Less than half of B2B marketers claim to be doing content marketing effectively. Either these types of marketers are too modest or over 58% of them are unsure how to market content the right way. With over 60% of marketers creating new content daily, there’s an excessive amount of content users have to sift through each day. In order to help improve content marketing for not only marketers, but us users out there trying to digest all of this content each day, let’s read a few tips from the experts: Michael, Matt, and Johnny.

The tips below are content marketing techniques to help improve exposure, as well as a few advanced techniques to help get your content “out of the box”. See where your content may be missing the beat and how to help improve it’s reach.

Research Where Your Target Audience Hangs Out

The most common mistake in content marketing is an insufficient amount of attention to researching your target audience. As soon as you spot where your target audience spends most of their time, consider you found a treasure!

Those might be:

• Facebook groups
• Pinterest Boards
• Instagram
• Relevant Blogs
• Online Communities

Be active in these communities and constantly make new friends. Help. And ask for help when you need it.

Identify The Most Active Users

Influencers, regular visitors, and bloggers. Those who comment the most, have high authority – they must become your target.

Build friendly relationships with them. Do something useful, something they’re interested in the most.

Learn the details. Have a close look at what type of posts they share on their social media accounts.

Become friends. Write a simple “thank-you” email. Here’s an example of such email:

Don’t Rely Solely on Subscribers to Promote Content

A common mistake in content marketing is an insufficient and off-target promotion of content. That’s why so many posts get a minimal number of comments and social shares.

It’s not enough to just send an email informing your subscribers of your new post. It’s important to email this news also to those who is maximally interested in it.  In my case, Commenter Technique works awesomely well.

I’ve written only four blog posts, but each of them averagely got 80 comments and more than 900 social shares! And that’s all because I contacted my target audience that needed my content.

Use the Power of Long-Form Content

When planning your content marketing strategy study which type of content is most popular in your niche. What is the average number of words each of your competitors’ article has? How many images, etc.

When I was launching my blog in the niche of online marketing, I did my home task.

I studied my competitors.

I found out that averagely each of their posts contains more than 4,000 words!!!

Use the Power of Friendship

It’s very difficult to choose the right strategy when you don’t have your audience or visitors.

You still don’t know your possibilities.

To take the full advantage of content marketing ask others for advice.

You will be surprised how well marketers and regular bloggers react when you ask them to help you in your research or give advice. It’s very important to make one clear question and return the favor by creating a link to those who gave you these recommendations.

Not so long ago I wrote an article on how to create a first blog post to start getting the traffic from the first day. I wrote more than 8,000 words, but I didn’t stop in that. I asked 100 other bloggers to give me advice out of their personal experience. 63 people replied, and as a result, I had a post more than 16,000 words long.

1,2k social shares, 87 comments, 500 new subscribers, and 5,609 unique pageviews – these are the results that you can obtain too!

-Michael Pozdnev 

Michael wants to be your friend, and he has recently launched a blog called IWANNABEABLOGGER. He is a lazy dreamer, but he’s also an SEO professional with 15 years of experience.

Help Journalists Visualize the Story

Visual content marketing (infographics, whitepapers, videos and interactives) are the medium in which editorial links to your content are possible.  Editorial links are a form of citation for the internet.  These links should take readers to the source of the content within a story. Visual content marketing helps journalists to visualize a story while also sourcing the data in the story correctly.

Which one of these examples are more engaging to a reader?  A block of long text, or a short block of text with visually engaging content?  Create content that can help someone else tell a story or content that builds upon an already existing story. This will help get your content in front of large audiences.

Find the ‘Content Gap’

Every industry has conventional wisdom.  It’s common knowledge that everyone agrees on, but it’s so common that no one questions it.  They don’t research it.  They don’t support it with data or statistics.  The goal here is to find the missing data or stats within the industry you are creating content for.

Step 1) Find the missing data/statistics that doesn’t exist yet

Step 2) Find a new and interesting perspective on it.

Mitigate Your Risks by Testing Your Content Idea before Development

Creating and promoting content takes both time and money.  You want to know your idea is going to work before sinking a lot of time and resources into it. By testing your content idea before development, you can find out if people actually are interested in the content you are creating. Reach out to thought leaders on the topic idea or journalists who have covered the topic extensively. Don’t guess what they’re looking for, let them tell you what they’re looking for.  This type of feedback will give you an idea of whether or not this content idea is viable.

Matt Zajechowski

Matt Zajechowski is the Senior Outreach Manager at Digital Third Coast a progressive internet marketing agency in Chicago. 

Never Stop Measuring and Testing

An piece of content’s life should never stop after it’s published. Track traffic, keep an eye on search engine ranking, and measure the click through rates on all of your CTAs. Even if a piece of content performs well, it can always do better! If you use a system that lets you A/B test, try out different images, buttons, and copy. Just remember to test one variable at a time.