Do you know that at least 70 percent of B2B marketers will create more content in 2017 compared to 2016? And now in 2020, 84 percent of B2B marketers will outsource their content creation.
While more marketers than ever are embracing content marketing, a much smaller number of them are seeing tangible results research shows that just 17 percent of content marketers report their content marketing efforts as much more successful.
Creating more content is usually always a good thing, but successful content marketers know that it takes more than just creating more content to get results from content marketing. Below are four tips guaranteed to make your content marketing much more effective:
Publish A LOT MORE Content
One of the factors you need to consider when working on your content strategy is that of content frequency. Should you publish more content, or should you publish fewer? Does it even make much of a difference?
This topic is a very controversial one, with blogging experts torn between the two. However, thanks to Hubspot’s extensive study of 13,500 content marketers, the verdict is in: they found that the sweet spot for content frequency is 16 posts a month; publishing 16 or more articles monthly will lead to 3.5 times more traffic and 4.5 times more leads than if you published fewer than four articles monthly.
So work on your content frequency. All things being equal, the more content you can afford to publish the better.
Publish More Comprehensive Content
Naturally, the debate on content frequency has been shaped in such a way that there has to be a trade-off between frequency and comprehensiveness. People are usually divided into two camps: publish fewer, but more comprehensive content or publish more but less comprehensive content.
What if you can have the best of both worlds?
While research shows that publishing more content will yield more content marketing ROI, research also shows that comprehensiveness shouldn’t be sacrificed. A study that analyzed Google search results for over 20,000 keywords found that the average word count for results in the top 10 is 2,000 words. The study concluded that more content is better. This study was further corroborated by a study from Buzzsumo, analyzing over 100 million articles, that found that content needs to be at least 1,000 words to get more traffic from search engines and social media.
1,000 words or 2,000 words, one thing is clear: length is still an important factor when calculating content marketing ROI, and longer, more comprehensive content is usually better.
Master Content Types: Not All Content are Created Equal
Trick question: which will get the most shares between an infographic and a “How to” post? If we are to go by the Buzzsumo study I earlier referenced, that analyzed over 100 million articles, infographics get several times as many shares as how to posts, generating thousands of extra shares on average compared to how to posts.
The Buzzsumo study also ranked the most shared content types in order of popularity. They are:
- Infographics
- List
- Why posts
- What posts
- How to posts
- Videos
It is important to use this knowledge when planning your content strategy. Naturally, you should embrace diversity when creating content, but it is also essential to create more of the content types that will give you the best bang for your buck.
Make Effective Use of Visuals and Media in Your Content
An image is worth a thousand words, but effectively used media content could be worth a lot more. Here are some key facts and stats you should know about multimedia:
- Infographics get thousands of extra shares than other content types on average
- Infographics are likely to get 832 percent more retweets than articles that are pure-text or image-only
- People are 80 percent more likely to remember visual content than text, and they are 30 times more likely to read an infographic than text
- Content that features images are likely to get 94 percent more views than content without images
Knowing the above facts, it is important to ensure that your content strategy effectively utilizes and integrates media. Owning a blog, publishing regular infographics, creating videos and utilizing different forms of multimedia can increase content reach as well as improve your brand image.
So, don’t just create the average bland text-only content. Instead, make your content rich with visuals and multimedia. Not only will it be more engaging, resulting on more average time on site, but it will also send your traffic and conversions through the roof.
Conclusion
It’s still very early to plan your content marketing strategy for 2017, but you’ll only get good results when you work on hard data and not just opinion and feelings. The above are some solid, research-backed tips for boosting your content marketing ROI. Use them in your content strategy and watch your results increase significantly.
John Stevens is the founder and CEO of Hosting Facts.