This guide will give you actionable steps to take your content marketing strategy to the next level.

• Prioritize Content Marketing In Your Business
• Set compelling content marketing objectives for your business
• Create a strategic content marketing plan document
• Develop compelling content from your core message
• Determine exactly who your target audience is and what to say to them
• Optimize your content for promotion and make money from your content marketing efforts

Your content strategy should include long-form content for a few reasons:

Establishes industry-expertise.

Using guides, eBooks and extended blog posts gives you a chance to demonstrate your organization’s personality, and how you can help your audience. Publishing well thought-out, well-written, relevant long-form content pieces helps marketers demonstrate expertise, credibility and develop a thought-leadership position.

Attracts more attention.

Visitors spend more time with long-form content – it takes longer to scan and longer to read. The Google algorithm gives higher rankings to pages that have more time on page and have high social share activity.

Gives new life to existing content.

Long-form content gives you an opportunity to revisit past content from print media, videos and webinar events to re-publish as long-form pieces to get more life out of inactive content.

Extends content investment.

A comprehensive guide pays off the time and budget allocated for production in its ability to easily morph into a string of other content pieces. Long-form content can be chopped into blog series, infographics, interactives and slide decks that extend the value of your investment.

4 Keys to Raising Your Content Marketing Game

Content marketing has been, and will likely continue as, one of the most effective tools for businesses of any size to drive brand awareness. As Google and other search engines continue to refine their algorithms, businesses need to quickly step up their game when it comes to content marketing. Are you sure that you are doing enough to stand out from the increasing competition? The steps below will help keep you on your game when it comes to content marketing.

1. Quality vs. quantity.

First and foremost, understand that quality content is far more important than quantity. Far too often, many entrepreneurs and small business owners fall into the trap of believing that if they just churn out enough content, it will be enough to drive exposure and awareness. In the early days of the Internet, a strategy of churning out mindless content chock-full of keywords was sufficient.

2. Use data to drive content marketing.

Do not overlook the opportunity to leverage data to improve your content marketing strategy. Brands have a wealth of tools at their disposal today to mine different types of data to use in their content marketing strategy. For instance, after analyzing your data, you might find it beneficial to post more content on Tuesday, when engagement is higher, than on Friday when everyone is getting ready for the weekend.

Based on your data, you could determine which topics have higher levels of interaction and decide to increase the number of posts on those topics. Keep in mind that content marketing is highly personal in terms of what works and what does not. The only way to know what will work for your brand is to test it and track it. Tools such as Google and Bing webmaster, Twitter Analytics, and HootSuite can help you to determine which pieces of content are driving the most traffic, and gauge engagement on social media.

3. Keep it concise with infographics.

Consider experimenting with infographics. As more companies produce an ever-increasing amount of content across a broad spectrum of blogs and social media platforms, the attention of your audience is more divided than ever. Consequently, you need to deliver as much information as possible in a concise format. Infographics allow you to do that. It is little wonder that they have become a favored content medium.

While not every piece that you post should contain an infographic, if you have not already used these tools in your content marketing strategy, consider giving one a try to see what it does to drive traffic.

4. Make the headlines.

Finally, make sure you include headlines and sub headlines in your content. This will make your content more easily digestible.H1 and H2 tags are also heavily weighted in Google’s Panda algorithm, so they could help to improve your SEO.

Share The Right Thing At The Right Time In The Right Place

A lot of people do not realize that you need to be very careful when you are putting content out on social media. A single wrong move in your marketing can backfire and cause a lot of problems that you want to avoid. As social media has become part of our lives we have also become wiser to the way we use it.

This means that sending a direct sales pitch to your users is generally going to do more harm than good to your business. You should look at sharing useful and valuable information with your followers which help them improve their lives in some way. One of the best ways that you can get people hooked to your social content is to provide educational, entertaining and informative content with them.

Always Avoid Overselling

A lot of businesses that have problems engaging with their social audiences are guilty of being too self-serving in their content. While sharing a special sale or information about new items is a good idea, these posts should only make up a small part of your overall content. You need to look instead at engaging your audience without trying to sell them something.

A mixture of contests, inspirational information and tips will help you with this. You should look at encouraging discussions and have your followers ask you questions or share ideas. Marketing experts recommend that you have an 80:20 ratio for your content where 20% is promotional and80% is engaging informative content. You need to think about what your customers want and try to get in touch with their interests even if it is slightly off your business.

Leverage The Social Sharing Buttons

You need to have a sharing widget on each and every product that you are looking to sell because this will work in your favor. Many social media users like to share products that appeal to them so their friends can see what they are looking at or they can remind themselves about the product through their timeline. Of course, you will need to ensure that the social sharing buttons are placed correctly and should be in a prominent and accessible area of your webpage.

Exploit The Power Of Visual Content

A picture is worth a thousand words and you can easily exploit this when you use the right picture for social media. Image based content on social media will generally work better than text-based posts because images grab the attention of the user and at the end of the day the interaction you receive from customers matters. If you have textual information to share you can incorporate this into an image with ease. There are many examples of how interesting facts highlighted by images can add an edge t your marketing efforts.

Measure And Improve

One of the best things about social media marketing is the abundance of information about how your campaign is doing. It is possible to easily measure the effectiveness of your marketing across a number of different platforms. Using this information you can determine when the best time to post is and the content that is getting the most engagement. It is possible to then use all of the data to refine your marketing strategy through experimenting with your campaigns.