90% of organizations use content as marketing material. This strategy is effective because it helps expand your business’ reach by connecting with and engaging the right audiences.
However, with over 50 billion web pages already on the internet and millions more being added daily, many content marketers struggle to stand out.
Over the past decade, I’ve helped dozens of businesses grow their online presence through content that attracts the right visitors—the ones most likely to purchase their products or services.
Now, I’m about to share game-changing content marketing tips that have helped companies skyrocket their online lead generation, with increases of up to 10x in the first year.
Ready to transform your content strategy and start seeing impressive results? Let’s jump in!
1. Know Your Target Audience
The entire content creation process starts with understanding your targeted audience.
When all is complete, you want your content to speak directly to your audience and generate an emotional or intellectual connection. This connection happens when you tailor your content to speak directly to the needs and desires of your ideal customer.
For example, if you’re selling a first-time homebuyer’s kit, your target demographic will likely be individuals in their late 20s to early 30s. Targeting content at seniors, who may have already purchased multiple homes, would miss the mark.
To create targeted content, conduct research on:
- Demographics: Key details such as age, location, gender, income, education, and more.
- Psychographics: What are their interests, values, motivations, and behaviours?
- Pain Points: What challenges are they facing that your product or service can help solve.
This research forms the foundation of your buyer profile. It’s important to develop profiles for each customer segment your product or service targets.
With this information, you’ll be able to craft content that resonates at every stage of the buyer’s journey, addressing the unique needs of each audience segment along the way.
2. Map Out Your Buyer’s Journey
When creating content for each stage of the buyer’s journey, the next tip is to take the time to map it out and document it for all stakeholders.
This step is crucial for ensuring that each piece of content you publish has a clear purpose and contributes to creating an effective content marketing funnel.
Without a mapped-out journey, your content efforts can feel disjointed. This is the #1 reason your content marketing efforts may generate high traffic but lead to minimal conversions.
To understand where your audience is in their journey, observe the following:
- Awareness Stage: Your audience identifies a problem but hasn’t found a solution yet. Look for early-stage research and common questions. For example, in the health industry, people might ask, “How can you improve sleep quality?”
- Consideration Stage: Prospects are comparing solutions. Track engagement, such as visits to product pages or requests for more information. In education, students may research various programs or universities.
- Decision Stage: Leads are ready to make a purchase. Watch for high-intent actions like pricing inquiries or demo requests. In software, prospects might sign up for a free trial or ask for a consultation.
By understanding how your audience behaves at each stage, you’ll be better positioned to map out a strategy that aligns with their needs and moves them toward conversion.
3. Establish Your Goals and KPIs
My final tip for pre-content planning is to set clear goals and KPIs for your content marketing campaign.
Without these clear indicators, you have no way of evaluating the overall success of your effective content marketing strategy.
You may just be saying, “Well, I want my content marketing to increase sales.”
This is too broad. It’s not a clear goal.
To truly move the needle, you need specific, measurable goals that will guide your efforts and help you achieve the bigger picture.
A content marketing goal should focus on metrics you can directly influence. For example, you might consider:
- Increase in Website Traffic: A clear indicator of growing brand awareness and potential lead generation.
- Increase in Shares: A sign of audience engagement and content resonance.
- Conversions: The ultimate indicator of success, whether it’s a sale or advancing your audience to the next stage of the funnel.
It’s also important to manage your expectations. Content marketing takes time. Set realistic and attainable goals—like a 20% monthly increase in website traffic—and measure progress toward them.
Your goals should be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. This clarity will help you focus your efforts and measure the success of each content piece accurately to yield the numerous benefits of content marketing.
4. Create a Content Marketing Strategy
If you’ve followed the previous tips, you now have everything you need to build a solid content marketing strategy.
At this stage, it’s time to define the type of content you’ll create, where you’ll publish it, and the topics you’ll cover to reach your target audience and build a seamless marketing funnel.
Think of your content strategy as the roadmap guiding your entire content creation process.
Whether it’s blog posts, video marketing, infographics, podcasts, or social media updates, every piece of content should serve a purpose and align with your overall strategy.
By creating and documenting your content strategy, you ensure that each piece of content moves your audience through the buyer’s journey, ultimately leading to brand loyalty and boosting conversions.
5. Establish an Editorial Process for Creating Content
With your content strategy in hand, the next step is establishing a clear editorial process. I strongly recommend against diving into content creation without this structure in place.
First, define roles and responsibilities within your team—from content creators to editors and approvers. This clarity ensures everyone knows their role, making collaboration smoother and more efficient.
Next, set clear guidelines for content quality, tone, and branding to maintain consistency across all platforms. This helps ensure your messaging resonates with your audience and stays aligned with your brand voice.
Finally, compile everything into a content calendar, including deadlines, content creators, and necessary details like keywords and SEO elements. This helps keep your team organized and focused on delivering content on time.
When done properly, a well-established editorial process reduces errors, boosts collaboration, and ensures content meets your goals and audience needs.
6. Create Compelling Content That Provides Value
You’d think this would go without saying: Do NOT create content just for search engines.
Whether it’s blog content, video content, or social media posts, the #1 content creation tip I can give is to create content first for a human audience.
The first and primary goal of your marketing content should be to engage and communicate with your target audience. You don’t accomplish this by focusing your content on search engines.
In fact, if it helps, don’t even think about SEO elements on your first draft. They can be incorporated later.
Instead, focus on delivering value, not just through the topics you cover but also through the way you communicate with them.
Speaking to your audience and providing helpful, value-driven insights is the key to creating engaging content that converts potential customers into loyal fans of your brand.
7. Optimize for Search Engines (SEO)
This content marketing tip needs to be mentioned here because while optimizing for search engines is important, you shouldn’t let it compromise quality content.
Yes, you want your content to speak to your audience—but it also needs to reach them first.
That’s where SEO comes in.
Incorporating the right keywords, distributing them throughout the content, and incorporating other SEO elements, such as meta descriptions, alt tags, and header optimizations, are paramount to ranking your content on search engines.
But, as I said earlier, these can all be added after the content is made. First and foremost, focus on quality.
8. Focus on Creating Topical Authority
This tip blends SEO benefits with content strategy: focus on creating topical authority.
Building topical authority establishes your brand as an expert in your niche. This leads to increased trust in your brand—both for purchasing decisions and for search engines when ranking your relevant content on search engine result pages (SERPs).
So now the big question: How do you create this topical authority.
Start with whatever general keyword you want to rank for. Often, this is the product or service you are selling, such as Birthday Gift Basket.
A product page selling birthday gift baskets serves as your pillar. Then, to build authority around the topic, you create what is called cluster content, targeting related keywords, like:
- Best birthday gifts for mom
- Best birthday gifts for dad
- Birthday gift basket ideas
- What to get someone for their birthday
By providing helpful content around these topics, you’ll become a go-to resource for birthday gifting. This will increase trust with your audience and help search engines recognize you as an authority in your niche.
9. Maintain a Consistent Editorial Calendar
We’ve already touched on the importance of a content calendar, but another key content marketing tip is to maintain a consistent publication schedule.
Search engines love fresh content.
Whether it’s Google, social media, or any other search engine, it’s important to set a publication schedule and stick with it.
In fact, businesses that publish 16 or more blog posts per month generate 3.5 times more traffic.
The more content you publish, the better it will perform. However, a big note: This Only Works If The Content is High-Quality.
Don’t let ambitions to hit publication milestones affect the overall end results.
If you only have time to publish four quality posts monthly, do that. If you have to do less, that is okay.
Slowly build up your publication schedule over time and as your resources permit.
10. Publish a Mix of Evergreen and Seasonal Content
Another content strategy tip is to publish a mix of evergreen and seasonal content.
- Evergreen Content: These are timeless pieces that remain relevant over the long term. Think how-to guides, product demos, and educational content that always provides value. This content continues to drive traffic and generate leads long after publication.
- Seasonal Content: This is content tied to specific events, holidays, or trends. It helps keep your content fresh and relevant to what’s happening right now, driving engagement during peak times.
By publishing both types, you ensure a steady stream of content that maintains long-term value while also capitalizing on seasonal opportunities for increased visibility and engagement.
11. Repurpose & Promote Your Content
One of the smartest strategies in content marketing is repurposing existing content.
You’ve invested time and effort into creating great content—now make sure to get the most out of it by repurposing it across different formats and marketing channels.
For example, you can turn a blog post into an infographic, a podcast, or a series of social media posts. This will help you reach different audiences who prefer various types of content and ensure that your content gets maximum exposure.
Distributing content across multiple marketing channels increases its visibility and extends its lifespan. The more distribution you get, the better the chance of engaging new audiences and driving more traffic.
12. Run Regular Content Audits
As stated earlier, search engines love fresh content.
However, one content marketing tip I didn’t mention is that it doesn’t have to be new content. You can update your existing content to generate new interest.
The easiest way to do this is to run frequent content audits.
Regularly reviewing your content can identify areas where you have outdated information, update it with the most current trends, and revitalise its search engine optimization.
In the process, you ensure your audience always gets the most accurate, valuable, and engaging information.
13. Track Performance and Analytics
This is another one that should go without saying but is actually neglected by many content marketers. You NEED to track performance.
If you are investing a lot of money into your content campaign, you need to be able to visualize the results to justify the investment.
Use analytics tools like Google Analytics, social media insights, and email campaign reports to measure key metrics such as traffic, engagement, bounce rates, and conversions.
These insights give you a clear picture of how your content is performing and where you can make adjustments.
By consistently monitoring your content’s performance, you can refine your strategy and continue delivering the content that resonates most with your audience.
14. Make Data-Driven Decisions to Improve Your Strategy
Many of these content marketing tips can be summarized in one point: Use data to drive your decision-making.
Instead of relying on guesswork, use the insights gathered from your analytics to inform your strategy. Whether it’s adjusting your content topics, publishing frequency, or distribution methods, data should guide your decisions to achieve better results.
By continuously analyzing performance and adapting based on the data, you’ll enhance your content marketing efforts and achieve more effective outcomes over time.
15. Hire a Professional
Here’s the thing with content marketing: You can do it yourself, but it requires a lot of patience and time to figure out what works and what doesn’t.
The quickest way to start generating results with minimal resources is to hire a professional.
At Kurt’sCopy, we bring a decade of experience crafting effective content marketing strategies that yield measurable results.
Stop wasting time and money on ineffective strategies. Contact us today for a free consultation and a custom content strategy tailored to your needs.
Kurt Norris is the founder of Kurt’sCopy, where he helps B2B, e-commerce, SaaS, and local businesses craft compelling content and SEO strategies that deliver measurable results. With over six years of experience, Kurt specializes in creating data-driven campaigns that drive traffic, increase conversions, and establish brand authority.
