Blogging has continue to exist as one of the most searched for-after strategies for content marketers to generate traffic. Sites that have blogs attract more traffic than those that don’t.
As a marketer, you are busy creating content for your blog, but are you actually taking the measurement of the impact of every published article? Your content marketing efforts could go in vain if your content pieces don’t attract the engagement you are after. The idea is for people to take action when reading your content, but don’t forget action leads to transformation.
Some content marketing strategy simply perform better than others. These are the ones that you need to favor in 2020 to generate maximum user engagement, on your blog and on other communication channels as well.
Let’s have a look at five top ways to boost the performance of your content marketing strategy.
1. Use Question-Based Titles
Your titles becomes visible everywhere. They are the first things people see when scrolling through their social feeds and scanning search results. Using question-based titles such as “how-to,” “why,” “what,” etc. can help your site rank as a featured snippet in Google’s organic search results.
Around 41% of questions have featured snippets. Having your content ranked as a featured snippet not only increases site traffic, but it also helps you to acquire more natural backlinks.
Around 10% of voice searches begin as actual questions. Using question-based titles and getting on featured snippets will increase your chances of appearing for voice search results.
2. Host Automated Webinars
Whether you just want to promote a product rollout or explain a concept to your audience, webinars are an effective content marketing tactic. Informational webinars also help to boost your authority in the niche.
Once you have the email address of all registrants, you can leverage email marketing to nurture those people. To find the content ideas for your webinar, look at your most viewed pages, Quora questions in your industry, check what’s trending (Google Trends can help you find it out), and talk to customers.
3. Improve Your E-A-T
Google recently published a blog on Webmaster Central reminding users about the core updates and what to do about them. In this blog post, Google specifically pointed out the importance of following the E-A-T guidelines. This applies to everyone creating and publishing content on websites.
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Content that has strong E-A-T does well in search results.
Don’t forget, your content must be crafted for your users and not search engines. Give more importance to user intent than keywords.
4. Segment Your Audience
Some of your blog readers are not ready to buy, but others are. Segmenting and creating content that caters to the needs of your potential customers at different stages of the buying cycle will increase the engagement and conversion rate.
The best way to find out who is at which stage of the funnel is by laying out several scenarios in which prospects become customers and trace back what actions they took since their first interaction with you.
5. Leverage Native Advertising
Native advertising is a form of online marketing in which the ads resemble the look, feel and function of the media format in which they appear.
Promoting your content via native ads offer its own set of advantages. Native ads don’t look like a sales pitch, hence, they are more effective. Native ads receive 53% more views than traditional display ads and can increase the purchase intent by 18%.
Another advantage of native ads is that they can easily bypass ad blockers, as they adapt to the content format naturally.
Conclusion
Marketers have already started leveraging content marketing to earn customer trust as opposed to selling their products directly. 2020 is the year you need to empower your content marketing by following the five strategies discussed in this article.
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