You probably know by now that compelling content on your website is an easy way to pull traffic (and leads) in your direction. After all, companies with a blog on their website produce roughly 67% more leads per month than competitors that don’t have an active blog. But how do you ensure that your content will achieve the desired results? 

A great content marketing strategy. 

If you’re ready to double down on content in 2024, you’re not alone— according to HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report, 50% of marketers plan to increase their investment in content marketing this year. The time is right to develop a strategy that will generate website traffic via educational, evergreen content that will attract leads for years to come! 

Here are a few suggestions to help you create better content with an effective content marketing strategy. 

#1: Set Your Content Goals

What do you want your content to achieve in the next quarter? The next six months? How about the next year? Do you want to increase leads by 30%? Bring attention to a new offering? Boost website traffic? Figure out what you want to accomplish and create a content plan that will support these goals.

If you’re accustomed to writing content on the fly to meet needs that pop up from time to time— say, for example, your sales team has had several questions about a service and you wrote a blog post answering the most common queries— it might be daunting to sit down and create a calendar of content for the next year.

But here’s the thing. If you no longer want to create content just for the sake of creating content, it’s important to determine what you want to accomplish with your content creation. Regular blog posts, a piece of gated long-form content, social posts, and emails can provide the fanfare you need to get the attention you want.

Once you’ve got a good cadence in place, you can replicate that over and over to promote just about anything. It might even come as a relief to have a plan — no more scrambling to populate your blog every month just because you know it’s something you should do. Instead, you’re creating content with intention! 

#2: Figure Out Who You’re Writing For

You could be producing top-notch content, but if it’s not about the topics that interest your audience, you might as well not write anything at all.

Start with the demographic data about the folks who currently visit your site. Learn their location, age, gender, role, education, and more with a combination of Google Analytics and simple surveys or contact forms.

Once you have the basic information, it’s time to dig a little deeper. Segment your audience into different personas, answering questions like: 

• What are your audience’s particular pain points? 
• What are their interests?  
• How much do they know about your products? Do they need
• more education? 
• Where are they located in the sales journey? 

Now, you can target content directly to distinct members of your audience. This is far more effective than a scattershot approach that will give a little bit of information to a wider audience. 
You’re drilling down into your audience’s needs at every stage of the buying process. 

#3: Assess the Content You Already Have

Here’s the good news— you don’t have to start entirely from scratch to create better content. You can likely repurpose some of your existing content to fit your needs.

With a few tweaks here and there, you can republish a blog post from a while back or combine a few blog posts into an ebook that you can use as an incentive to sign up for your email newsletter. Have you appeared on podcasts? Do you have helpful videos on your website? These can be repurposed into blog posts, too.

Consider utilizing SEO to ensure your existing content is ranking well with relevant keywords. If you make a habit of reassessing your website’s content archive every 6-12 months, you can make sure it stays evergreen and continues to bring in traffic for years to come. 

#4: Find Your Content Sweet Spot

If your audience consists of busy business owners who just don’t have the time to sit and ingest a 3000-word ebook, you might consider other mediums. Podcasts are an increasingly popular format for harried professionals to learn on the go, and they’re getting easier to produce all the time. If you’ve got a laptop and a decent microphone, you’re equipped to start your own podcast.

That said, you don’t necessarily want to rely on a single content format if you hope to maximize leads and conversions. A blog and a podcast in tandem can reach a wider audience than focusing on one or the other. Blogs are particularly good for conversion, but podcasts effectively increase brand awareness. Each format has its strengths, and when they’re used together, you’ll see a positive impact on your marketing efforts across the board.  

It’s important to assess your team’s capacity and abilities as well as your audience’s preferences before you jump into any content format. Say you’ve determined that a weekly blog post in tandem with a monthly podcast is the best way to reach the personas you’ve created, but you don’t have the manpower to publish blog posts on this rigorous schedule. No need to sacrifice prospective leads; you can tap a content marketing agency to help you produce high-quality content that will appeal to your audience. 

#5: Make a Content Calendar— and Stick To It! 

Whether you use a simple spreadsheet or a cool content calendar template, you must plan out your content for a chunk of time. Maybe you prefer to plan three months at a time to allow you to pivot if necessary, or you want to plan out the whole year just so you don’t have to think about it again anytime soon. 

No matter your preference, make sure you provide yourself with sufficient time to create better content and shepherd it through the appropriate channels for approval, then get it published on the platform of your choice on time.

Need Help to Create Better Content? 11outof11 Can Help! 

Wondering how you can stay on top of your content marketing strategy? At 11outof11, we can keep you on schedule, producing approved content at the cadence you set. Our expert content marketers have the know-how you need to attract your audience at every stage of the buyer’s journey. Connect with us today for a complimentary call with one of our experts.