As the New Year looms, take time to look back over the past and evaluate your content marketing efforts.
Go Long
A recent study with Buzzfeed and Curata revealed that content gets more impactful and effective the longer it is. Blog posts over 1,000 words are far more effective than shorter posts. Over 2,000 words, effectiveness leaps up again.
What’s the reason for this? When you have a longer article you are able to cover related topics and reference relevant issues. This means a single article will rank for multiple keywords and phrases in search engines. That means your content will appear more often, boosting your “expert” status.
Use More Visuals
Adding eye-catching images to your content can make your content click-bait and increase engagement. People engage with digital devices differently than a magazine and need more context to understand and immerse themselves in written text. It’s easy to get lost in a screen full of copy, but basic additions like pictures, custom graphics and pull quotes can break up text to make it easier to read and understand.
Write a “Bestseller”
No one wants to read boring content – even if it’s about a technical subject. Readers expect us to bring the topic to life and convey the information they want in a way that’s useful and enjoyable. There are lots of ways to improve the quality of your content, from writing more clearly and concisely, to making sure it provides lots of useful information, to displaying it in a visually engaging way.
Harness the Power of Your Employees
An often underestimated and overlooked source of sharing is your staff. Research from LinkedIn has shown that only 3% of employees share company content but this generates 30% of content engagement for a typical business.
While that stat alone is powerful it also shows how much potential is being left unused. Advocate with your team a shared understanding of what you’re trying to achieve and the benefits different partners get and build a strategy that makes it easy for your employees to share your content.
Recycle
When you create great content think about all the different ways you can use it. When you invest huge amounts of effort into creating an eBook or white paper, make the plan of how to repurpose and repackage it to get the most mileage from it. For every one piece of truly high-impact content that you create, it should be able to translate into at least five other smaller pieces.