Content marketing has gained a lot of steam over the years, but when it first began there were only a few techniques that you could actually leverage. For example, on a typical day, you might have written a blog post, crossed your fingers, and hoped it ranked high on Google.

Next, you would have sent it to subscribers on your email list and then posted it to your social media profiles – and that was it, pretty much!

That kind of strategy worked for the most part during those days, but now things have changed a lot on the online marketing scene.

There are still marketers who are using that same technique and if you’re one of them, it’s important for you to understand that with the explosion in popularity of content marketing, this type of marketing has become a lot more nuanced and complex.

There are now a lot of different techniques for effectively reaching an audience and resonating with them.

In an effort to help you discover some of the most effective techniques for marketing in today’s world, I’ve rounded up 10 of the best ones that you can use in this and the coming years.

This article will help you acquire more tools to ensure the success of your content marketing efforts.

9 Powerful Marketing Techniques That Will Get You Better Results

1. Storytelling

Neuroscience has proven that the best way of capturing people’s attention is by providing them with a well-crafted narrative.

Our brains are programmed to crave and seek out interesting stories, and if that hasn’t changed over the last few thousand years, it’s not about to change now.

Use storytelling to bake information into the memories of your audience as well as to resonate with them on a deep emotional level. Craft the story of you, your business, brand, products, or services and weave it into everything you do.

Every aspect of your digital marketing efforts should be designed to make people want to subscribe to updates from you in much the same way that they subscribe to updates for their latest shows on Netflix.

In order to do this, you simply have to take a look at all the content that you create.

Before you publish those how-to posts, ultimate guide, e-books, and listicles, make sure that you find ways of instilling interesting stories that elicit conflict, surprise, emotion (or whatever else you’re going for) from your audience.

Tie your stories to an angle that is unique and tell the stories in an episodic manner.

2. Use Pillar-Clusters

The vast majority of people rely on Google to offer accurate, relevant answers to all their questions online. And for Google to do this effectively, it needs to understand what the intent and the context behind each of those searches is.

To this end, Google has evolved and now recognizes topical connections across different queries from users.

The search engine can look back at other similar queries that were searched for in the past, and then surface the best type of content that will answer those questions.

Because of this, Google delivers content it deems to be the most authoritative on that particular topic.

If you want to help Google see your content as trustworthy and authoritative in your industry, you need to implement the pillar-cluster content model on your site.

If you’ve been keeping up with my blog, then you know I’ve written some posts on how to create pillar content for your blog as well as how to create content clusters. But now this is about putting those two powerful practices together to make Google take notice of your content.

Creating one pillar page which offers a high-level overview of an overarching topic with hyperlinks to many different cluster pages which dive into that topic’s various subtopics allows you to signal to the search engine that the pillar page is authoritative as far as that topic is concerned.

When you hyperlink all the different cluster pages to that pillar page, you also help to spread domain authority all over the cluster of content.

This means that each of your cluster pages gets an organic boost when the pillar page starts to rank higher.

Furthermore, if any of the cluster pages begin to rank for specific keywords or phrases, they can also help the pillar page climb the rankings.

3. Email Subscriptions

One of the best ways of keeping up with the latest news and stories online is by subscribing to the different online publications via email.

As a marketer, you know that it takes an average of 6-8 touch points before your business can generate qualified sales leads.

This means that by convincing people to subscribe to your email list and getting them to consume your content frequently, you’ll be able to generate more leads for your business and ultimately increase revenue.

Being able to build and grow a loyal subscriber base of engaged readers says a lot about the quality of the content you produce as well as its emotional resonance.

There may be hordes of content that’s already on the Internet right now…

And most people’s inboxes may be packed full of so much information that they wouldn’t be able to consume all of it if they lived 30 lifetimes…

But if you can get people to actively engage with your content, then this is a clear sign that those people actually value your content.

4. A/B Testing

Each company has different sets of customers, which means that there isn’t any one-size-fits-all method when it comes to building the most optimal sites, creating the most compelling copy, developing the most effective products, and so on.

To figure out which of these elements such as website design, copy, and product features will produce the absolute best results for your business, you need to determine exactly what each unique set of customers would prefer.

A/B testing allows you to run experiments between two different variables (such as a blue or red call to action button or two different headlines) so you can identify the one that produces better results.

Just remember not to confuse A/B testing with multivariate testing which involves simultaneously testing a lot of different variables.

5. Audience Segmentation

Our digital world is overflowing with noise.

Everywhere you go people are creating irrelevant content that is unwarranted and does nothing to really catch anyone’s attention. Adding to all that noise will not help you in any way.

You need to create marketing campaigns that are personalized for each of your target market groups.

Leverage audience segmentation to separate your target market based on different personal attributes such as psycho-graphics, demographics, and behavioral information.

In the end, you will have specific and accessible groups of people which makes it easier to create content that is relevant to each of them.

6. Social Media PR

These days over 30% of all time spent online goes to social media.

With people spending more time on social networks than ever before, marketers need to pivot their strategies from focusing solely on placing stories in the publications of news outlets and instead concentrate on sending traffic to their social profiles too.

If you want to pitch stories successfully to news outlets and journalists these days, you have to account for the types of content which perform well on their various social media profiles and publications.

So before pitching your story, take the time to ensure that it’s not only relevant but also interesting to the social audience of that news outlet.

7. Link Building

As an online marketer, you know that it’s imperative for you to earn high-quality links from websites that have high authority scores. This boosts your domain authority and helps you achieve higher rankings over time.

Just keep in mind that even with the best, most epic content ever – just because you wrote it, doesn’t mean they’ll link to it.

‘Writing and hoping’ isn’t a viable search engine optimization tactic.

A more effective method of helping you earn quality inbound links is by requesting links to your top content from other websites with a domain/page authority score that is the same or higher than yours.

Also, make sure that the content that is being linked to is highly relevant to the content on the referring website.

Yet another way of earning quality backlinks involves finding content in your industry that already ranks well for the same keywords that you want to rank high for and then creating better content than those top ranking posts.

This is as simple as conducting a Google search for a specific keyword, taking a look at the top three organic listings, and then coming up with content that rivals those three put together.

If ever there was a sure fire way of making it to the top spots in the search engine rankings, this is it.

After creating that awesome content, use SEO tools to help you find all the websites that linked to the content from your competitors and then ask those sites to link to the improved content on your website.

8. Podcasting

More and more people are listening to audio content online than ever before.

According to some studies, people are spending an average of 17 hours every week tuning into some of their favorite podcasts, as well as listening to audiobooks and online radio shows.

For the past few years, every year has seen a massive increase on weekly podcast listeners than the previous one – and this year is no different. We now have people as young as 12 years listening to podcasts each and every week.

With this explosion in the demand for audio content, there’s a big opportunity for marketers to drive even more traffic to their websites. However, that doesn’t mean people are going to listen to just any branded podcast simply because it’s a podcast.

The reality is, if you want to hold people’s attention so they’ll actually listen to your podcast, you need to educate or entertain them.

If you’re simply going to produce another podcast that just interviews experts (like everyone else is doing) then you’re only adding to the noise that’s already flooding the Internet.

9. Historical Optimization

If you take the time to look through your analytics data, you might find that, like the majority of blogs online, most of your traffic comes from older posts.

For most marketers, a huge portion of their monthly blog views comes from posts written over three months prior.

For this reason, it’s very important to develop a strategy that is dedicated to refreshing and then republishing such historical content pieces.

This is what we call ‘updating’ content and this practice should comprise about a third of your entire editorial calendar.

Refreshing old posts with new information and updated search engine optimization allows you to effectively republish them as brand-new blog posts.

You can build upon the existing organic value your posts have accumulated over time through user engagements, backlinks, and so on.

By doing this, you’ll be able to double or even triple the traffic from those posts. This process will also help you optimize your blog for efficiency, thereby increasing your organic traffic and website conversions.

The Bottom Line

A marketing strategy simply describes how your business is going to accomplish a specific mission or goal.

It can include many different digital marketing aspects as long as they all work toward the same objectives for your business.This may include content, campaigns, marketing software, and channels.

When it comes to choosing the right one for your business, it’s important to realize that what works for one person may not necessarily work for you. Choose your various techniques carefully according to what works for your particular audience.

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PlanetBizOp.com

->Steven

Updated: Originally published June 4th 2019