It’s 2021. Trends are a whole lot different from what they were a decade ago. This doesn’t just relate to fashion or hobby choices, either. It’s also highly relevant in the marketing world. 

One of the most essential methods to generate organic traffic is content marketing when it comes to marketing. With the right content marketing strategy in place, a website has the ability to do that all-important climb to the first page of Google. 

However, to win the content marketing game, you have to forget about the tactics that worked in the past. Forget about keyword stuffing and other outdated SEO methods. Below are a few strategies to implement which ensure your content marketing has a greater overall impact.

Use the data that’s available

With content marketing, data is your friend. It highlights hot topics in your industry. It points out what your competitors are doing. It also allows you to understand where trends are going in your industry, ensuring you can plan ahead effectively. 

The good news is there are various sources to find some juicy data. For example, to find competitors that are doing best in your sector, you can look at website ranking performance. If a site is at the top, you know its content strategy is on-point. Then once you get a list of the top performers, you can analyze their content and use this as the basis for your own marketing efforts.

Craft content experiences that engage your audience

It’s recommended to produce long-form content which goes into in-depth detail about the subject it revolves around. However, getting your audience actually to read a long strip of written content is difficult. Even if you break it up with subheadings, bullet-point lists, and highlighted quotes, users are likely to skim over the content and not engage in the way you’d hope. 

As a result, it is important you put together content experiences that provide active involvement for users. This can be anything from a quiz to a poll to a before-and-after graphic. This type of content experience isn’t just creative, but it’s also more likely to leave an impression – and this ultimately results in a larger business impact in your favor. 

Build a community

This is easier said than done, admittedly. Yet if you manage to put in the effort to build a community, you have a ready-made audience that will often consume whatever content you serve. 

There are various ways to establish a community effectively. A tried-and-tested method is to incorporate a forum that allows others to post their own thoughts and opinions – a great option if this can be integrated into blog posts on your website. 

Another tactic is to build a large following on social media. By sharing your content and unique, creative posts on social media, you can gain an incredible amount of exposure. Plus, if you’re creating visual content – which should be a strong focus of your strategy – this is ideal for directly sharing on the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.