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Content Marketing Tips: The Ultimate Content Marketing Guide for Beginners


Content Marketing Tips: The Ultimate Content Marketing Guide for Beginners

Are you looking to get started with content marketing? If so, check out this guide to learn the top content marketing tips for beginners.

Keyword(s): Content Marketing Tips

You don't need a mega list of content marketing tips to be successful with content marketing. The content basics are more than enough to do well.

In this guide, you'll get the low-down on digital content marketing.

Those of you ready to commit should prepare to put in hard work. Following this guide will create real results. Excited? Let's get right to it.

Step 1: Brainstorm and Confirm Content Ideas

Your first content marketing task is brainstorming content ideas. Approach this process without being critical. Entertain every idea because you never know what may spawn from the previous.

Brainstorming Content Ideas

Start with some of the easy content ideas:

  • Answers to common questions held by your community
  • Guides and tutorials on how to use your products or services
  • Lists and roundups talking about interesting things in your industry

Then, start expanding on the content ideas by doing the following:

  • Round up your top 10 competitors and look at what they're publishing
  • Use a keyword research tool to find topics based on search metrics
  • Source ideas from community polling, analytics, and feedback

These six techniques will offer hundreds of content ideas. Compile them in a spreadsheet, then go back through them noting which stand out. The refined list will become your core content ideas -- but first, you'll have them validated.

Validating Content Ideas

What sounds interesting or beneficial to you may not be so with the community. Not validating topics can waste time and resources, so vet every idea. You'll want to target specific topics with proven interest.

A super simple way of doing so is like this:

  1. Search for the primary keyword of the topic into Google
  2. Look to see if anyone is advertising for this topic
  3. Check the top results, their debt, and comment count

The results of this tell us two important things:

  1. Someone is paying real money to show up in results
  2. People are responding to the topic, and it has potential

It's tedious but go through and do this for your main content list. Finish this task and you'll have what's needed to roll out a great content campaign.

Step 2: Develop a Content Plan and Schedule

Great content requires great execution. A plan and schedule create consistent marketing results. This section shares how to set yourself up for success.

Define the Goal

What is the underlying purpose and drive for content efforts? It is:

  • Sales
  • Branding
  • Awareness
  • Reputation

Defining a goal aligns efforts and resources. Everyone is on the same page with delivering great content. This means the content will resonate with your audience as it aligns with their intent.

Know the Audience (And Yourself)

Two quick questions to answer:

  • Who is your audience?
  • What are your abilities?

Define your audience by assessing who buys from the business. Or, looking at who the competition is attracting. Then, create an hold this image while creating content to always touch on points that matter to them.

Likewise, know what you're capable of and your content abilities:

  • Use a content format befit to your abilities
  • Outsource content you can't handle

Syncing content to a defined audience attracts the leads you truly want.

Form the Plan and Set the Schedule

Create a content marketing plan:

  1. Outline the goal(s)
  2. Define the audience
  3. Select the content types
  4. Choose when to publish
  5. Outline and record everything

A spreadsheet is ideal for the plan and schedule. A basic week, month, and year outline will suffice, listing the content topic and who's making it.

Step 3: Create Great Content (And Support It)

The easiest part of content marketing is its creation. That's because you already have what it takes to create content. It's a matter of learning the nuances for creating content for the Web.

Creating Content

Written content is like creating a research paper that's easy to skim:

  1. Header/title
  2. Introduction
  3. Body content
  4. Outro + call-to-action

Look at the structure of this article. Notice how there are many headings, sub-headings, lists, and such? That lets you skim the content.

There are a few things you'll want in written pieces:

  • Primary and secondary keywords
  • Phrases and sub-topics

These are the terms and phrases people search on Google to find the content. Including them can define the content's direction and give people what they want. This is your basic on-page SEO (more on that in the next section).

As for audio or video content:

  1. Write everything out
  2. Record the content
  3. Publish it

Microphone or camera shy? Consider hiring a video pro that does the narration. This lets you get video and audio for a podcast in one swoop.

Supporting Content

Plan to support published content as time goes on:

  1. Identify high traffic pages with site analytics
  2. Update the content with new keywords and topics
  3. Add extra promotions or call-to-actions if possible

The hard work was done the first time around creating the content. Supporting it lets it continue to gain search and social traction. It also keeps it relevant, so it remains valuable to the community and the industry at large.

Step 4: Promote Content Like an Asset

An asset holds value. Content isn't disposable when it holds value. Seeing content as an asset encourages proper support and promotion.

SEO and Social Media Marketing

Use SEO to improve the content's performance:

  • Fill content gaps and expand topics (this adds more keywords)
  • Build links to the page (guest posting does great for link building)
  • Fix page issues and performance (strive for fast, responsive design)

It's also important you get content everywhere.

Here are a few ways to leverage social media marketing:

  • Published and paid promotions via a Facebook business page
  • Tweeted and included in hashtags or discussions on Twitter
  • Connected with businesspeople via DMs on LinkedIn
  • Partnered with supporting images and video on Instagram and YouTube

The more people content gets to the better. Each new set of eyeballs could help with its promotion and distribution. Many people may become leads having consumed the content in the process, too!

Advertising and Paid Promotion

Remember having seen content and landing pages in Google and ads during brainstorming? Now it's your turn to do this advertising and promotion!

Begin exploring opportunities with:

  • Google Ads
  • Facebook Ads

These two ad platforms have low technical barriers and learning curves.

A simple campaign could look like this:

  1. Choose a great content piece (backed by site analytics)
  2. Set up the ad profile and configure tracking
  3. Write a captivating headline, body, and CTA
  4. Fund the ad and start driving traffic to the content
  5. Test and track the campaign, making changes to improve its ROI

This is an extremely simplified overview of paid content promotion. But, the core concepts are there for you to explore. Or, pass to ad pros who can set up and run these campaigns on your behalf.

Go Beyond Content Marketing Tips and Tricks

The content marketing tips and strategies in this guide lays a foundation. It offers a way to craft regular, great content the community wants and needs. Follow through this guide and, no doubt, traffic, and sales will increase.

What happens next? Double-up on content efforts!

Continue following the content plan and schedule. But, support and double it by tapping into freelance content services. Discover next-level marketing services in our content writing marketplace.

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