Content marketing relies on you being able to convince others to share your content. This reliance means that you need to create content that others will want to share, rather than having to convince them.
Unfortunately, many marketers focus on the content and forget that the overall package is just as important. If you take the best piece of content in the world but package it poorly, you won’t do nearly as well as you could have.
Content marketing consists of many different factors and optimizing each of them will significantly improve the success of your campaign.
Improve your website
The design is a huge factor. Many bloggers and publication writers refuse to link to sites that look or feel spammy, regardless of how good your content is.
If your content is better than your website, then you’re letting yourself down. Be very critical of your design and evaluate how you could improve it. When someone lands on your page, you want them to be impressed by the overall package.
One factor you’ll want to consider is the speed of your website. It’s easy to forget that even in the US lots of people are still using dial-up. Their internet isn’t fast enough for them to sit there and load your 5mb page.
All of your images should be compressed and loaded from your server. Making new requests and calls to external website servers is going to jump your loading time quite noticeably.
If you’re using a CMS like Joomla or WordPress, then you might consider installing a lazy load plugin. These plugins make your website load downwards, allowing visitors to start reading the content at the top as the rest of the page loads.
Every person that lands on your page are potential sharers. They could be the person who shares your page on social media and takes it viral. Or they might be a local news writer or know somebody who is.
Secondly, you’ll want to make sure that your website looks appealing and isn’t buggy on different browsers or screens.
It’s great that you site loads quickly, but if it hurts my eyes to look at then I’m probably not going to share it with my friends!
If your site still isn’t responsive, then there’s a good chance that on some browsers or screen sizes it’s going to look bad.
Learning about basic design principles like color combinations will make your website look much better and could be the difference between influencers sharing your content and ignoring it.
Give your keyboard a rest
It’s a myth that people don’t like to read content. But ignoring graphics and videos is a mistake. It can often be easier to convince people to share infographics and videos than it is to get them to share a long wall of text (even if it’s amazing!).
If you have no design skills, then you can look to upwork.com to hire a freelance designer who will be able to create you something fantastic.
Certain industries do better with visual content and others with written text. It’s important that you research other content marketing campaigns in your industry and learn from them first.
Blow the competition away
The skyscraper technique has become famous across the SEO and content marketing world. It revolves around the idea that influencers want to share the best possible content on a given topic.
You go out and find other content marketing campaigns that your competitors have run and were successful. Then, you can create better versions of their content and replicate their campaigns.
Then you go ahead and share your superior version with the influencers who linked to your competitors’ piece.
Blowing the competition away is the easiest way to have a successful content marketing campaign. Yes, it’s possible to score plenty of backlinks and shares with an average piece of content, but it’s far easier with something that’s amazing.
If your competition is relying purely on text, then this could be as simple as hiring a designer to create infographics of their content. This infographic can be combined with your blog post and should make content marketing a breeze.
Similarly, if they are creating low-quality graphics but are managing to score shares and backlinks, you can create much better versions. The skyscraper technique is great because it allows you to get plenty of publicity but it can also remove your competitor’s backlink.
Business is war!
Conclusion
Content marketing is about having the best product and being able to put that in front of the most amount of relevant people. Forgetting about the overall package is a mistake. Small factors like your page speed and the design of your header might let down your content.
After spending so much time and energy on your content and marketing it, it would be crazy to let other factors harm your campaign. As always, you should do as much research as possible to figure out what kinds of campaigns will perform best in your industry.
Once you know what your competitors have done and how well their campaigns went you can brainstorm ideas that are far superior. Content marketing can be your competitive advantage.