Content is king when it comes to digital marketing.
But your content is only as good as the strategy it’s built on.
And a lot has changed in the world of marketing since March 2020.
If you want to continue getting a return on investment from your content efforts, it’s crucial you adapt to the post-COVID landscape.
To help you out, here’s our pick of the seven best content strategies to grow your business in 2021.
What is content marketing?
According to the Content Marketing Institute:
“Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
Which means every tweet, blog post, YouTube video or podcast you create is a piece of content marketing.
These channels are the bread and butter of every marketer in 2021, having displaced traditional paid media as most marketers’ go-to marketing channels years ago.
And unlike advertising and magazine coverage, content marketing is available to every business, from huge B2B brands like American Express, with its mammoth Trends and Insights content hub:
To B2C brands like Wendy’s, with its iconic Twitter presence:
All the way down to small businesses trying to reach an incredibly niche target audience, such as Venveo’s guide to marketing to architects:
Why you need a content marketing strategy
Over a decade ago, Seth Godin famously said ‘content marketing is the only marketing that’s left’.
And if you want to get the biggest return on investment from the most potent marketing channel at your disposal, you’re going to need a strategy.
Not convinced?
Did you know:
- Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (19.7% vs 2.5%), according to Aberdeen?
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads, according to DemandMetric?
- Conversion rates are nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (2.9% vs 0.5%), according to Aberdeen?
If you want to achieve results like these with your own content marketing efforts in 2021, then you need to be following today’s seven most effective content strategies.
7 Content Strategies for 2021
Social media and search engine algorithms, consumer behaviour, and what’s in the zeitgeist are always changing.
So if you want to drive sales with your content in 2021, make sure you’re sticking to these seven strategies:
1. Invest in visuals
Humans are visual animals.
In fact, the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual, according to Thermopylae Sciences and Technology.
Which is why it’s no surprise that:
- Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets than tweets without images, according to Buffer.
- Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images, according to Buzzsumo.
- Publishers that feature visual content grow traffic 12 times faster than those who don’t, according to Anson Alex.
So if you want the highest return on the time and budget you invest in content marketing this year, make sure you’re using visual content to boost engagement.
And remember – visuals can be much more than just attaching an image to your social posts and sprinkling stock images throughout your blog posts.
For example, 61% of marketers doing original research say it meets most or all expectations, according to Mantis Research’s State of Original Research for Marketing Report.
A simple tactic bound to yield great results in 2021 is therefore to conduct original research of your own and then follow Venngage’s guide to data visualisation to make it as visual – and shareable – as possible.
2. Create more targeted landing pages
Before the internet, the money was in marketing to the crowd.
But now that consumers’ choices aren’t restricted to what fits on the shelves of a department store, there’s a huge opportunity available in ‘the long tail’.
According to Investopedia:
‘The long tail is a business strategy that allows companies to realize significant profits by selling low volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items’.
Just a few successful companies thriving in the long tail are:
- Wall Street Zen, which provides stock market analysis for part-time investors,
- Esq.Marketing which focus on helping small business market themselves,
- And The Cloud Appreciation Society, which sends subscribers a picture of a cloud every day.
The secret to these super-niche business’s success?
Extremely targeted landing pages.
If you’re going for the long tail, you’re going to need to appeal to your target audiences’ very specific needs by using the language they use themselves.
Looking for an easy and effective way to make sure your website’s content is perfectly tailored to your target audience?
Follow the lead of In VPN, which has clearly structured the content of its landing page around the questions people search within its niche:
You can quickly find the most commonly asked questions within your niche to tailor your copy around through Answer the Public.
3. Incorporate more video marketing
Video is one of the most powerful types of content available to you to grow your brand in 2021.
Here are just a few reasons why:
- Mobile video consumption rises by 100% every year, according to Insivia.
- By 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic – 15 times higher than it was in 2017, according to Cisco.
- 72% of customers would rather learn about a product or service by way of video, according to HubSpot.
A solid video strategy can be used to complement your existing digital marketing efforts as well.
For example, FreshBooks already has the top paid spot on Google for the term ‘how to make an invoice’, as well as the Featured Snippet through its How To Make an Invoice article:
And two videos on the topic help it dominate the results page for this search, with FreshBooks appearing four times on the first page of Google:
If there’s a search term that’s incredibly valuable to your business that you’re already tackling with PPC and SEO, it’s therefore well worth doubling up your efforts with our video strategy too.
4. Run a competitor analysis
When it comes to your content strategy, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
In fact, the first place you should start is with a competitor analysis.
This will help you understand what the landscape looks like in your niche and where the bar you need to rise above sits if you want to outperform your competition.
And it can give you ideas for topics and target keywords you may never have come up with otherwise.
Follow Loganix’s guide on How to Do an SEO Competitor Keyword Analysis to make sure you’re keeping up with the Joneses when it comes to your website content.
5. Creating an editorial calendar
No one reaches the top of Everest without a plan for getting there.
And you won’t drive sales through your content marketing without an editorial calendar.
This doesn’t need to be complicated, but it does need to be comprehensive.
What are you going to post, and when?
And what do you need in place before you can create each piece of content?
If you’ve ever tried to keep on top of all these things without a content calendar in place, you know how difficult it is.
To get the most from your content throughout the year, be sure to keep track of the major events using a social media content calendar.
Reactions to trending topics can be incredibly effective social media posts, as these examples from Marketing Example’s Twitter Inspiration Handbook illustrate:
Make sure you pay attention to events that get the world’s attention (the Cybertruck launch, the SuperBowl, the presidential election) for chances of creating your own posts with vural potential.
6. Utilize AI image recognition
AI image recognition is changing marketing forever.
AI platforms are giving marketers access to an unprecedented amount of data on visual trends, audience interests, and logo recognition.
The marketers set to dominate their niches over the coming years are those who make AI marketing a key part of their strategy going forward.
So make sure you’re clued up on this essential technological advance to get the biggest return on investment on your marketing efforts.
7. Assess changes in your audience’s behaviours
Last but not least, the most effective marketing strategies are based on data.
First-class marketers always stay up to date with the latest trends in their profession and then test them in their own business.
But the next step is crucial – using analytics and benchmarks to find out what works and what doesn’t for you.
Every niche is unique, and every brand within that niche is unique too.
The best marketers incorporate the latest marketing ideas into their strategy and then wait and see if the data shows if it works for their business.
Then they iterate – sticking with what’s working and tweaking or ditching what doesn’t.
So, above all else, be sure to track your audience’s and your customers’ behaviours.
It’s never been easier – or more important – to track this data if you want your content strategy to succeed.
Summary
So, there you have it: seven strategies you can use to grow your business in 2021.
Each of these approaches will help ensure you get the biggest return on investment possible from your marketing efforts.
Keep an eye on our blog to make sure you stay up to date with the latest small business advice this year and beyond.
