10 Unique Content Marketing Tips That Drive Results

Do you want to boost your organic traffic but don't know how? Perhaps you'd like to increase your sign up rate but have no idea where to start.

Don't panic. We've scoured the web to find the most successful content marketing tactics and made a list of 10 content marketing tips that will help you reach your goals.

1. Align your content plan with your business goals

Benefit: Getting the BEST customer insights to write amazing articles that speak to your readers.

Within a business, content marketing can be used by many departments, including marketing, sales, product, and customer success team. It can even be used to raise funds or position your business as a industry leader.

So when developing your content strategy, make sure it ties in with the different departments and verticals of your business. To start, you need to clearly understand your company’s ambitions and who the different stakeholders are.

Then, speak:

• To the customer success team to learn from your current customers and the type of content that resonates most with them.
• To the product team to understand what aspect of the company’s product customers like or struggle with the most.
• To the sales team to find out what type of content you need to create the most to double the number of Monthly Qualified Leads (MQLs).

Doing so allows you to craft a marketing message that addresses the pain points of your potential customers.

2. Design shareable assets

Benefit: Increasing social media engagement and building a solid backlink profile.

Non-text content like images, infographics, videos, charts, or flyers, are essential to good content marketing as they make your content shareable. These types of content easily grab the attention of internet users, are easy to digest, and are easily shared on social media.

After analyzing more than a million articles, BuzzSumo found that articles with an image every 75 to 100 words received twice as many shares on social media as articles with fewer images.

Shareable assets can also strengthen your backlinks, help you establish yourself as an authority in your niche, and generate leads. For example, let’s say you create an infographic that covers relevant and current issues in your industry. It can quickly become the go-to resource in your industry, get widely shared and receive tons of backlinks.

3. Use the principles of the content marketing funnel

Benefit: Feeding your prospects with the right content at the right time to seamlessly move them through the decision process.

The buyer's journey consists of three stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion. In light of this, there are three types of content you can create to help move buyers through the different stages together.

Top of The Funnel (TOFU) - Awareness

This type of content is geared towards generating brand awareness, getting the word about your product and business. At this point, your content is aimed at people who have a generic problem and are looking for solutions/resources.

For example,someone who wants to learn about email marketing and comes across your article "The Beginner's Guide to Email Marketing."

Middle of The Funnel (MOFU) - Consideration

At this point, your content is aimed at an audience that is pain-aware and actively seeking solutions. This type of content positions your product as one of the potential solutions to be considered. Your goal is to generate interest and trigger consideration from your leads.

For example, someone is looking for ways to improve their web traffic and finds your article entitled, "How to Find Keywords With Traffic Potential." In the article, they learn about how they can do it using your software.

Bottom of The Funnel (BOFU) - Conversion

Here, your content aims to help the prospect make the purchasing decision. Usually, prospects at this stage of the buyer's journey explore several solutions like yours but struggle to decide. So your goal is to convince them that your software is the best.

For example, someone is looking for alternatives to Hubspot and comes across your article entitled, "7 Best Hubspot Alternatives." In this article, you place your software at the top of the list and write about all the features that make you a better alternative.

4. Create pain-point-related content

Benefit: Creating content that drives sales, user signups, trials, etc.

Most companies pursue traffic thinking it will help them increase leads.

So, for instance, based on this logic, if you have a task management tool like Asana or Trello, your goal would be to have 30,000 monthly visitors, hoping that it will get you 500 new leads per month.

So you create content like:

• “What a task management tool is and how it works”
• “The Beginner’s Guide to Task Management”

The problem with this type of content is that it is vague and does not address the reader’s actual problem. It will undoubtedly bring in new organic traffic but very few new leads. Besides, this type of article is not useful unless you’re creating an entirely new category.

Creating pain point related articles means taking a keyword and writing an article with an angle that speaks more to the reader’s intent.

For example, someone who Googles “Task Management Tool,” is probably looking for alternatives to Trello or is looking at all the options available to them. It would be absurd to target them with an article like, “What a task management tool is and how it works.”

You have a better chance of bringing in new deals by writing articles like:

• 7 Task Management Tools to Improve Your Team’s Productivity
• Task Management Tools: How to Choose The Right One

5. Create content clusters

Benefit: Building topical authority, dominating the SERP, and keeping a well-organized blog.

Content clusters are groups of interrelated content that collectively cover a broad topic. The topic cluster model is based on a hub and spoke structure. Each cluster has three essential elements:

• A general-purpose pillar page
• Several in-depth cluster pages
• Strategically placed internal links.

Here are real-life examples from Drift about Chatbot marketing and DietDoctor about keto dieting.

• Chatbot Learning Centre — By Drift
• Keto for Beginners — By DietDoctor

According to Jonas Sickler of Terakeet, the interest of creating content clusters is that they provide contextual support for other pages within a group. They also create a strong internal linking framework to help users—and search engines—find your content.

6. Use video content as part of your content marketing strategy

Benefit: Boosting engagement with visual content and diversifying content mediums.

Video content is taking off as a marketing strategy. In fact, video marketing is all the rage in digital marketing right now, and the statistics couldn’t be more convincing.

• Nine out of ten people want more brands to make videos (Hubspot)
• 83% of marketers report that videos help them find more qualified leads (Wyzowl)
• A marketing strategy that incorporates video can grow revenue 49% faster than a strategy that doesn’t (Wordstream)

In conclusion, there has never been a better time to start using videos in your marketing strategy.

Here is how to tie your video content to your content strategy.

• In your TOFU content strategy: You can use explainer videos, brand videos, company culture videos, etc.
• In your MOFU content strategy: You can use product videos, how-to videos, overview videos, demo videos, walkthrough videos, event videos, etc.
• In your BOFU content strategy: You can use testimonial videos, sales videos, personalized videos, training videos, case study videos, etc.

7. Collaborate with other industry players

Benefit: Building authority and winning new audiences.

Collaborating with other players in your industry is called collaborative marketing. It can help widen your content’s reach and provide authenticity to your brand. You can easily increase brand awareness, gain new customers and leads, and drive more conversions and revenue.

For all the marketers collaborating, it helps create a pool of recommended and trusted businesses.

Databox is one of the companies that find success with this strategy. They bring out like-minded marketers from different companies (with whom they can work effectively) to share their views and tips on achieving something specific the audience pool cares about. Here is an article exemplifying this.

8. Always match the 3 Cs of search intent

Benefit: Keeping your content in the good graces of Google and matching searchers’ intent.

No matter what type of content you create, you want to be sure Google keeps your website and content in its good books and that your content gets the traffic it deserves. The first step to achieving this is to nail down the three Cs of search intent.

• Content-type
• Content format
• Content angle

Google strives to suggest the most relevant answers to every search query, which means it matches the search intent behind every keyword. Here’s how.

Content-type

The most found content types on SERP include blog posts, videos, products, or landing pages. When creating content, your job consists of finding the most suited content type for your specific keyword.

For example, the most suited content type for the keyword “how to maintain a keto lifestyle” is a blog post.

Meanwhile, for “how to shoot a video,” Google suggested a video.

So, always factor in the content type when targeting a given keyword.

Content format

Content format usually falls into categories such as how-to articles, listicles, news articles, or opinion articles.

For example, the results for “content marketing tips” are mostly listicles:

At the same time, the results for “grasshopper vs ringcentral” are mostly opinion articles.

Thus, when writing about “Content Marketing Tips,” it’s bestto shoot for a format Google suggests is the best.

Content angle

The content angle refers to the unique value of your content. Ideally, you need to develop your content angle on your own. But it’s not a bad idea to look into the SERP before you do.

Here are the top results for “podcast mics.” Notice how each of the highlighted top-ranking posts takes a different angle.

Overall, the three Cs of search intent help you match your content with the preferences of Google and make it unique.

9. Build a content distribution strategy and stick to it

Benefit: Ensuring maximum engagement to your content.

We don’t talk enough about content distribution. Though, it remains the most effective way to ensure optimal engagement to your content. There is no point in creating content if it will not be distributed.

Effective content distribution can dramatically increase the exposure of your content, placing it in the places your target audience frequents. It also allows you to pick up some new readers and fans in the process.

Here are a few distribution strategies you can use.

• SEO for SERP: SEO is more of a distribution strategy than it is a content strategy. To get the most out of your SEO, follow best practices, such as placing the keyword in your titles, in metadata and title tags, and in your alt texts. This will increase your chances of ranking and getting organic traffic.
• Social media: Regularly post your new content on your social media accounts. Make sure though that you double down on the platforms that matter the most. If you sell a direct-to-consumer product, platforms like Facebook and Twitter make more sense to leverage. However, if you are targeting businesses, LinkedIn seems to be the ideal social platform.
• Paid promotion: Most of the time, the organic reach of your posts is not enough to attract many eyeballs to your content. This is where paid distribution comes into play. Basically, it stipulates that you pay for maximum reach. Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram are all platforms you can use for your paid promotion.
• Repurpose your content:  Repurposing content entails the use of one content across multiple platforms. For example, you can turn an article into a Twitter thread, a video into a blog post, a video into a Slideshare, a podcast into a blog article, answer questions on Quora and Reddit, etc.

10. Create thought leadership content

Benefit: Standing out from the competition and building authority, trust, and credibility.

There are over 7 million blog posts created on a daily basis. And as you look closely, you’ll realize that the content created across industries is similar, if not a copy of each other.

In a digital world full of sameness, it takes thought leadership content to stand out.

According to a study by Edelman and LinkedIn, 48% of B2B buyers awarded a deal to the organization responsible for the thought leadership content they consumed. And 42% of survey respondents invited a company to bid on a project (even when that company was not part of their initial selection criteria) because of thought leadership content.

Thought leadership influences brand perception, motivates decision-makers to act, and allows your target audience to determine your company’s trustworthiness, competence, and credibility.

Most importantly, thought leadership content helps you challenge the status quo and position yourself as the single source of truth in the industry.

Now, over to you

Know that there can be as many content marketing strategies and tips as marketers. The tips we share may not all apply to your content strategy. It’s up to you to choose which will work for you and implement them. You will need to consider your content marketing objectives, the current state of your content marketing strategy, and your business model.

While you’re at it, always be mindful of your target audience and the value you’re offering through your content marketing. After all, that is what it comes down to. Strive to be a solution people love, not a product they buy.

If you liked these tips and want to get to the next level by implementing some of them, here are some content strategy templates to start with.