that's typically between 1,000 and 7,500 words in length, gives you the space to work through a subject in-depth, making it truly useful to your audience. This usefulness is evident in the higher traffic long-form content statistically generates.

What kind of content might be useful to your audience? The answer varies, but often it's educational content in the following formats:

• Top tips
• Case studies
• How-to blogs
• Reviews

These types of content are often considered evergreen because they continue to be relevant, and hence, generate traffic over an extended period of time. You will, of course, have to update this content from time to time to ensure it stays accurate. In the next section, we’ll take a more detailed look at what an update entails.

4. Rework old content

Old can be gold. Old does not mean a piece of content can’t be useful anymore. Sometimes a little "makeover" can do a lot of magic to revive old content.

If your content includes statistics, replace them with current ones. Rewrite passages that are no longer relevant, and if there are new trends, add them to your copy. Change wordings to include new buzzwords and to reflect current best practices.

Also, update headlines. Do a fresh keyword search and switch out or add new keywords to get your content back on Google's radar for future searches. We’ll take a detailed look at how an optimized headline can boost your content’s performance in a later section.

5. Become an expert

How would you feel if your mechanic suddenly started giving you advice about your physical health? Make sure you focus on content that demonstrates your expertise, and write about topics that matter to your business, your industry, and your customers.

Collect original data and use it to provide a unique perspective on something in your industry. Original research and case studies demonstrate transparency and set your business apart from competitors. It also shows your audience your commitment to quality. If you include other people's data, choose high-quality sources.

Establish your business as a reliable source for information in your field. It will help you rank higher in Google searches, and it doesn’t cost anything.

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6. Quality over quantity

Creating a lot of content in a short period of time might seem like a good idea at first, but it will quickly turn against you if it’s of low quality. If you want to save money, quality should be your primary focus, and only publish your best work. The circle of writing, editing, and rewriting might take a little longer, but it will pay off in terms of engagement from your audience.

7. Optimize your headlines

Having great content is key, but it's useless if you can’t grab your audience's attention. Uninspiring headlines are a common cause. Headlines are meant to catch your audience's attention, and they need to be captivating.

Take time to write a good headline. Think of the “50-50 rule” by successful advertising executive David Ogilvy: when creating content, spend half the time writing the headline, and half the time writing the body of the text.

Optimizing your headlines also involves SEO title optimization. Keeping an eye on it while writing your headlines will help  you to reach a better rank in SERPs (search engine results pages).

8. Choose the right channels

Content can be published in many different ways, but that does not mean you have to do them all. On the contrary, to keep costs down while maintaining the quality of your output, you should only publish on an easily manageable number of platforms. Choose the types of content that you feel most comfortable with and that your business can create without additional financial expenditures.

These are the five most common types of content companies use:

• Blog articles
• Videos
• Infographics
• Podcasts
• Ebooks

Not all of them will work for your business. Depending on which form you choose, you should consider different platforms to publish them. Blog articles are best for websites, while videos and infographics can be published on social media. Some kinds of content are best shared through email marketing.

You should also consider the platforms that your audience uses the most and make sure your content is suitable for those channels.

9. Promote your content

Promoting your content does not mean that you have to spend a huge amount of money. Besides paid promotions, which include keyword buying and cost-per-click systems, there are two very effective ways to promote your content without additional costs:

• Use your email newsletter to link your latest published content.
• Interact directly with followers through social media. Place links in posts, bios, or stories to bring new content to their attention. You can also share links to problem-solving content in your comments when questions come up.

As you can see, promotion doesn’t have to be expensive. If you use the right tools and focus on the right sites, your promotion strategy can be almost cost-free.

10. Measure content performance

There’s no point in using a variety of content marketing strategies if you don’t find out which ones are actually working for you. You should be measuring content performance constantly. Here are a few questions that can help you structure your analysis:

• How are click and engagement rates developing?
• How much time on average does a customer spend on your website?
• Where do your clicks come from (links, social media, searches)?
• How do your customers react to your content?
• Does your content convert?

These are questions you should be asking regularly to know whether your content strategy is working. And you don't necessarily need expensive analytics. As we discussed earlier, many of these questions can be answered through customer feedback.

And for those questions that need to be answered through analysis services, Googles Analytics is free and is a perfectly good place to start. Additionally, if you’re using automation software, such as email campaign software, you can make the most of their in-built analytics to track your performance.

Big rewards from content marketing

It might seem complicated at first, but once you get the hang of it, content marketing is a great way to enhance your SEO and improve your brand's reputation. It will also help you gain traction on your social media accounts and establish your authority as an expert in your industry.

A content marketing strategy doesn’t have to cost a huge amount of money. Focusing on the details and being aware of your audience’s needs will take you a long way.

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