Content marketing can be a flexible and effective way to promote a business, but many entrepreneurs find themselves too strapped for time to give it the attention needed to maximize its impact.
Whether you use it to fuel other marketing initiatives, improve your search engine optimization (SEO) results, or share valuable information with your audience, the potential benefits make content marketing worth the effort. Well-crafted content has the power to connect with readers on a deeper level than standard ad copy, and integrating it into your strategy can be easier than you think.
To get the biggest impact from your content and your time, it’s important to embrace efficient design practices and have a cohesive content plan in place.
Start with “The Content Marketer’s Surefire Strategy For Success,” a primer for busy business owners looking for a smart start for their content marketing efforts. Then, review these articles from the Hiring Headquarters—Upwork’s resource for businesses, freelancers, and entrepreneurs—for ideas to help further refine your efforts.
Stay Organized with an Editorial Calendar
Without a structured plan to ensure a steady drip of fresh content, it can be difficult to get the traction and results you’re aiming for. An unclear plan can also bog down the creative process.
The most successful content marketers don’t just wing it and publish articles, blog posts, whitepapers, or multimedia content on a whim. Instead, they spend time crafting and refining a strategic editorial calendar, which allows them to get a better handle on the topics, big-picture scope, and frequency of the content they’re delivering to readers.
“7 Ways an Editorial Calendar Can Increase Your Efficiency” explores the value of having an editorial calendar for your content marketing strategy and why a well-executed battle plan can be invaluable for getting the word out about your brand. Here are three of the top reasons you should use an editorial calendar to track, organize, and inform your marketing outreach.
1) It allows you to repurpose your best posts. Having an editorial calendar lets you look back and get at-a-glance info on when a particular piece of content launched while keeping track of how it’s performing over time. This info can be invaluable for highlighting your best performing posts so you can repurpose them into new pieces of content.
2) It helps you diversify your content. Worried that you’re not spreading your post topics out enough? An editorial calendar makes it easy to see what topics you’ve recently covered so you can switch things up for variety. This will help you avoid fatiguing your readers with too much of the same material in a short timeframe.
3) It lets you capture ideas before you forget them. Sitting down to brainstorm and log plans for your next editorial cycle gives you the opportunity to jot down lots of great ideas and track them all in one convenient place. If you come up with new ideas later on, you can always add them to the calendar, too.
Make Your Whitepapers Pop with Smart Design
When it comes to different types of content, whitepapers are an effective way to deliver industry insights while weaving in your brand messaging.
Due to their long-form nature, these meatier tools in your content marketing arsenal also have more potential to rank highly in Google searches. This makes them a popular choice for many companies that want to supplement their short-form blog posts and cross-link across multiple content channels.
“Make Your Whitepaper Stand Out: Write with Design in Mind” offers useful tips to help optimize the flow of your writing and design for the biggest impact. The article has a range of recommendations to help you enhance the quality of your whitepapers, including these tidbits:
1) Brevity is your friend. Throwing walls of text into your whitepapers is a sure-fire way to lose your reader’s interest. By keeping your whitepaper content scaled toward the more concise end of the spectrum, you won’t risk overloading people with information.
2) Make good use of images and design visuals. The layout of your whitepaper is just as important as the content it contains. Using imagery, pops of color, and visual design elements to break up the text can make them more engaging and readable.
3) You don’t have to include the kitchen sink. Taking the less-is-more approach to your whitepaper content can help make it more digestible. Instead of cramming in every detail, for example, use direct links to point readers to other pieces of high-value—and high-converting—content on your site.
Looking for more insights to enhance the effectiveness of your content marketing plan? The Hiring Headquarters is packed with helpful articles.
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