Breadcrumb

6 Content Marketing Tips to Boost Your Business

Written by

The GoCardless content team comprises a group of subject-matter experts in multiple fields from across GoCardless. The authors and reviewers work in the sales, marketing, legal, and finance departments. All have in-depth knowledge and experience in various aspects of payment scheme technology and the operating rules applicable to each. The team holds expertise in the well-established payment schemes such as UK Direct Debit, the European SEPA scheme, and the US ACH scheme, as well as in schemes operating in Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand. See full bio

Last editedAug 20222 min read

If you run a business, content marketing can play a huge role in attracting and retaining customers. It does this by establishing your business as a reliable source of information and an authority within your sector. Creating and publishing content targeted at your customer base increases revenue and builds customer loyalty, which is why some of the biggest brands in the world use it.

Too many businesses, however, make the mistake of thinking that they can simply throw together content quickly on a couple of relevant topics and leave it at that. If a content marketing strategy is going to have the desired impact, take note of the following content marketing tips.

Give your content a measurable business goal

Modern social media means that it’s possible to create content in a wide range of formats – from traditional blog posts to podcasts, e-books and Facebook messages. No matter what format you choose, each piece of content must have a measurable business goal. Attracting views isn’t enough on its own, even though desirable. The content you create must be tied in to your wider marketing strategy and aimed at a specific target audience.

Understand your audience

To target your business audience accurately you need to understand it completely. If you have a marketing team, work with them to create a persona for your target customer. This persona can then be a reference point when putting together content, so that everything you create is highly targeted.

Create in-depth content

Longer content has been performing more successfully in terms of search engine results for a while now. It’s no longer the case that marketers presume that people have a short attention span online and can only take in limited amounts of material. Instead, longer content is seen as a means of signifying depth of understanding.

This only works if the focus is always placed on answering all the questions a prospective customer might have on a given subject. Longer content will only cut through if every part plays a role in helping the customer, answering specific questions and providing targeted tips. Each piece of content should focus on one particular topic and have at most two keywords.

Promotion

The best content in the world is only effective if you get it in front of the right people. Promote your content vigorously using techniques such as:

sharing new content on social media accounts created for your brand
placing ads on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook
including a link to your blog in any newsletter you send to subscribers

Use data to measure success

Creating highly effective content is only one half of the battle. Also, measure the impact and success of that content to ensure that you’re making the right choices when putting it together. Choosing the right metrics on which to base this evaluation is the key to making it part of wider strategic planning.

The number of times a blog is shared on social media may be highly gratifying, but this figure alone doesn’t guarantee that your business goals are being met. Some businesses judge the success of their content marketing strategy on the basis of overall traffic measured by Google Analytics, while others use software to track metrics such as social shares and ‘scroll depth’.

The key to success lies in being very clear about the metrics that represent ‘success’, and sticking to those metrics consistently.

Repurpose your content

If you’ve created a useful, effective and high-impact piece of content, it seems a shame to use it just the once and then forget about it. Instead, reuse the best content, turning a blog post into an e-book, for example, or using the same information to create a webinar. Good content takes time and money to create, so extract the maximum mileage from it.

We can help

GoCardless is a global payments solution that helps you automate payment collection, cutting down on the amount of financial admin your team needs to deal with. Find out how GoCardless can help you with one-off or recurring payments.