You have questions about content marketing strategies? I have answers. This article covers 15 of the questions I get asked most often, and their answers.
Table of Contents
- What’s the Difference Between Content Marketing and Content Strategy?
- Is Content Strategy Worth the Investment?
- How Can I Tell If My Content Marketing Strategy Is Effective?
- If Content Marketing Isn’t Supposed to Be “Salesy”, How Does it Work?
- Why Should I Give Away My Expertise for Free?
- What’s the Most Efficient Way to Use Content Marketing to Increase My Brand Awareness and Authority?
- Where Do You Get Inspiration for Content Marketing Topics?
- How Can I Make Content that Stands Out from the Crowd?
- What Does Voice Search Mean for Content Marketing Strategists?
- How Can I Make Content That Goes Viral?
- What’s the Difference Between Traffic and Audience?
- How Many Buyer Personas Do We Need?
- How Can I Create Content for Different Audiences?
- Why Isn’t My Content Marketing Strategy Getting Results?
- Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Killing Content Marketing??
1) What’s the Difference Between Content Marketing and Content Marketing Strategy?
Content marketing deals primarily with content creation, whereas content marketing strategy deals with the data and analysis side of content marketing. You can write a blog post about whatever interests you right now and call it content marketing, but not a content marketing strategy.
Content marketing strategy involves researching keywords, trending topics, topic gaps, and gathering data on your audience to make sure the content you create is relevant to their interests.
Content marketing involves creating and distributing content for your audience, whereas content marketing strategy determines what topics you cover in your content, when you publish it, where and how you distribute it, etc.
2) Is Content Marketing Strategy Worth the Investment?
If done properly, your content marketing strategy should bring in more than enough business to make up for what you spend on it. The proper SEO techniques should help drive traffic, while the value of the content, combined with a strong (and relevant) call to action, should help convert those leads into customers.
According to a study conducted by Hubspot, leads brought in through proper use of SEO have a 14.6% conversion rate. And my clients have certainly seen a significant ROI from my efforts.
Whether content marketing strategy is worth your time and effort depends on how you define “worth it”. That means you not only have to determine how much money you’re spending on your content marketing strategy, you also have to define the goals you want to achieve with your content.
Determining how much you’re spending is easy if you’re hiring a professional content marketing strategist, but if you’re doing it yourself, you need to assign a dollar value to your time (literally think about how much your time is worth), measure how much time you spend on your content marketing strategy, and measure how much business it brings in to determine the ROI of your content marketing strategy.
3) How Can I Tell if My Content Marketing Strategy Is Effective?
Part of maintaining an effective content marketing strategy requires measuring the results. That means you have to know, not only how many visitors you have to your site, but how they got there. Did they follow a link on social media? Or put in a specific search term that led them to your site? If so, which social media channel? Which search term brought them to your site, and what content did they find as a result?
You also need to keep track of your conversions. High traffic is great, but it’s not going to help you pay the bills. So, in addition to keeping track of which pages and blog posts are getting the most traffic, you also need to know which ones are getting the highest conversion rate. If people keep finding a particular page or blog post, but not converting, the content might not be relevant to the search terms that are bringing them to you, or your call to action might be off base.
4) If Content Marketing Isn’t Supposed to Be “Salesy”, How Does It Work?
I know this might feel like a trick. The only reason you have a website, much less spend all that time and effort creating content for it, is to sell your products/services. But how are you supposed to do that if your content isn’t supposed to sell anything?
The key is to provide value. Create content your audience wants to see. For example, before someone hires a lawyer, they might search all sorts of things related to their problem, such as “what to do if you get sued” or “how to evict a tenant.” If they find your site, they’ll look for information that can help them without hiring an attorney. If their situation reaches the point where they need an attorney, you’ll be top of mind for them because of your incredibly valuable and relevant content.
This is also where your call to actions come in. It should be at the end of your content and should always be relevant to where your audience is in the buyer journey. For example, someone who found your blog by searching “how to …” is probably not looking to buy right now, but they might sign up for your mailing list. If you use their email address to keep sending them useful, well-written content, they’ll remember you when they are ready to buy (or when they know someone who is.)
5) Why Should I Give Away My Expertise for Free?
First of all, you’re not giving away all your tricks in your blog posts. Some trade secrets should always remain secret.
Second, you’ve spent years building up your expertise. That’s a lot of time spent studying, researching and conducting experiments to see what works and what doesn’t. Does your audience really have time to do all that themselves? Even if they did, you’re probably using software specific to your industry to help you do your job better. Is your audience going to pay for that software in addition to putting in the time and effort to learn everything you’ve learned over the years?
Probably not. Some of them might try, and if they never buy from you, it’s probably because they can’t afford you. Those who can afford you will see your value because all that content will demonstrate how well you know your industry – but it’s only after they’ve gotten that “proof” that they’ll hire you.
6) What’s the Most Efficient Way to Use Content Marketing Strategy to Increase My Brand Awareness and Authority?
This is where the strategy part comes in. You have to know where your audience is hanging out online, what search terms they’re using, as well as their search intent when using each keyword. Go where they are and create content centered around the search terms they’re using to look for companies just like yours.
7) Where Do You Get Inspiration for Content Marketing Topics?
I covered this in a whole other blog post, which you can read here.
8) How Can I Make Content that Stands Out from the Crowd?
In 2023, there are about 7.5 million blog posts being published every day!
And that number is only going up as more business owners and marketers understand the value of blogging and invest more resources into it.
So, as with just about every aspect of a successful blogging strategy, the key to standing out from the crowd is a) knowing your audience and making sure your content addresses their needs; and b) strategizing the topics your content covers by finding gaps in the existing content, and creating content around those gaps.
There’s also a third requirement, which is developing a voice and tone that is unique to your brand and making sure you consistently use that voice in all your content. It’s a way to “brand” all your content as yours, even without your logo (although you should absolutely still include your logo with all your content).
9) What Does Voice Search Mean for Content Marketing Strategists?
The world of content marketing strategy and SEO is constantly changing as the way people search for answers to their problems continues to change, Google adjusts its algorithm to accommodate those changes, and we marketers scramble to keep up with the constant changes to Google’s algorithm.
There’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that voice search is changing the way people look for information, which means marketers have to change their tactics accordingly. Mostly, this means keyword research is more important than ever, but it also means marketers will have to be aware of which virtual assistants their audience is using. Google Home uses Google. Siri uses Bing, and Alexa uses both Bing and your personal Amazon shopping history. Depending on which tool your audience tends to use for voice search, playing by Google’s rules might not always be in your best interest, whereas paying attention to how Bing prioritizes information is likely to become more important, especially given the recent antitrust lawsuit against Google.
10) How Can I Make Content that Goes Viral?
There’s no proven formula for making content go viral, but there are a few things that most viral content seems to have in common:
- Originality
- Humor
- Connection to a trending topic. For example, if you know your audience tends to love Star Wars, then coming up with Star Wars-related content around the same time a new Star Wars movie is released, or on May 4th, could help boost your content to viral levels.
- Human connection
- Interactive
- Contains lists and/or images
- Short
- A compelling headline
11) What’s the Difference Between Traffic and Audience?
Traffic is composed of people who visit your site and then leave, whereas an audience is defined as the people who hang around, follow you on social media, subscribe to your newsletter, etc. They’re the ones who should be helping you define your content marketing strategy because they’re more likely to convert into customers.
12) How Many Buyer Personas Do We Need?
Buyer personas are important, but you shouldn’t put too much stock in them. They’re a great way to narrow down the focus of your marketing efforts to make sure it’s relevant to your target audience, and while that’s important, you also have to remember that not everyone in your audience will perfectly match your personas. They may have a few things in common, but they’re still a diverse group of people with their own interests.
Creating 2-3 buyer personas should account for most of these differences and cover the broadest spectrum of your audience. At the very least you should have one for each gender, unless, for some reason, you’re only targeting one gender, such as women for your women’s networking group.
Either way, it’s important to remember not to rely too heavily on your audience personas. If you’re talking to a client or looking over client survey responses and something doesn’t line up with any of your personas, it’s best to adjust one or more of your personas than dismiss what your clients are telling you.
13) How Can I Create Content for Different Audiences?
If you’re working with multiple personas, you might be wondering how you can create content that speaks to each of them without alienating the others.
This is where it’s important to remember what every member of your audience has in common with every other member of your audience: they all need your products/services.
If you have different products/services that serve different markets, it’s fine to create content that speaks to each market and leads them back to the landing pages for the relevant products/services you offer.
This is also where content clusters are great. For each market you serve, you can create one ultimate-guide-style piece of content detailing how your products/services can solve the problems of people in that particular section of the market. Then you can create a string of blog posts, all linking back to that ultimate guide. Not only is this great for your SEO, it also helps make sure each section of your audience finds the content that’s most relevant to them.
14) Why Isn’t My Content Marketing Strategy Getting Results?
It depends on what you mean by “results”. Is your content failing to get traffic, or is it getting traffic, but failing to convert any of those leads?
If it’s not getting traffic, the answer could be a lack of understanding of SEO and/or failure to promote the content to your audience. Do you share it on social media? In your newsletter? Is it answering your audience’s questions, or is it just more white noise? If your content isn’t driving traffic, it’s time to reassess your strategy because something is missing.
If your content is driving traffic, but not converting leads, there are a few things that could be going wrong. The first thing to look at is your call to action. Do you have one? Is it effective? And is it appropriate to where the audience is in the buyer journey?
For example, it it’s a blog post that answers a question for your audience, it’s likely attracting people who are searching for answers to that question, but aren’t necessarily looking to buy (yet.)
In that case, ending with a call to action that asks them to buy right away is not likely to get results. If, on the other hand, you ask them to sign up for your newsletter, sign up for your webinar, or download your lead magnet, that’s a small ask that is much more relevant to that stage of the buyer journey and is more likely to get results. Then those visitors become part of your audience and you can reel them in slowly by putting more and more relevant content in front of them until they are ready to buy (and/or refer you to their friends and family).
15) Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) Killing Content Marketing?
No.
I wish I could leave it there, but I get asked so many different versions of this question, that it merits a longer response.
First of all, do I use AI to create content?
No.
I’ve tried, but I found I had to spend so much time editing the content it “generated” for me that, far from saving me time, using AI actually took 50% longer than writing a similar post of the same length from scratch. I timed it to be sure.
As a result, I wasn’t surprised when I heard that the people who benefit the most from AI are those who are new to their jobs and still learning the ropes.
The ones who have had their gig for a while and know everything there is to know see very little (if any) benefit from AI.
I’m a fast writer and I know what I’m talking about, so there’s not much AI can do for me … at least not when it comes to creating content.
What AI can help me with is data analysis and overcoming writer’s block.
I might have an idea of what to say, but not know how to get started. By putting something into ChatGPT or another AI writing software, I can take what it gives me as a jumping off point.
I think the real benefit of AI is data analysis. Give it a bunch of information and then ask it to summarize that information for you. Ask it questions about that information to help you dive deeper into it. I’ve seen people do some pretty amazing things with AI when it comes to data analysis.
That’s because data is a computer’s wheelhouse.
What’s not in a computer’s wheelhouse is telling a story, which is an incredibly important aspect of any successful content marketing strategy. A computer can give you a list of facts, but who wants to read that?
Your readers want you to tell them a story. A story will help make the abstract concepts you’re talking about real.
A story is also much more engaging and easier to remember than a list of facts.
The other thing AI can’t do is tell you something you haven’t heard before.
When AI “creates” content, it’s really just assembling a bunch of information from the internet and regurgitating it for you.
That leaves you with a bunch of the same stale, old information everyone else has already said.
That does nothing to set you apart as a thought leader in your industry. To accomplish that, you need to say something people have not heard anywhere else.
15)(b) AI and SEO
The one thing about generative AI that does have me concerned is people using it as a search engine. That means people aren’t visiting the websites of those of us who spent all that time and energy creating the content the AI software used to provide an answer to their user.
If they never see our website, how are we supposed to lead them through our buyer journey?
Either AI software will need to start providing links to the resources it uses when “generating” content, or we are going to have to adapt and find other ways to get prospects into our funnel.
Conclusion
If you only take away one thing from this post, it should be that content marketing strategy is a long game. If you’ve just launched a new website and/or rebranded, don’t get discouraged if you don’t see results right away. Give Google time to index your pages and posts, and for your audience to find you. It won’t happen overnight, but if you come up with a winning strategy and you’re consistent with it, you’ll see results.
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