Looking to improve your content marketing? Try these 5 research-based actions

As content marketing steadily becomes more popular and relevant, you or your organization may have decided to invest in the marketing approach, or at least try it out.

But maybe content marketing hasn’t garnered the results you had hoped for, or maybe you’re looking to take your content marketing to the next level. What should you do?

Writing for the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) blog, Lisa Murton Beets shares 5 research-based actions to improve your content marketing. Read the full article here or the summary below.

1. Focus on building an audience

It will be very difficult to achieve sustainable marketing impact – or any real impact for that matter – without a loyal, reliable and engaged audience. Focus on audience development, including securing more subscribers for your newsletters, blogs and updates. Beets says:

“Check how your numbers look versus one year ago. Can you tie subscriber growth directly to individual content marketing initiatives? Do you have solid audience personas so you target the right people?”

She also points out that you should “evaluate how your audience is nurtured once they subscribe to your content.”

2. Get better at content creation to boost overall success

Beets highlights that respondents to a CMI annual content marketing survey cited higher quality and more efficient content creation as the biggest contributor to increased content marketing success over the previous year.

She adds: “Assess the health of your content planning and creation machine. Are ideas flowing and captured? … Are topics organized in an editorial calendar?”

3. Streamline your workflow

Beets writes: “…one of the key differences our research found between top-performing content marketers and their less successful peers is that top performers have a better handle on their workflow… If you’re challenged with content-creation bottlenecks, face the workflow issues head on.”

4. Set realistic expectations about what content marketing can achieve

“Ask if your goals are realistic based on factors such as the size of your organization, its overall goals, management commitment, the nature of your industry and audience, total addressable market, competitive landscape, and available resources,” says Beets.

5. Make a commitment to content marketing and stick with it

You won’t achieve sustainable content marketing success without strong individual, team and organizational commitment in the long term.

“If commitment isn’t strong in your organization, ask why. Who can you talk with to change this?” says Beets.

Read Beets’ full article for tips on how to get buy-in for content marketing.