2.75 million blog posts, 6 million blog posts, 7.5 million blog posts, 4.6 billion pieces of content — a quick Google search for the key phrase “pieces of content published every day” yielded these results.

You’ll likely find other figures, also in the millions and billions, but the point is loud and clear: so we publish much content online every day. How can your design agency stand out from the crowd?

Here are some proven, time-tested strategic content marketing tips you can implement today.

Table of Contents

1

• Not Everything Is About You
• Understand Which Topics Your Audience Wants
• Build Backlinks Through Guest Posting
• Maintain a Regular Posting Schedule
• Leverage Social Media
• Repurpose your content
• Doing Content Marketing Right

Not Everything Is About You

Content marketing, by definition, is the use of various types of content — blogs, articles, podcasts, demo videos, social media posts — to drum up interest for your brand. But not in an explicitly promotional way.

Don’t create content that’s all about you. Talk about topics your target audience would like to know more about, such as.

• Why branding matters?
• The components of good social media graphic design
• How to create a logo
• Graphic design skills to brush up on
• How to leverage flyers for business promotion

Pro tip: Be helpful. Provide as much detail as you can. Then, at the end of each post, add a call to action asking the reader or viewer to reach out if they need to know more about the topic.

Understand Which Topics Your Audience Wants

This tip ties in perfectly with tip #1. Create content your audience wants, but which ones?

It’s all about finding the right topic idea and the content your audience engages with. These you’ll discover through research using tools such as Buzzsumo, Feedly, and Google Trends.

Shane Barker, a content marketing consultant, recommends creating content on popular topics in your niche if you’re just starting with content marketing. People already like these topics, but that doesn’t mean they like reading about the same things. Your best bet? Approach the same topic from another angle, i.e., be the devil’s advocate, inject controversy, or present a case study.

Matt Janaway, another content marketing expert, recommends implementing a content tracking system to measure the performance of your existing subject. This way, you can create more idea around topics that are getting the most hits.

Pro tip: Don’t stick to just one content format. Vary things up by creating videos around your best-performing blog posts and vice versa. Or curate your best-performing articles on a specific topic and turn them into an ebook.

Build Backlinks Through Guest Posting

Guest posting is one of the most effective techniques for spreading awareness about your design agency. You can expand your market reach by leveraging the influence of popular sites in the design industry. This is good for branding and SEO.

Take note, however, that getting high-authority design sites to publish your piece takes some work:

• Create a list of sites for outreach
• Depending on how the site wants the guest posting process to go, reach out to them with a list of topics you want to write about or send them a completed an article for review
• If they decide to publish your piece as is, well and good. If not, ask for feedback so you can make the improvements.

Before submitting an article for the site’s owner or webmaster to review, study their guest posting guidelines. This is important because you don’t want to write on a topic they’re not interested in publishing.

Pro tip: Cover a topic inside out. Come up with angles or talking points other articles haven’t covered yet. If you’re writing about a specific design tool, include every necessary detail. This comprehensive piece on ExportYourStore is one example to emulate. It’s not about design, obviously. But it shows how far you can go on a topic as long as you’re willing to dig deeply enough.

Maintain a Regular Posting Schedule

Long-running TV shows are successful for many reasons, one of which is that their audience knows that, like clockwork, they can expect an episode to run at a certain time and day.

It’s the same thing with content marketing. It’s not enough that your posts are fresh, interesting, helpful, and informational — they have to come at regular intervals, too. This way, you give your customers something to look forward to.

Whether you are creating social media posts or writing a series of blog posts on the top-quality performance testing software, establish a content publishing schedule to organize and speed up your workflow.

Pro tip: Project management tools such as ClickUp or Mavenlink can make sure all members of your content team are aware of your posting schedules and the content to publish. These and other similar tools offer project planning features and file-sharing capabilities that are integral to keeping everyone in the loop.

Leverage Social Media

More than 50% of the world’s population uses social media. Meaning, used properly, social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram can magnify your content’s reach many times over. The secret is putting the right content in front of the right audience using the right platform at the right time.

And this can only happen if you’ve taken the time to fully understand who your target customer is. The following questions can get you started with audience research:

• Who are the people you’re trying to attract?
• Which social networks do they use?
• What are their motivations or pain points?
• Where do they work?
• Are they familiar with your brand?
• What types of content do they want to see?

You don’t have to be on every social media platform to succeed at social media marketing. Before investing time and resources in a new platform, think about brand fit and if your audience is using it. Remember, social media is a communication channel, and communication is a two-way street. There’s no use posting when nobody’s reading or listening.

Pro tip: Use social media productivity tools like Vista Social, Hootsuite, and SocialPilot to automate activities such as post scheduling and publishing, social inbox listening, reports generation, insights extraction, and review management. This way, your team doesn’t have to do everything manually, saving everyone time and energy.

Repurpose your content

You don’t have to throw away your previously published content, especially those that gave you significant results.

You can still repurpose and reuse old content to make the most of them.

Plus, it can be exhausting and time-consuming to create new content, and by repurposing, you won’t need to make new ones from scratch.

You’ll save a lot of work hours and resources while getting more out of your old content.

Follow these tips:

• Revise and update old content. Look through your archives and identify any old content that you can revise and to make it more relevant and valuable to your audience.
• Turn long-form content into shorter, more digestible pieces. Consider breaking up your long-form content into smaller, more easily consumable pieces that you can easily share on social media or use in your email marketing campaigns.
• Repurpose content for various platforms. Repurpose your content pieces based on the specific platform, such as turning a blog post into a video or creating social media graphics from infographics.
• Repost User-Generated Content. Encourage your audiences to share their own content related to your brand and repurpose the content for your marketing efforts (with proper attribution to the original creator).

Reposting UGC can help create a sense of community and engagement around your brand.

Doing Content Marketing Right

Strategic content marketing is critical to any design agency’s success. Not only can it boost your brand presence and grow audience engagement, but it can also build consumer trust and generate more and better leads.

It’s important to note that content marketing is not a one-and-done deal. It’s an ongoing marketing strategy that can only succeed through constant research, testing, and measuring. So while you’re at it, arm yourself with the right knowledge and tools so you can also take time to enjoy the ride.

Originally posted at RuhaniRabin.com. Click here to subscribe now