Seven ways to significantly improve your Content Marketing skills

In this post, we’ve updated an earlier four point post on how to improve content marketing skills, strategy, writing and creation with more tips. Make sure to check out our other content marketing posts (see footer of post) and our on-demand content marketing training.

We’ve seen a huge rise in content marketing to become one of the most important aspects of the modern marketer role.

Whether it is the written word, video, audio or experiential, the concept of content transcends almost all marketing specialisms (brand, digital, PR and creative) in a way like no other.

It’s becoming especially critical to marketing roles at all levels to understand the theory behind creating content, linking it to marketing strategy and business goals and being able to craft intelligent, entertaining and persuasive content that takes prospects on a journey to wanting to work with your business.

It can be both deceptively easy if you believe the rising tide of gurus peddling their own approaches to content marketing yet overwhelming at the same time.

And it’s very different if you’re marketing B2C, B2B, public sector or charity propositions whether you think it is or it isn’t. Audience always determines tone, platform and optimum delivery of message.

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 of seven key ways to improve your own content marketing skills 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. Open your eyes

Look within your industry. Start with competitors and then branch out wider to see what they’re doing, how they are positioning and what content marketing tools and tricks they are adopting.

Look outside your industry and see what the leading companies are doing elsewhere. There may be opportunity to bring something entirely new to your sector that no-one else is doing.

Look at what the biggest brands and award winning brands are doing in their content. Just bear in mind they will have sizable teams and huge budgets so what they are doing may not be entirely practical for you.

Two techniques that are hot right now are

(1) automated on-demand webinar funnels which allow anyone to book and join “seemingly” live webinars and enter a communications funnel to start conversations. Look up eWebinar, EasyWebinar and Demio, and

(2) benchmark surveys which allow prospects to complete a survey that helps them understand where they are now and what they need to do to get to the next level. Check out Ryan Levesque “Ask” and Daniel Priestley’s ScoreApp.

2. Start writing

Most content involves some form of writing. And getting good at writing means practice.

Get into the habit of writing everyday. Keep it simple. It might be short snappy social media posts, blog posts or even recording a video, based on a script or outline.

The point is you’re perfecting your craft of improving all the aspects necessary to make a piece of content pop. This means working on headlines, the critical first line “hook”, telling a story or structuring an argument, delivering a lesson and creating a relevant call to action.

In all these areas, think about mixing them up so some are designed to be engaging and others are designed to drive commercial action. Focusing only on one or the other will be a detriment.

3. Read more

There’s no surprise that schools place so much importance on reading throughout the entire education process.

If you read more, your vocabulary improves, your spelling, grammar and punctuation improve and you learn about different styles of writing, tone and structure.

So read more. And mix your reading across fiction and non-fiction. If you’re not a fan of books, read blogs and articles. If you like the visual medium, consider comics and graphic novels.

Podcasts can fill a gap if you are more driven to audio content but bear in mind, this is about reading specifically to improve your own creation. If, ultimately, you are looking to produce video and audio content primarily, devouring more podcasts and video content will definitely help, but you’ll still need to write crisp prose for use in these types of assets too.

4. 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.

5. Become 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 long 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.

6. 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?

7. 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 seven 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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