Content Marketing in 2024: Elements That You Should Focus On

Content marketing is the creation, publication and distribution of content to a targeted audience in order to boost business branding, customer engagement and examine their interests to tailor their business goals. This is vital for any business to help them understand their customers and improve the service or product they provide. Forgoing content marketing can heavily impact your business but not doing it effectively can be just as damaging, if not more.

With the new year starting, it is the perfect time to review your business goals and start fresh with a solid content marketing plan for the most promising results as the year goes by. Let’s get into some tips on the best content marketing tips for 2023.

Audience

Without an audience, who are you marketing content to? Knowing your audience should be one of the first things to consider when creating your content plan. If your company is offering gardening as a service, you wouldn’t be marketing to plumbers. While your audience doesn’t have to be detailed in targeting, having a general idea of who they are can help in the writing and publication stage. Engaging your audience through emotionally and fact driven content can prompt them to form a connection to you and consequently, your website. 

Marketing Psychology

After you’ve figured out that part, now you have to pique their interest in what you are offering or selling. Psychology plays a huge part in this. Reading a large chunk of text, whether it is broken up into paragraphs or not, can be incredibly boring for the average person. Visual stimuli can help your customer to process information quickly and to make a judgement without having to read statistics scattered all over the article. According to Smartinsights, over 65% of people are visual learners.

When you look at the graphic, you can see that the majority of people learn more visually than others. Making enticing graphics, or going the extra mile to include relevant GIFs can all encourage your audience to retain information about the article. If you keep in mind that most people will make a decision based on visuals rather than purely text based, you can help your audience along the journey to make them a customer.

Evidence

This leads to having the right evidence in your content. Content without a source backing up the information is seen as opinion. Saying you are the best at something, or saying you are ranked first on Google means nothing unless you have visual proof or an externally linked article to back up your claim. While psychology can tickle the brain into veering toward a certain business, having evidence in the right place can fully sway them into choosing your business.

Trust Building

Another tactic that businesses commonly use is to work alongside trusted brands and list them as a vote of confidence on their website or in their content. People who have had a positive experience with another brand that you have used or are using, can persuade them to choose you as they know that brand is trustworthy. As an example, if you are looking for a reputable company to provide you a service, and their website says something like, ‘Featured on Forbes’ or similar, you know that their services are good quality because not many people get published on a high authority site like that one. 

Strategy

Strategy when marketing content effectively is the technical side of the whole process. You’ve identified your audience. Strategising to reach them is what’s next.

In your content, whether it be on your blog or allocated to a guest post, backlinking to your website or page you are targeting is important to nail the first time. Backlinking to quality content and publishing to high DA websites can boost your websites ranking and introduce potential customers to your content and potentially to your website.

Publishing to just anywhere can waste your content and impact the effectiveness of the article.

Website Usefulness Checklist

For every website, you should check:

Website relevance to article topic: Is the website relevant to your article topic? For example, ‘How To Wash Your Car’ would be an excellent fit for a website targeting new car owners or a car cleaning company (if your business offers that as a service). Posting an article to a website about lifestyle or a home based website wouldn’t be as effective because their audience wouldn’t be what you want to reach.

Are some of the other articles also guest posts? In your hunt for a quality website, you may land on some that look visually appealing with a high DA score. However, there’s no use reaching out to the owner if the articles they post are internal. Chances are, they won’t get back to you or they’ll tell you they aren’t accepting guest posts. Make sure you read the proper guidelines for content submission.

Domain Authority (DA) score (aim for above 50): Domain Authority is referring to how well a website ranks in search result pages (SERPs). A low DA score can mean that the website is new and hasn’t been around for a long time, as DA takes time to increase. As a general rule of thumb, aim for a DA score of over 50 or 60. If you have the opportunity to publish your content on 70+ DA websites, it can help your rankings as the audience on the website could potentially click on the backlink to your page. With the right amount of clicks and with the right anchor text, you may see an influx of traffic to your website.

Spam score: A spam score is basically a metric which evaluates and determines sites that are spammier than others. Aiming for a low spam score means that your content will be published to a quality, trustworthy website. However, you should know that just because a website's spam score is high, doesn’t necessarily mean it has bad content. Like Domain Authority, sometimes the reason for the spam score being high is because the site might be relatively new.

However, you can measure spam score into three different categories:

You can use quality spam score checkers like Moz, Ahrefs and SEMRush as they all have tools that can help you see as much data as possible on the site you are evaluating and help you choose the best website for your article.

Is the website user friendly? One of the first things people notice when they click on a website is the visual appeal. After that, it tends to be how the website flows. Is the website mobile friendly? According to an article on Canonicalized, almost 24% of the top one million websites in the world are not mobile friendly. If the site isn’t mobile friendly, potential customers searching for your article topic may select a different website.

Anchor text

Anchor text is a link from an article to a website. The anchor text, being the text used to link between the two. Choosing anchor text is reliant on the search volume and how it trends on Google. 

You can find what people are searching through related searches to the topic (found at the bottom of Google). Questions asked through Quora or other forums/community pages to get an idea of what people are searching for.

Google Trends has long been known as a great tool to identify trending topics and what people are searching for on Google. 

You can compare search terms to see how they measure up against each other: 

See an itemised breakdown by subregion (depending on where you live):

You can use this to target specific audiences who are searching for the topic.

As well as a breakdown of related queries to what you inputted:

Conclusion

All of the above can be wildly helpful in boosting your next content marketing plan. With the right plan, your business can boost their website rankings, hold customer engagement and increase leads. Content marketing is only bound to increase in popularity, but knowing how to do it effectively is what will be the defining point. There are many different ways to utilise tools on the web to increase the effectiveness of your content marketing. In order to create truly effective content, it's important to understand your audience, what motivates them and how they process information. 

Marketing psychology provides valuable insights into human behaviour that can be applied to content marketing in order to more effectively reach and persuade target audiences. Likewise, including evidence in your content can help bolster your argument and build trust with readers. Finally, using the right anchor text can make a big difference in how Google ranks your content and whether or not users click through to read it. All of these factors are important considerations for anyone looking to improve their content marketing strategy. Have you implemented any of these tips in your own work? We'd love to hear about your experiences in the comments below.