5 Practical Content Marketing Tactics Your Team Should Live By

Spinning your wheels with content marketing? Bullhorn Senior Director of Marketing Doug Ellinger shares five practical tactics to get you on track.

By this point, you likely realize how valuable content marketing can be as a key driver of business. Done right, it can help generate and nurture leads, boost sales, and establish your company as an influential thought leader. But if your idea of impactful content is limited to a bunch of blog posts  with keywords sprinkled here and there, you might want to rethink your strategy.
According to Doug Ellinger, Senior Director of Marketing at recruiting software company Bullhorn, in order to be successful, there are five core content marketing tactics his team lives by. Below he shares those tactics along with some common mistakes to avoid to elevate your content marketing strategy to the next level.

5 Practical Content Marketing Tactics Your Team Should Live By

1) Be Data Driven

Too many marketers put a lot of words on a page without saying anything that’s actually meaningful. We try to avoid this at Bullhorn by making sure our content is data-driven. For example, our annual Staffing and Recruiting Trends Report is based on a survey that we construct and farm out to our prospects and customers. We typically generate close to 2,000 survey completes and compile enough data to support content creation for the rest of the year.
Data and statistics establish credibility, and they are easy to work with from a content creation standpoint. Data also provides ample opportunity for interpretation and opining, not to mention the ability to create content in multiple formats (see #2 below).
If you’re not sure where to start, think of an interesting topic and collect data by surveying your prospects and customers. If your company is early stage and you don’t have a lot of prospects and customers, push out a survey through an industry or trade publication/site. If you have access to product usage data, mine it and think about how you can convert it into content that is educational and insightful.

2) Don’t Focus on SEO

Over time, great content builds SEO juice. Fluff pieces don’t. Avoid keyword stuffing and writing content that unnaturally squeezes in your top keywords. Instead, focus on creating content — especially for your blog — that provides value for your readers. Superficial content that is simply filler will steer away eyeballs and the links that are the key to your SEO success.

3) Rework, Repurpose, Reuse

Good content comes in all shapes and sizes. If you invest in creating great content, make sure you don’t limit it to a single format. By branching out you can adapt and optimize it to be distributed across a wide variety of channels (see #5 below), increasing the chances of it being discovered.
Think about reusing your content, too. No, it’s not okay to repost or rename your existing content (your readers and Google won’t appreciate it), but it is okay to reposition or provide a different point of view on an earlier piece, or pull in someone new to write on the same topic. Just make sure that whatever content you create is unique in some way, shape or form.

4) Don’t Try to Do Everything at Once

Don’t use up all of your great ideas at once. If you turn your data into content, think about the different ways you can use it — a report, an infographic, or an interactive calculator — your call. If you’re sitting on a huge pile of data or insights, trying to leverage it all right away can be overwhelming for both you and your audience. Rather, consider writing and distributing a major report and then doing a separate deep dive on specific topic areas throughout the year.

5) Maximize Your Reach

If nobody reads your content, it doesn’t matter. Too many B2B firms create solid content, but don’t maximize its reach and penetration. If you create a great piece of content, make sure your prospects – and customers – get their hands on it.
At Bullhorn, we pitch most of our unique content to bloggers, editors and influencers in our space. We think of PR as much as a content distribution engine as a typical public relations necessity.
We also make sure to promote big content pieces across many channels. We promote them on our homepage. We distribute them through paid and social media channels, and we cross-promote them in every thank you email and thank you page following a form complete – an often overlooked tactic for hooking your prospects into further engagement with your company and your content.
If you don’t match your investment in content creation with equal investment in distribution, you’re wasting your efforts.

Looking for a One-Stop Guide to Utilizing Content Marketing Effectively?

By building out a targeted content marketing function, even small marketing teams can create and distribute the content they need to support their company’s go-to-market strategy by generating leads, nurturing them at key points throughout the buying process, and, ultimately, driving sales.
It Takes a Content Factory! covers everything you need to know to transform your marketing with content that works.
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Photo by: Hiroyuki Takeda