10 Best Practices for Content Marketing

Content marketing is the new buzzword, but what is it exactly? It’s the strategic marketing approach of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action. If you’re new to content marketing, I recommend checking out our Content Marketing for Purpose-Driven Businesses article first.  

These are the best content marketing practices in 2024. 

Create client personas first 

The foundation of a successful content marketing strategy is in deeply understanding each audience and doing some audience segmentation with client personas. You need to develop empathy for your audience on a very personal level and your personas or ideal client avatars will help you do that.   

This should include individualizing your personas with a name, outlining their business background, thinking about a day in their life, considering what their descriptive objectives are, including problems or questions they might have. Consider their content preferences and keywords they might use in searching for your content and what phase they are in the search process. 

If you don’t go through this process and revert to the age-old approach of only thinking about the message you want to broadcast – chances are your content will not be found and or utilized in the way that you want.  

Think about how your content can be the solution to their problems 

Now that you have your client personas, it should be easier to identify what problems and challenges they have. Do they have an unarticulated problem and are they even aware of the problem? Once you start to put yourself in their shoes, you’ll get more ideas for content you can create for each client persona.  

Use the holy trinity 

The holy trinity of content marketing is search, email, and social. All three channels should be used when thinking about sharing content marketing resources. For search, you want to make sure your content and pages are optimized with keywords and phrases. For email, create intrigue in subject lines and tease the value of a resource in the copy. For social, keep your client personas and the channel in mind for best practices.   

Use media to share content 

We just talked about the holy trinity which would be your owned or “free” channels. You should also use other media to share content like paid, earned, and shared. Paid media is what your brand pays for to increase traffic. It could be display ads, social media ads, and search engine marketing. It could also be offline paid media like billboards, tv ads, and direct mail. Earned media is media that you earn via word of mouth. It could be publicity from media outlets, SEO, review sites, and social media. This can have the highest return on investment and can be extremely effective. You could share your content in related Facebook groups to increase word of mouth and get more traffic to your site. Shared media is when someone shares your content and engages with it. It could be any of the popular social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram, partnerships, influencers, and sponsorships. In an ideal world, your content marketing strategy should use a variety of these media to share content! 

Set a goal for each resource you create 

For content marketing, you want to choose one goal per resource, and not one goal for your entire strategy. This way, you’re not only focusing on one part of the customer journey, but instead can create many resources to reach leads at any part of the journey.  

Goals: 

• Brand awareness 
• Attracting new customers 
• Fostering brand loyalty 
• Staking your claim in SEO 
• Engaging with customers 
• Educating current and potential customers 

Establish your KPIs 

You should also create key performance indicators, or KPIs, to track results. The difference between a goal and a KPI is — the goal is the outcome you hope to achieve and the KPI is a metric to let you know how well you’re doing working towards that goal. So once you know your goal and you establish what channels you’re using, then come back and set your KPIs.  

KPIs you could track:  

• Number of conversions 
• Conversion rate 
• Number of leads 
• New customers 
• Cost per lead 
• Downloads 
• Organic site traffic 

Create content that engages 

Does your content have helpful graphics, illustrations, or photos? Are you only talking about your company in your content or are you educating the audience? Are you sharing real-life examples, anecdotes, or statistics? These are great ways to make your content engaging for the audience. 

Create content that converts 

You can create content that converts by knowing your audience and teasing the value of what they can learn after downloading your content. What knowledge will a person walk away with after giving you their email? The more intrigue and value you tease, the more likely they’ll opt-in. Everything after that should be a piece of cake!  

Start with one resource 

Content marketing is a learning game. Focus on one resource at a time so you can work out the kinks, because there will be some! Write all the copy at one time so you don’t need to go back and do it later. You’ll learn important lessons with that first resource that you can apply to the following ones.   

Be open, flexible, and patient 

There are many ins and outs of content marketing so be open to discarding an idea for a better one, be flexible when timelines and priorities change, and patient when mistakes are made. You got this!  

Want to know more? We have a free video with more tips for buttoning up your content marketing strategy here:

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KidGlov is a content marketing agency and certified B Corp with offices in Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska, specializing in nonprofit marketing, healthcare marketing, financial marketing, social marketing and purpose-driven businesses.