How can I improve my content marketing skills?

Content marketing is fast becoming the dominant skill required in the modern marketer.

Whether it is the written word, video, audio or experiential, the concept of content transcends brand, digital, PR, creative in a way like no other marketing discipline.

Being able to craft intelligent, entertaining and persuasive content and take prospects on a journey to wanting to work with your business is the number one challenge facing most business owners and most marketing teams.

There is no magic bullet.

But there are ways to systematically improve what you’re doing. And the best part of it is – practice inherently helps you improve.

Use this checklist to evaluate your own content marketing efforts and to make a plan to improve this year.

Skills needed to be an effective Content Marketing professional

1. Be curious

You need to think like an investigative journalist or detective investigating a case. And your research needs to start in understanding your audience more deeply.

Any content you produce needs to meet their needs otherwise it is a big waste of time.

What are their biggest challenges? Where do they want to get to? What products and services are they currently using that maybe aren’t giving them what they need? What does that aspirational future look like?

How do you find answers to these questions? By asking them. Either directly or indirectly using:

  • Google Analytics to find out who’s visiting your website. Base level analytics gives you information like the location, IP, device and preferred content and behaviours of your site visitors.
  • Quora and Reddit to research topics around your niche. Find out what people are talking about and seeking more information on.
  • Learn from your most engaged content using tools like BuzzSumo to find out why your audience like what they like.
  • Engage with people in the comment section of your blog or offer email reply or (incentivised) surveys to your most engaged audience members.

2. Be an expert

Producing relevant content that excites and motivates your audience to take action requires you to be an expert on your topic. But the great thing about being the expert is that it doesn’t actually have to be you. See yourself as a host, guide or facilitator and trade off “invited subject experts.

This has worked for a decade or more on industry leading blogs, emerging podcasts and of course the event sector has existed using this strategy for many years.

As the host, your skill is applying any interview or written piece to the audience and their needs. So an ability to be a great “interviewer” is an emerging skill for the modern marketer.

Great interviewers are:

  • Prepared. They arrive at interviews with an understanding of the expert, their work and their content and have great questions ready.
  • Ask open ended questions. This technique leads to more open and expansive responses and opens up for opportunities for, yes you guessed it, more open questions.
  • Comfortable with technology. It’s important to give yourself the best chance to maximise your content longer term. Video record in situ or online using Zoom. Transcribe into text using Otter and you are able to create video, audio and written content all from one interview.

It’s for these reasons we’re digging much deeper into the area of content and conversion in 2022 at MMC Learning and looking at ways to help marketers improve tactically and strategically in these areas.

3. Create content with a goal in mind

It is important that any piece of content – whether blog post, email, social media post, video, podcast, ebook, lead magnet, webinar – has a call to action and a reason for being.

Goals may not only be specific to selling products or services, they could be to grow your email subscription list for a future launch, social media following webinar sign-ups.

Setting goals also helps in assessing effectiveness. Attaching how content performs help you determine whether the content is successful or needs improvement.

The best ways to do this are:

  • Email click-through rate. Which emails and links are people most interested in? Pro tip: Moving to email as you publish and actually sending more emails instead of a monthly newsletter is a better approach. You build more trust and value.
  • Bounce rate. Do people leave your site without clicking through to other pages? The rate at which they do so is your bounce rate. If people click away more than 70% of the time, you need to improve your content and how it is structured to keep them on the site
  • Dwell time. How long are people staying and how are they moving through your site?

4. Create content people are searching for

Optimising content to be found online – outside of your organic social media, paid and email efforts – is critical to reaching more of the right people when they are searching for it.

Keywords don’t just help your Google ranking, keyword provide a foundation for content and positioning. Keywords should direct what you say and allow you to stay relevant with what people want to read.

Choosing the right keywords:

  • Use the Google Adwords tool for free or paid services like SEMrush, Ahrefs or KWFinder.
  • Opt for long-tail keywords. For example, instead of choosing “marketing course,” go for “accredited CIM marketing courses.” Keywords like this help direct quality traffic to your site.
  • Even better, ask whole questions and see who else is providing that kind of content. This is how the humble “How to…” blog post and YouTube video was born.
  • Choose low competition keywords to avoid competing with major brands and their huge budgets.
    Lower search volumes are fine as it is all about being focused.

These four steps and the included tips and tools will certainly help you to plan and prepare content that will have more meaning for your intended audience.
At MMC Learning, we practice what we preach. We’re not out-of-touch academics teaching methods that don’t work in modern marketing.

This year, we’re running a range of free and paid masterclasses, we’re providing a range of low cost on-demand short courses and of course deliver CIM, CMI and the MSc in Digital Marketing qualification courses. Click the links above to find out more.

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Rene Power

MMC Learning’s Director of Marketing, Rene is passionate about making marketing more accessible and has an interest in businesses in the industrial and professional services sectors. Among his responsibilities as a member of the MMC Learning team are designing and delivering the company’s own marketing activities, and assisting clients with their team training.