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Content marketing has become a big part of consumer engagement and attracting the attention of the right audience online. That means that a lot more companies are doing it, and it’s getting increasingly challenging to stand out amid the sea of audio, video, images, documents, blogs, and more.

To make matters worse, virtually every marketer and business owner have found themselves in a rut trying to create enough marketing content, get the desired engagement, and find interesting ways to innovate.

Research shows that that 70% of B2B marketers are creating more content than they were the year before, and 54% find it difficult to produce engaging content.

There’s a distinct difference between B2B and B2C marketing, and each comes with its own unique challenges. Despite that, you can still benefit from these tips to get out of that rut and start to churn out something new and exciting.

Here are 24 content marketing tips you need to know in order to become a ‘Marketing Prodigy’:

1. Use your content to gently guide your customers through your buying cycle. Don’t treat it like a speedboat, full-throttle through to conversion.
2. Use social ads as a way to amplify the reach of your content marketing when you push it out through your social channels. A slight budget boost on Facebook can go a long way.
3. Promote your content through a .com domain as often as possible.84% of top-ranking pages use .com as their top-level domain.
4. “The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing,”says Tom Fishburne of Marketoonist. If you have to force your audience to see the value in the content, or hard sell it, it won’t work. Build content around a takeaway for the audience.
5. Don’t write short posts just to get the job done and over with. Write long-form content of 1,000+ words to help improve your search rank, traffic, and value to the reader.
6. Create a buyer persona before you start planning or producing content. That way you have a better understanding of who is reading it and the answers they’re looking for. That leads to much higher conversions.
7. Guest blog on popular industry sites and put a link back to your site within your byline or bio. This builds traffic as well as personal brand authority.
8. Avoid verbose headlines and go with short, simple, optimized titles that get the point across. The closer you get to looking like click-bait, the more wary your audience may become.
9. Never skip an opportunity to leverage email in your content marketing.80% of businesses report that email is directly tied to their primary revenue.
10. Blog consistently, not sporadically. According to a recent survey, 82% of marketers who blogged daily reported acquiring at least one customer via their blog, compared to 57% who were only blogging monthly.
11. Share your own content and use the social sharing buttons next to your content. You can use a plugin to make this process even easier.
12. Re-purpose old content in a new way to bring something fresh to users who may not have seen it. “In the end, the re-purposed content needs to provide some level of unique value to people, or it’s not worth doing,” says Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Marketing.
13. Syndicate your content to reach a new audience and drive referral traffic back to your site.
14. Always create a content strategy. The most effective content marketers are more likely to have a documented strategy in place.
15. Create a strategy for content promotion. Use a checklist for each post that lists all of the social channels and applications you’ll use to promote your content.
16. Always have a plan for building your audience. Use time-saving content marketing tools that work with you to help organically grow your following.
17. Make reference to influencers by linking to their content or quoting them within your content marketing. Then reach out and let them know when you’ve mentioned them, either through manual social notifications, via email, or with an online marketing tool.
18. Don’t generate one-off pieces of content. Create series pieces to drive repeat traffic.
19. Remember to use the basic principles of conversion optimization so that all of your content, on every channel, has a higher chance of generating leads and sales for your team. Think about headlines, visual engagement, content layout, and call to action, just to name a few.
20. Pay close attention to your analytics so you can keep track of the most popular topics and content types that are bringing in or driving traffic to your site. Do a lot more of what works, and cut the dead weight from your strategy.
21. Trending content is important, but remember to include evergreen content that will continue to product traffic month after month, year after year.
22. Always keep the focus on your audience when you produce content, no matter the type or channel. “Don’t focus on having a great blog,” says Brian Clark, Founder of CopyBlogger. “Focus on producing a blog that’s great for your readers.”
23. Talk and write as if you were having a conversation with a friend. Your audience is far more likely to relate to and engage with content that is conversational in nature. Speak on their level. You’re not a textbook.
24. You can’t force good writing. Try different conditions, influences, and times of day for writing. Find the conditions that are most conducive to your creativity. If you can’t manage, you can always turn to freelancers to help you produce the content that your audience is hungry to find.

We hope you have found these 24 tips useful. Explore different ways of utilising them in your marketing strategy to see how they can work for you! The difference in traffic generation could be astounding and prove to be worth every effort. Good luck!

Are you interested in careers in marketing? We may have the perfect opportunity for you! Check out our latest Marketing Manager role by following this link.

– Sujan Patel