11 Content Marketing Tips to Improve Your Strategy

Need new ideas to improve your brand's content marketing?

Here are 11 content marketing tips you can implement today.

1. Understand Your Target Audience With Segments

Divide your audience into smaller segments with shared interests so you can create content that is more likely to resonate with the people you want to reach.

These segments can help you further understand your target audience. And create more personalized content that can increase engagement and turn more people from casual followers to loyal fans.

For example, a general campaign about a sale might grab the attention of your entire audience. However, segmenting your audience by interests-like highlighting discounts on eco-friendly products to sustainability enthusiasts-can make your campaign feel more relevant and potentially drive more purchases.

Segment your audience by factors like interests, age, location, or purchasing habits.

Learn more granular details about your audience by:

• Surveying and interviewing customers to uncover their challenges, frustrations, and interests
• Reviewing customer feedback from reviews, testimonials, or customer service interactions to spot themes and needs
• Reviewing reports from reliable sources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics for demographic insights
• Monitoring online forums like Reddit, where your audience discusses relevant topics
• Purchasing industry research reports from places like IBISWorld to uncover market trends

You can learn about your audience's interests with Semrush's Market Explorer tool.

Enter at least three competitor domains and click "Create and analyze."

Then, go to the "Audience" tab to learn more about your target audience.

Get ideas for audience segments from the "Interests" section of this report.

For example, you can create an audience segment for your customers who are interested in "Travel & Tourism." And another one for customers interested in "Finance."

Look at the "Social Media" section to discover which social platforms your audience spends the most time on. That way, you can tailor your content marketing strategy to platforms your audience hangs out on.

After you gather data, create profiles for each of your audience segments using Semrush's free persona template. Like this one:

Your team can then use the personas while brainstorming to make sure your content addresses audience needs on a more granular level.

2. Ensure All Content Has a Clear Goal

All your content should contribute to overarching business goals, such as improving brand awareness, generating leads, or increasing repeat purchases.

To tie your content back to your goals, align each piece of content with one of the four stages of the marketing funnel (a model of the customer journey):

• Awareness: Users in the awareness stage are looking for information. Goals in this stage may be to educate, build brand recognition, and generate interest in your business. Examples of content that generate awareness include informational posts and "how-to" guides.
• Consideration: Prospects in the consideration stage want to understand their options and find solutions to their problems. Goals in this stage could be to demonstrate expertise, highlight unique value propositions, and provide social proof. Examples of content that address customers at the consideration stage are customer testimonials, product comparisons, and case studies.
• Conversion: Prospects in the conversion stage have found a solution to their problems and turned into customers. Some goals in this stage could be to provide useful information to reduce refund requests and increase product adoption. Examples of post-purchase content are product tutorials and support documents.
• Loyalty: Loyal prospects continue to use your services and recommend your offers to other people. Goals in this stage might be to provide ongoing value, create brand advocates, and develop deeper customer relationships through personalized content. Examples of content for this stage include ongoing educational resources.

As you build your content marketing plan, analyze your existing content, its goals, and its placement within the marketing funnel. Identify any gaps or weak areas where you lack content to guide potential customers to the next stage.

These gaps represent opportunities to develop targeted content that can strengthen your customer journey, improve engagement, and, ultimately, drive more conversions.

3. Identify Competitor Content Gaps

Identify competitor gaps (keywords your competitors rank for that you don't) and fill them with your own content so you can take traffic from your rivals and increase your visibility in the search results.

Use the Keyword Gap tool to find competitor content gaps.

Enter your domain and the domains of up to four competitors. And click "Compare."

Pay attention to the "Missing" column (keywords you don't rank for but all of the entered competitors do). And the "Untapped" column (keywords you don't rank for but at least one of your entered competitors do).

Review the keywords and make sure each keyword aligns with your personas and their interests. Then, create blog posts and pages for each relevant keyword.

4. Align Content with User Needs

Making sure your content delivers what your audience wants and expects will likely lead to better results-no matter what format or channel you're using.

For example, your audience on social media might prefer a short video with high-level information rather than a long and in-depth video.

Review the performance of your past social posts and analyze those of your competitors to identify what your audience prefers.

Look for posts that receive the highest levels of engagement, such as likes, shares, or comments.

Then, model your content after the highest-performing posts. To try and meet user needs.

When creating content like blog posts and guides, make sure those pieces align with search intent -the reason someone searches a query. Because content that matches intent is more likely to rank and be of interest.

There are four main types of search intent:

• Informational: The searcher wants to learn about a topic
• Navigational: The searcher wants to find a specific website or page (like a company's contact page)
• Commercial: The searcher wants to learn about brands, products, or services-usually before making a purchase
• Transactional: The searcher wants to complete an action like making a purchase

You can determine search intent by searching a keyword and reviewing the content that ranks for it on Google's first page.

For example, the intent for "best coffee grinders" is likely commercial. Meaning searchers likely want a list of top coffee grinders for comparison.

Which is exactly what the search results show.

Making sure your format aligns with the ranking content can increase the chance of Google ranking your site higher in search results.

5. Promote Content Using Multiple Channels

Sharing your content across various channels can increase each piece's reach and help you drive more engagement.

Lean on channels you've already built an audience on-like your email list and your social media accounts. Also, explore other promotional avenues like:

• Banner ads: Place banner ads-ads on other websites that link back to your content-on sites your audience visits. Ad management platforms like Bannerflow can help place your ads on relevant sites.
• Influencers: Partner with industry influencers and ask them to share your content to tap into their networks
• Paid social media ads: Use social media ads to expand the reach of popular posts
• Guest posts: Write guest blogs (blogs you write for other sites that list you as the author) that promote a piece of content for influential sites in your niche
• Newsletter ads: Promote your content within another brand's newsletter. Platforms like Paved can connect you with relevant publications that accept advertisements.
• Search ads: Create ads on search engines so you rank at the top of the results for specific keywords related to your content

Here are search ads that promote reports for the term "state of b2b marketing:"

6. Experiment With New Content Formats

Experimenting with new content lets you discover what resonates most with your audience so you can refine your strategy and deliver engaging content each time you post.

Some content ideas include:

• Interviews with industry experts
• Case studies
• Short- and long-form videos
• Research reports
• Memes
• Webinars and courses
• User-generated content
• Ebooks
• Whitepapers
• Podcasts
• Infographics

For example, this Semrush infographic contains tips to improve your content:

After experimenting with different types of content, compare the new content's engagement (such as likes, shares, or views) to other popular pieces to understand which formats perform best. And which formats deserve your focus moving forward.

7. Focus On User Experience (UX)

A good user experience keeps people engaged with your content for longer and may increase the chance that users will become followers or fans of your brand.

For example, a reader may be more likely to read a blog post that uses a clear, legible font over a blog post with a font that's difficult to read.

Here are some tips to improve your content's UX:

• Add closed captions or subtitles to videos so people can watch your videos without sound
• Add alt text -text that describes an image for search engines and screen readers-to images on social media and your website
• Avoid text-heavy images with small font sizes that are difficult to read
• Ensure your content is legible on all screen sizes
• Make links different colors than body text so users can easily find clickable elements
• Use descriptive anchor text (the clickable part of a link) so users know a linked page's topic
• Use clear headers on your website to organize your information and make scanning easy
• Keep paragraphs short-a few sentences or less-so readers don't feel overwhelmed with walls of text
• Incorporate visuals such as images and videos to break up website text
• Write simply and clearly so readers can easily understand your content. Tools like the Hemingway Editor evaluate the readability of your text. Usually, you'll want to aim for a score between 60 or higher. As reading scores in that range are suitable for most adults. Like this:

8. Continually Optimize and Update Content

Updating blog content can improve your rankings and increase the credibility of your content.

Update blog posts that are declining in rankings, contain outdated information, or never ranked well to begin with.

Google Search Console (GSC) can help you monitor keyword positions. That way, you can easily see when your blog posts need to be updated.

Log in to your GSC account and select your property. Click "Search results." Toggle on "Average position" and turn off the default "Total clicks" and "Total impressions."

Click "More."

Then, click "Compare," select which period you want to compare keyword positions for, and click "Apply."

Scroll down and look for keywords that have the greatest position difference. As these are the ones that have fallen the most in position.

Finally, click on the "Pages" tab to view the page associated with the keyword. So you know which page to optimize.

Assess whether or not the article needs to be updated.

If the answer is yes, paste or import that article into Semrush's SEO Writing Assistant to get writing suggestions based on your text's readability, tone, originality, and SEO.

Enter your target keywords, adjust the audience, and click "Get recommendations."

SWA will grade your text based on readability, SEO, originality, and tone of voice. Click through the recommendations and apply the tips to improve your score in all four categories.

For example, clicking "SEO" gives you suggestions for recommended keywords to add to your blog post.

Then, publish your newly updated content to your site.

9. Create Topic Clusters

Topic clusters are groups of related pages that can help you build site authority, which can lead to ranking higher in the search results.

Clusters contain one pillar (main) page that links out to other related pages. Related pages link to the pillar page and one another. (The process of linking related pages on your website is called internal linking.)

Here's an example of a topic cluster:

Semrush's Keyword Strategy Builder automatically creates topic clusters.

Head into the tool and enter one to five seed keywords (very broad keywords relevant to your niche). Click "Create list."

Scroll to the "Page Details" section to view the different pillar and subpage ideas. Click the "Write content" button and select "SEO Writing Assistant" to directly send the page's keywords to the SEO Writing Assistant tool. So you can begin writing-and optimizing-your new pages.

Publish your optimized pages, and remember to include internal links to and from your pillar and subpages.

10. Conduct and Publish Original Research

Conducting original research can position your brand as an authority and attract backlinks-i.e., links from other websites to your site.

Google views backlinks from reputable websites as votes of confidence. Which can help your content rank higher in search results.

For example, the image below compares the number of backlinks for a piece of original research Semrush published versus a blog post. The original research has over five times the number of backlinks compared to the blog post.

Types of original research you can create include:

• Case studies
• Whitepapers
• Surveys
• Industry reports
• Data analyses based on your own data

11. Incorporate Trending Topics

Trending topics (topics relevant for a brief period) can give you a momentary spike in traffic, help your brand stay relevant, and keep your brand relevant within your industry.

Find trending topics to write about in Google Trends< /a>' "Trending now" tab and adjust the filters to find topics relevant to your niche.

For example, the image below shows a spike in interest for the topic "fireplace." And the "In the news" section gives you context as to why the topic is trending. This context can help you write a piece that matches search intent.

While evergreen content (i.e., content that remains relevant for a long period) should generally make up the majority of your posts in most niches, trending content can give you opportunities to engage your audience right now.

Finding the Best Strategies for Your Brand

Test different content marketing tips yourself to see which strategies have the greatest impact on your brand.

Semrush offers a variety of tools to help you learn about your audience, optimize articles, and more.

Ready to try out the above content marketing advice?

Try Semrush for free.

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