How to Better Optimize Your Content Strategy

Content is king; there’s no doubting that. And while fresh content might not always be the most effective way to boost one’s rankings when compared to backlinks, creating compelling content that people want to read is essential to any content strategy as it fosters customer loyalty and increases a company’s online visibility. 

However, just because most marketers and SEOs agree that content is central, the Content Marketing Institute found that only 41% of marketers feel that their content strategy is organized and working. Part of why they may be feeling unorganized is because the CMI also found that only 20% of B2C and 50% of B2B gets any engagement at all. 

So how do you get your content strategy better optimized? As we’ve discussed before, one the of the secrets of content marketing is knowing your audience and delivering relevant content that answers questions they might ask. Searches in the form of questions are on the rise, and both blogs and video content are seeing a serious boost in search visibility. 

But what is the best and more time-efficient way to delivering the content that your audience will truly want to read and share? Even when competing against larger companies with more resources, being smart and looking to the areas not being covered by competitors is the fastest way to come up with topics that your audience will actually read. Or watch. Or listen to in a podcast. The fact of the matter is that content marketing is a multi-faceted endeavor that takes in every aspect of an organization’s visual materials. Mix it up and experiment with slideshares and social-shareable images. 

The other half of the content marketing pie is devising a means to measure your ROI in a way that produces actionable insights and meaningful results. But tracking ROI can be tricky, though the tools are getting better. Where only 21% of B2B marketers reported successful ROI tracking in 2015, today 72% are measuring their content, and 79% are using tools to do so. 

But the tools are only part of the puzzle. You need meaningful KPIs that fully communicate the success or failure of your content. Thus, you should be looking at your content’s performance over the course of the entire sales funnel–from lead generation to nurturing the audience you build, conversion, sales, and even post-sales and retention. Site traffic and social shares are also top metrics that B2B and B2C marketers use to determine the fate of a piece of content. 

Lastly, SEO can often be overlooked in the scramble to produce new and fresh content, but it’s more a matter of having an actionable checklist in place to ensure nothing gets left behind. From readability standards to title tag optimization, meta descriptions, subheadings, images and text in line with current SEO standards, you can ensure that not only will your audience find your content engaging, but will be able to find it easily too.