The 2024 Guide to Creating a Content Marketing Strategy: What’s New and What Works

Do you know that every second over 6,000 tweets are posted, rapidly adding to the digital chaos?

It’s like screaming into a hurricane.

But here’s the epiphany – it’s not about the loudest voice but the most resonant message.
B2B content marketing is no longer a simple game of keywords; it’s a challenge of delivering laser-targeted insights laden from one human to another.

Unprecedented choices have left the modern consumer skeptical and selective, giving rise to a new content marketing mantra: treat your content as a conversation, not a sales pitch.

I want to guide you through the same strategy I’ve build over the last 3 years for my consulting clients to the tune of 1,200% growth in a year.

The same concept resulting in a 350% increase over six months

“We have 50 posts on the site, but we might as well have nothing when look at what’s converting…”

Sound familiar?

There’s a lot of discussion around content marketing. Most of it is wrong. It’s primarily based on content creation and has been mislabelled. What we’re seeing is a vast increase in spending and budget behind content creation but a chasm when it comes to content marketing strategy.

If you’re going to spend any time or money on your blog. You NEED to have a content strategy.

This isn’t for everyone. This isn’t for businesses that just want to have a blog. Or are overloading their junior marketers with writing the white papers, sales pages, newsletters, and social posts.

(Junior marketers, I got you, I’ve been there. It gets better).

This is for the business that wants to grow a blog to become one of their biggest income generators.

Want all the deets but prefer listening to reading?

No problem, you can listen to the discussion of this blog on our Podcast, Content Conversations. Or, grab a listen right here:

The 8 Steps to a Great Content Marketing Strategy

The content on your site is only as good as the strategy behind it. If we’re talking about content like a mini product, and we should be, why aren’t you putting your content to market?

If there is no feedback loop, how can you know if what you’re creating is getting better? Or resonating stronger with your customers?

Here are the main questions you need to be asking and answering whilst thinking about your content. They are the essence of a great content marketing strategy and fundamental to seeing a return on your company’s investment in content creation.

1. Who Are You Creating Content For?
2. What Are You Going To Create For Them?
3. How Often?
4. How Are You Going To Drive Traffic To Your Content?
5. What Does All This Do To Support The Business?
6. How Do We Report All Of This?
7. What’s new for 2024?
8. Our Favourite Tools

There is a lot here. So we’re going to dive into each step one at a time.

1. Who Are You Creating Content For?

Key takeaways:

• Gain deeper insights by intimately knowing your target audience
• Leverage LinkedIn for precise and effective customer research
• Discover real customer needs beyond your product’s immediate solutions
• Engage directly with potential customers for actionable insights
• Focus on customers most likely to purchase for better conversion rates

Ok, let’s talk people. Because random names of “persona’s” just don’t cut it anymore.
You should know who you’re writing for. Almost as if you were them. Creepy right? Debatably so.
We must create content for real people. The easiest way to do this is to jump on over to LinkedIn and pull up the profile of someone you’d love to be your customer.

By this point, you’ve already had to make a few decisions.

Who do they work for?

What position do they hold?

How long have they been in the business?

With the profile still open, what’s the first problem you think this person is having? If you instantly thought of a pain that your product solves. Wrong. Think again. Step into their shoes. What problems do they have?

Instead of guessing, you could just add them and ask.

It’s important to really do the work here and understand this person. Without writing a whole guide on reader/customer research myself, here are a few of my favourites on the web to help you get started.

• Content Marketing Personas – The Animalz blog is incredible and makes me want to quit every time I read it.

Remember, though, it’s easy to get tied up in sessions and pageviews and large search volumes,

The ideal reader is the one who buys your stuff.

Identify who that person is, scale that, and you’ll never have an MQLs problem ever again.

My favourite tool to do this, bar none, is Sparktoro. Get yourself on there asap and learn as much as you can about your core audience. Your competitors’ audience. What channels they love etc.
There is nothing better than Sparktoro at this. Period.

2. What Are You Going To Create For Them?

• Expand audience reach with varied content formats
• Maximize engagement through strategic long-form content
• Optimize impact with tailored content length
• Ensure consistent messaging with clear content guidelines
• Enhance conversion with a funnel-focused content strategy

We have our eyes, our users. What do we want to put in front of them?

Notice how I didn’t say “What are we going to write for them?”

Content doesn’t have to be just the written word. It can be video, it can be pictures (think of all the business doing +6 figures just though insta, sickening right?) or it can be written. Or any combination of creating value and placing it in front of your audience.

But understanding this step brings you closer to understanding your audience.

We’re going to stick with long-form written content because it’s what we do and it’s also where I think you can create the most value for the longest time.

Written content length is something that has been highly debated for a long time.

This blog says you should write over 1200 words. That guru says 1900 is the sweet spot. There are a lot of rights and wrongs in all of this but you should have an idea of how long the content you’re going to produce is.

Is it interviews with industry experts? 2200 words? Short tutorials on common issues you know your customer is having?

This outline of the content types you’re going to create is the same as the brand guidelines for the colours you use and what you can and can’t do with your logo. Think of them as the asset guidelines. They’re nowhere near as strict as brand guidelines but they do convey the message of the company and the kind of value people can expect from you.

Your content strategy should cover the main four touchpoints of the search sales funnel –

• Top of the Funnel – Use keywords to address a high level topic/question and use this as an opportunity to introduce the reader to your brand.

Notice how I didn’t say product, or sell them on your service? This is where most sites go very wrong and try to jump in bed with a customer they only just met.

• Middle of the Funnel – Using a combination of mostly keyword research with a little sales and support sprinkled on top to tie the service you offer to the solution for the problem/question being searched.
• Bottom of the Funnel – Using mostly sales and support feedback to write directly about your product or service. Think landing pages, direct product pages. It’s nice to try and rank these pages, but you’ll find the search volume is usually pretty low and you’re better off nurturing the customer, leading them toward these pages.

3. How Often?

The question of how often are you creating content is really a question of resource allocation. How much time can your team give to writing blogs, or how much share of the budget can you give to getting the content written for you?

Not the question being asked, but an important one nonetheless. Let’s answer the actual question.

I wouldn’t say jump in at the deep end from the beginning. At least not straight away. Ramp it up. We’ll think of it in stages.

Stage One

4 blogs a month (once a week) 1 whitepaper per month

Stage Two

2 blogs a week
2 whitepapers a month

Stage Three

3-4 blogs a week, nearing on one a day here
1 major guide/whitepaper a week

Stage “How deep end did you want to go?”

2 blogs a day
2-3 whitepapers a week.
This is for insane growth, but at a pretty insane budget to go with it.
I’m looking at you happiestbaby.co.uk. I see your 631 blog posts in the last 18 months (at the time of writing). That’s some ridiculous growth. I’d love to talk about it 😀

There’s no right or wrong here. I’d always prefer you create one piece of content a month with legitimate value to your audience than one 400 word long post a day but I’d get more value reading the back of a cereal box. 🥣

With Penfriend you can create blogs so much faster than getting them written manually.
We take the first draft seriously and aim to get you 85% of the way to a finished blog in as little as 6 minutes.

If you’re serious about scaling your written content, check out the content scaling guide.

4. How Are You Going To Drive Traffic To Your Content?

This is my favourite part because it’s just a long way of saying, how are you gonna rank it?

Let’s talk growth.

Let’s talk about compounding growth.

Let’s talk SEO.

As much as I love content, writing content, and consuming content (anyone else with 100+ articles on the new reading list feature on Chrome?), my passion is organic – specifically ranking it.

Mostly down to this reason –
It hits all the pointers of the golden rule of content marketing – compounding growth, keeps working once you’ve done it, makes sales in your sleep 🛏

The other two channels I recommend are email and a social channel.

Organic Search (SEO)

In my opinion, you should be considering search from before the site is even live. It should be a consideration of how the site is built. How the pages link together. Even what you have in nav bar, footer, home page. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

If you’re writing content search should be a major consideration before the content is written, when it’s being written and every day after the content is published. It never stops because people will always be taking their problems and concerns to the almighty G man in the sky – Google.

I have a whole framework of how SEO impacts your site and your content so I’m not going to re-write the whole thing, you can find it over here. For now here are a few things to be musing over:

• Technical SEO – Yeah, technically we’re doing SEO. What does this actually mean? It’s to do with how Google even finds your site in the first place. Can’t rank if you’re not in the pool of options to be chosen. Think about site structure, go take a look into canonical links (looking at you shopify people) and do a “site:mywebsite.co” search every now and then. Take a look at what pages Google is indexing.
• Thin Content – Think about what valuable means to you when we’re talking content. Is it some behemoth post, covering a lot of smaller topics? *cough cough this one cough*, or a post that takes one topic and splits it apart, explaining every step of the way? Or it is 500 words telling you what kind of bread you are?

Take a look at the content on your site. How long is it? Does it actually teach you anything? Did you work out what kind of bread you are?

• Internal Linking – Go and take a look at some really big websites, click around the blog and see where on their own site they link to. Take note of what pages link to each other, where in the content are they linking to and from?

What text do you need to click to move from one page to the other? These things all matter.

For a master class in this, check out Wikipedia – see how they all link to each other.

There’s so much when it comes to organic ranking factors. This is barely scratching the surface. You want to be looking at these factors and adapting your content strategy around them.

Ideally, the long term play is to take what matters and build it into the content production process itself. There’s a whole post on how pretty much everyone get’s this wrong – No One Cares About Your Blog.

Email

We’re building content to get more eyeballs and users on the site. From what we’ve already figured out new content is mostly built for the ToFu and MoFu parts of the cycle. What can we do to help lubricate that funnel?

Email! Email is where we have total control of everything we put in front of those that sign up. It can be segmented based on interest. Automated based on where they are in the cycle. You can sell unapologetically in your email cycle to people you know are ready based on what emails they’re getting.

It’s amazing. One of the main reasons you should be building content is to get people to sign up to your newsletter and further emails. Talking about newsletters, what are the types of emails you can and should be sending to your list?

• The weekly/monthly, the regular update. Call it a newsletter, the inside scoop, the exclusive tips and tricks list. This is your regular broadcast of offering value.
• Product Updates. If you’re a SaaS company your email list is one of the best places to be testing new product features as most likely they already love your product and will give you the most honest feedback. There is also the opportunity to educate this list to all the different features you offer in providing nuanced solutions.
• The 5-day email course. If there was ever a way to almost guarantee email sign-ups on Top of Funnel content it’s the email course. Take a process you can educate on and provide a comprehensive step by step solution in the form of individual lessons over a 3-5 days email course. Our flagship email course is about scaling content with AI without sacrificing quality.

On top of the variety you get with email, I want to quickly touch on automations. One of the absolute best parts of email is setting up automations, emails sent out, without you, based on time, or emails sent before, or if someone has clicked something on your site or other emails.

• Content upgrade or HSO (hyper-specific offer) video downloads. Instead of just giving out a link, swap an email address for further info they’re likely to be interested in.
• Welcome series of emails – If someone joins any list and they’re new, how are you going to welcome them to the content?
• Now we have a few people on the list, how are we going to continue to provide value to them? How are you going to keep them engaged?
• The sales sequence? Now, this could be from anywhere on the site. How to turn those eyeballs, those clicks, those people into sales. This is one of the most essential sequences on the site by far.
• And the last in this list, but not least. The re-engage or remove sequence. The health of the list is massively important, so we want to make sure anyone on the list is an asset to the list. This sequence is designed to get people back in the circle or remove the dead weight entirely.
•  

A social channel

You can’t run content in 2024 without talking about a social channel of such.

Could be Youtube, could be LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit. Whatever.

Our main focus at time of writing is LinkedIn.

It’s a platform where the feedback loop from publishing to user engagement is as small as possible.

The feedback loop for blogs is huge. Months.
Social? Hours. Maybe even minutes.

And the best part? The bit almost everyone misses?

Not only can you post your lessons and insights from the blogs as social posts, but you can prove messaging, ideas, opinions on socials first. Tighten them up, and then move them to the platform you own. Your blog.

You get traction faster, you get traffic faster, you get the fans of your product faster. It’s just the right way to do it in 2024.

The strategy we’re running with Penfriend

The thing we’ll be experimenting with for Penfriend are long form podcasts. Chopping those up in short form video and posting on TikTok, YouTube shorts and Instagram Reels.

And then taking those topics and using them to support the long form content.

That long form content then also get’s clipped up and used for our LinkedIn personal pages.

We get comments, and use those to build relationships, get expert insights we can insert into the posts.

It’s a content flywheel.

5. What does all this do to support the business?

Traffic is great. Subscribers are even better. But you wanna know what’s even more significant than this?

Money. Dollar dollar baby. 💸

Traffic costs money. Getting subscribers costs money. The only thing that doesn’t cost money in this whole strategy is paying customers. They literally do the opposite.

There are hundred, neigh, thousands. There are tens of thousands of great, unique, life-changing blogs that make no money. They are at best an accounted for overhead and at worst a considerable time and money sink for the business.

So it’s hopefully no one’s surprise that a content strategy should include, NEEDS to have monetization. There is an end goal here and unfortunately just writing content ain’t it.

Here are 4 things we cannot overstate enough of their importance to the grand scheming that is content marketing.

You have to assume people have no idea you exist

It’s not enough to just have the content on the site. People won’t click. You NEED to tell them there is software, a service, a course, a solution THAT YOU OFFER behind what they’re reading.

Put yourself in the shoes of the reader for a moment. Now, apart from the weird concept of wearing someone else’s shoes, what’s going on?

Instagram this. Twitter that. Send an email there. Go to the meeting here. HOW MANY tabs does this person have open?

Stop thinking about it. It’s ok. You’re back at your own pc. OMG, how many tabs do I have open?

The point is, these people are  b u s y.

It’s on you to make it abundantly clear that you exist. They’re on a SaaS product site. Here’s how –

• Chatbots? Using something like ManyChat or Intercom will give you an automated chance to ask questions to your readers whilst they’re on the site.

Here’s a great question to ask “If you could wave a magic wand, what’s the first thing you’d fix about your WE SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?”

Here’s another – “What’s something you’d like to see us write more about?”

• Keep your blog in a subfolder on the site. There are a number of hard-hitting points when it comes to the SEO benefit of this, but more from a branding side of things this is important. It makes it easier to just go to the homepage. The name of that company is there first, so it’s helpful for branding.

MyGreatSaaS.com/blog
not
blog.MyGreatSaaS.com

There are a lot of people who would say “don’t put your blog on Medium”, and I’d agree – there’s a blog about it over here where I went into depth about this.

• Correct attribution of job titles on blog posts. It’s looks way more professional to have “Tom – Head of Front End Development” have write your posts on why UI/UX is pivotal to long term customer retention and happiness than it is to have “Maybel – freelance Twitter writer for hire”. Author bios, their links, socials etc – They go a long way in showcasing the people behind the content and the company too.
• Don’t be afraid to sell, but in the right places. The content of every post shouldn’t be a long form sales pages, or in some cases – short form and entirely the wrong offer temperature.

You can offer straight-up value without asking for anything in return, AND have testimonials,

social proof on the same page.

• Use HSO’s, Hyper Specific Offers. If your blog post is about the state of search online and why it needs to be changed show me a call to action about the 10 ways Google has influenced how we use the internet.

Here’s a few more for you

Blog Post – Why it’s so difficult for people to save money.
HSO – £10 now, £10k later. How compounding interest works.

Blog Post – Rubik’s cube speed solve timeline.
HSO – Advanced techniques to solve the cube in under 2 mins.

Blog Post – How to shoot great photos on a budget.
HSO – The 5 things to upgrade first as you get more serious about photography.

It’s not enough to just read the blog – The capture is where it’s at

I learnt this from Sabri Suby (total genius btw), audience temperature. Pretty much every company to one extent or another gets this wrong or very wrong.

The vast majority of people won’t buy from you straight away. 1% of readers are in a position where your offer is exactly what they’re looking for, they know it AND they have the funds to purchase it. This happens when a hot audience meets a hot offer. They are intimately familiar with the problem they have and can instantly recognise when someone else knows the issue and can solve it.

The more expensive the solution, the rarer this situation is.

Does this mean that 99% of readers are a lost cause? Yes if your site isn’t set up to take advantage of colder audience temperatures. Most aren’t. This is due to the person writing having a huge case of “not knowing what it’s like to not know”. All this aside, what can we do about it?

Email captures. You need to establish an ongoing relationship with the reader to help them understand their own situation, the problems associated and how you can help them out of this. Search hero’s journey if you want to understand a great organic sales journey.

By capturing an email address we can solve another problem. content attribution. It’s pretty difficult to measure the success of a piece of content if 99% of readers don’t convert to the MAIN BIG SCARY OFFER, but what about a smaller, simpler offer. An offer that’s your friend.

High-level thoughts over, here are some things to consider to make capturing email addresses easier

• Like we spoke about before – HSO’s or content upgrades. How can you offer even more value in exchange for an email address?
• The tried and tested email newsletter. Keeping people up to date with the blog content, extras they may find interesting, product updates and industry news.
• A free course instead of a newsletter. TBH my favourite. There are very few newsletters I actually enjoy reading. Most newsletters I sign up to don’t make it past 3 months. But a course, kinda hits different. 5 emails sent straight to me? Designed to help solve a problem I’m having? In bite-size lessons so I can learn them in 5-15 mins each day? Are we best friends? That’s how you build a relationship.

Everyone onboard with attribution

I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Content marketing is a total shit to measure sometimes. OK, Most of the time. It’s a much picked on pain point of management and often the source of disagreements and arguments.
The main source of this contention comes from people not agreeing on what to measure.
What does success look like?
There’s no one size fits all here, so let’s look at a few options and you can work out what works for you.

• Clicks from SERPs to content, content to email sign ups, email to newsletter or course, conversions from there.

Break down each step, one by one and measure the job done to move the user to the next step ONLY. Not clicks to product conversion.

• Look at the site behaviour as a whole. What are people doing on the site? How long do they stick around? Where do they click from and to?
• How many emails are you capturing? What posts convert the best? Does it make sense to send people to that content from other blogs?

Trying to mush a load of data together to prove success isn’t the right way of going about things. Get everyone on board first with what success looks like and measure accordingly.

No one leaves unwelcomed

Talk to everyone on your list. Again. Maybe try a third or seventh time. Follow up with everyone. Have a plan, an automation, a list, a process. Anything to speak to these people on multiple occasions.

A sales team to reach out. A drip email sequence to nurture the leads. A re-engage or remove sequence.

With automation tools, this process isn’t the massive hassle it used to be, but that doesn’t mean it should be overlooked.

Putting these processes in place can mean the difference between a sale and people leaving the party because you didn’t say hi.

Remember – most sales happen on the 7th or later touchpoint.

6. How Do We Report All Of This?

How do we take this abstract concept that is content marketing and turn it into data? Numbers we can measure and monitor and ultimately improve. Scale. Some kind of report seems most likely.
As someone who loves data and using it to back up decisions and long term plays, I love a good report. But they are time-consuming. So automation of the key points here is huge for us.

What do we even want to measure?

I’ll get the main SEO ones out of the way. One because I know them the best (SEO is life after all) and two, they are some of the easiest ones to measure with the right tools.

Keyword rankings, organic clicks, monthly traffic. Google Analytics goal conversions.
Success could be the amount of new content going on the blog each month. Or quality links built to the site. Email signups.

Make it easy to see the numbers that support your team’s win at a glance. Are the tactics/sprints you’re using contributing to long term, measurable success?

I already touched on the hurdles when it comes to de-facto bottom line changes from content marketing so tracking lead indicators, ones you know will make a difference given enough time, is the plan to prove the success of your team.

Continued improvement in the following almost always produces more sales and revenue

• Total ranking keywords.
• Target keywords ranking.
• Total backlinks and referring domains.
• Month-on-month traffic growth.
• Month-on-month organic traffic growth.

7. What Else?

What else? As if there isn’t enough here already to cause intense information fatigue. 🤯

My main ‘what else’ would be putting these questions, concepts and thoughts into action. Sitting and thinking about it over and over won’t get you any closer to the holy grail of recurring income whilst your sleep.

So, where to start?

Start with talking to your audience. Step One in this whole article. Suppose two people have a similar problem. Write about that problem. Talk about the fixes for that problem.

8. Our Favourite Tools

This is just a small amount of the tools we use on a daily basis. If you want the full list, hit me up and I’ll get a post put together.
This is mostly a shortlist of the tools we need to get the job done well and properly.

Research

• Ahrefs. I live in Ahrefs. It’s my ‘new tab’ page in Chrome. I’m unsure I could do my job without Ahrefs. Also the blog is incredible.
• Sparktoro

Technical

• Screaming Frog. It’s just the best imo. I love it. Learn how to use this and you’re lightyears ahead of most others in content marketing.
• If you’re not using Screaming Frog, you’re likely using Sitebulb. Great software. Lovely visuals that come with it too.
• Site speed – GTMetrix

On-Page

• Surfer* So much of my time is spent in SurferSEO. It’s amazing. Clients hit featured snippets with this
• Penfriend.ai – We use our own tool to write 80% of all the content on here. We have to. If we can’t prove it works for us, then how can we sell it to you? Also, I’m the biggest use case for Penfriend.ai, if it solves my problems, it solves yours. And it it doesn’t? Then it’s a good job I’m head of product.

Off-Page and backlinks

• Ahrefs. Still one of the best places to get your data from. Both for finding great places to reach out to, and reporting backlinks.

Reporting

• Google Search Console
• Google Analytics
• Google Sheets/All the Google docs
• Looker Studio
• My good friends over at Ranktracker.

Day to day, just makes the cogs spin tools.

• Coda – I have built out the entire backend business support system, internal tools, external tools, client portals, reports in Coda. It’s insane. For anyone running a business/department, it will pay off time and time again to get your ass on Coda.
• Slack

*This is an affiliate link. Would I really be a content marketer if I wasn’t trying to monetize my content? 🤔

Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Content Marketing Strategy in 2024

TL;DR: Understand the process used by top marketers to plan their content. Discover the four critical steps needed to define your strategy, set goals, understand your audience, review existing content and decide the best platforms to use.

Step 1: Define Your Content Marketing Goals

1. Why are you creating content? Content marketing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Instead, it supports broader business and marketing goals. Whether it is increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or something more specific like improving SEO rankings, identifying your goals is the first step.

Understanding why you’re creating content will guide your strategy and help you to create something meaningful that affects your bottom line. Businesses can’t afford to create content without a clear sense of purpose.

2. A SMART Start: When setting your content marketing goals, whether for this year or farther ahead, remember the acronym SMART. They should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound.
   Rather than saying “get more leads,” try setting a much more precise goal—“Increase lead generation by 25% in the second quarter”.

Step 2: Understand Your Audience

1. Craft Buyer Personas: Documenting your audience’s demographics, interests, and challenges allows you to tailor your content to their needs. The more detailed your persona is, the more effective your content will be.
2. Research Your Audience: Learn about the needs and pain points of your target audience by surveying or interviewing them. Your content should address these needs, and also reflect their language, style, and terminology.
3. Listen and Analyze: Use social listening tools and keyword analysis to understand what topics your audience cares about, what questions they’re asking, and what types of content they consume.

Step 3: Conduct a Content Audit

1. Inventory Existing Content: Evaluate what you already have in terms of blog posts, whitepapers, e-books, videos, etc. Use a content inventory template to document all the essential information, such as the title, URL, format, and key metrics.
2. Assess Performance: Identify the high-performing pieces and the duds. Look at metrics like page views, SEO rankings, social shares, conversion rates, and more.
3. Identify Gaps and Opportunities: With a comprehensive view of your existing content, you’ll see where there are gaps in your content library. Not only can you identify new topics, but you can also improve underperforming content.

Step 4: Choose the Right content channels

1. Where is your audience? Not all platforms are created equal, and not every social media channel is suitable for your audience. Find out where your audience spends their time online and focus your efforts there.
2. What format is best? Different channels call for different content formats. Blogs do well on LinkedIn, while photos and videos are best for Instagram or YouTube.
3. Test and Adjust: As you get data on what’s working and what’s not, adjust your strategy. Success in content marketing doesn’t come from stubbornly sticking to one plan but from being adaptable and responsive to your audience’s preferences.

Emerging Content Marketing Trends to Incorporate in Your Strategy

• Understand the soaring popularity of video content
• Grasp SEO’s significant role in content marketing
• Realize the effectiveness of user-generated content

The Rise of Video Content

With skyrocketing internet speeds and every other individual flaunting a smartphone, video content is ascending in the marketing world more than ever. Video, through its dynamic and interactive nature, effortlessly grabs attention, which is becoming increasingly scarce in this age of information bombardment

In the crucial realm of social media, video marketing is scorching trails. Remember the time when everyone was scrolling through photo-stories on Instagram? Well, those days are receding. The present belongs to Instagram’s Reels, YouTube Shorts, and TikTok’s punchy videos, undefeated champions of engagement and reach. So, if your content marketing strategy does not accommodate video content, it’s time to re-evaluate!

The Power of User-Generated Content

In a world bombarded with promotional messages, consumers are turning towards authentic and relatable content – created by fellow consumers. User-generated content (UGC), including customer testimonials, reviews, and social media shoutouts, holds immense power in shaping brand perceptions and influencing buying decisions.

UGC serves as social proof, building trust and credibility. It demonstrates that other people are finding value in your product or service, which can strongly motivate potential customers to choose you. By incorporating UGC into your content marketing strategy, you can enhance engagement, strengthen community, and ultimately, bolster sales. In 2024, the question isn’t whether you should leverage user-generated content, but how creatively you can do so.

How to Measure the Success of Your Content Marketing Strategy

• Wrap your brain around the pivotal metrics for content marketing
• Accelerate your strategy with real-time analytics
• Learn how to monitor and improve your content marketing over time

After understanding the latest content marketing trends to integrate into your strategy, knowing how to measure your strategy’s effectiveness becomes vital. Let’s delve into the world of analytics and metrics to better understand the impact of our efforts.

Key Content Marketing Metrics to Track

The success of your content marketing strategy heavily depends on measuring the right parameters. Remember, not all metrics reflect the true success or value of your campaign.

Website Traffic

Monitoring website traffic is a fundamental metric. You need information on the number of page views, unique visitors, and where they’re coming from. This gives an insight into the reach of your content and its potential to attract the target audience.

Social Shares

Social shares indicate how compelling your content is. High shares mean strong audience engagement, and your content resonates well with them. Thus, tracking the number of shares could help in fine-tuning your content for more engagement.

Conversion Rate

Simply put, the conversion rate presents how often your website visitors take a preferred action after consuming your content. Do they sign up for a newsletter, make a purchase, or fill out a form? Conversion rates signify the true ROI of your content marketing efforts.

How to Use Analytics to Improve Your Content Marketing Strategy

Whilst there is no secret potion for creating a perfect content marketing strategy, analytics can significantly refine your methods.

Analyzing Audience Behavior

Google Analytics is an invaluable tool in understanding audience behaviour. Examining elements like bounce rate, time spent on page, and traffic data can offer a wealth of insights. Is your content appealing enough to retain the audience? If not, some changes are due.

Referral Traffic

Unveiling the sources driving traffic to your content can help identify the most successful channels. It’s worth spending more time and effort on those channels that lead high-quality traffic to your site.

Identifying Content Gaps

By tracking which keywords are driving traffic to your site and what questions users are asking online, it’s possible to identify content gaps. Is there a topic that interests your audience but you haven’t covered? Finding and filling these gaps is an efficient way to increase traffic and build your authority.

By measuring your content marketing strategy’s success and using analytics to guide improvement, your organisation can consistently tailor its content to meet your audiences’ evolving needs. A well-measured and improved strategy brings you one step closer to your business goals.

Common Challenges in Developing a Content Marketing Strategy and How to Overcome Them

You’ve got a grip on how to measure the success of your content marketing strategy. Great! But the journey isn’t over. Now, let’s move to the next phase as we tackle a few unavoidable roadblocks you may encounter along the way. Are you ready to take on:

– The art of developing consistent and high-quality content

– The mystery of measuring content marketing ROI

– The ever-evolving challenge of keeping up with content marketing trends

Challenge 1: Creating Consistent and High-Quality Content

Producing regular, top-tier content can feel more like running a never-ending marathon than a sprint. The constant chase after fresh, relevant, and exciting material can be exhausting. But don’t despair. You can establish a rhythm that promotes consistency without compromising quality.

Start by developing a detailed content calendar that outlines what will be created, who’s responsible, and when it’s due.

Commit to a realistic posting schedule that doesn’t burn out your team. Too often, businesses start with a sprint pace, only to find they can’t maintain the vigor.

One of the main ways we ensure a consistent output is using Penfriend.ai ourselves. Getting through the first draft asap means we can proof ideas and get content on the site without the worry of spending >$600/article just to get it on the site.

Also, avoid the trap of creating content for the sake of content. It’s crucial to remember: Quality over quantity. Take time to understand your audience’s needs and craft content that directly addresses these.

Challenge 2: Measuring Content Marketing ROI

When it comes to content marketing, monitoring ROI isn’t as straightforward as counting dollars and cents. Yet, it’s crucial to demonstrate the value derived from your efforts.

Start by defining what success means for your business. Are you looking to increase sales, attract more website visitors, or improve brand visibility? Your goals will influence what metrics you track.

Additionally, consider the lifespan of your content. Content marketing, unlike direct advertising, often delivers value over a more extended period, so consider this in your analysis.

Challenge 3: Keeping Up with content marketing trends

The content marketing landscape changes at break-neck speed. New platforms, evolving audience preferences, technological advancements – keeping up can feel like a full-time job.

Regularly immersing yourself in industry updates can help. Attend webinars, follow relevant blogs, join industry forums – these can all keep you abreast of trends.

Yet, while chasing trends, don’t lose sight of your brand’s unique voice and your audience’s core interests. Not all trends will be right for you, and that’s okay.

Finally, dare to be a trendsetter. Originality and innovation often pay off in the world of content marketing. Remember, it’s a space for creativity, not just conformity.

Ready for your 2024 Content Strategy Revolution?

Keeping pace with the dynamic world of content marketing is never easy, but you’re well on your way. We’ve delved into the trendiest 2024 marketing strategies, helping you grasp the crucial role of storytelling, the use of video, SEO optimization, and data-based decision making.

Why does it matter? Because in today’s cut-throat marketplace, an effective content strategy can shape your brand’s voice, pull more viewers, drive conversions, and skyrocket your revenue. You’ve been equipped with modern, efficient strategies that can catapult your business to new heights in 2024.

Just a reminder – integrating these insights is not an overnight process. Start by assessing your existing strategy, then capitalize on storytelling and video, lean more on SEO, and back your decisions with solid data. Gradually, you’ll transition your business onto the forefront of content marketing.

So the question to answer is: Which strategy captivates you the most, and how are you planning to innovate it for your business?

Originally written on fivethreeoh.com by Tim Hanson (our CCO) and republished here. Updated, specific for AI content creation and is the framework we use daily to build and refine the content strategy here at Penfriend.ai

Glossary of Key Terms:

• B2B Content Marketing: Marketing targeted at businesses selling to other businesses, focused on providing valuable content that addresses business needs.
• Content Strategy: A plan outlining the creation, distribution, and promotion of content to achieve specific business goals.
• Target Audience: The specific group of people a business aims to reach with its marketing efforts.
• LinkedIn: A social media platform primarily for professional networking and career development.
• Long-Form Content: In-depth and comprehensive content, typically exceeding 1,000 words, providing detailed information on a specific topic.
• Search Sales Funnel: A model representing the customer journey from awareness to purchase, with different stages requiring tailored marketing approaches.
• Organic Search (SEO): The practice of optimizing websites and content to rank highly in unpaid search engine results.
• Email Marketing: Directly marketing to individuals via email, often used for nurturing leads and promoting products or services.
• Social Channel: A specific social media platform used for marketing and communication purposes.
• Content Attribution: The process of attributing specific business results to different pieces of content.
• HSO (Hyper-Specific Offer): A highly targeted offer designed to appeal to a specific audience segment based on their interests or needs.
• Audience Temperature: A metaphor describing the level of awareness, interest, and readiness to purchase a product or service.
• Content Marketing ROI: The return on investment from content marketing efforts, measured by metrics like website traffic, leads generated, and sales conversions.
• Content Calendar: A schedule outlining the planned creation and publication of content.
• User-Generated Content (UGC): Content created by users or customers, such as reviews, testimonials, and social media posts.