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As a marketer, one of your primary goals is likely to attract and engage with your target audience. Content marketing is an effective modern-day strategy that helps increase a brand’s visibility and strengthens relationships with potential customers. Keeping content relevant is essential because if you don’t keep up with the changes in your industry, customer base, or society as a whole, you’ll get passed over.
“Relevant” content can include content that is in line with current social climates and trends, as well as content that appeals to your specific target audience; usually, these things overlap. Continue reading to get a brief overview of five tips you should put into practice to keep your content relevant.
1. Research Your Target Market
Market research is a must for any kind of campaign: email marketing, product launches, influencer marketing campaigns, etc. Content marketing is no different. In order to know what type of blog posts, social media content, images, and videos your target audience will relate to, you need to know who they are.
There are many ways to gather information—from customer surveys to hard data collected from social media and website engagement. Just like any kind of marketing, content marketing is most effective when you have a target or a persona to market to and write for.
2. Research Your Competitors
Research shouldn’t stop at your customers. Competitor research is another pillar of good content marketing. To write engaging content, you have to know what your audience finds engaging in the first place; looking at your top competitors’ content can help you deduce this. It’s also vital to remember that this is not a one-time effort—you don’t conduct research once and then use it for the next five years.
Relevant topics in each industry constantly change thanks to the fast-paced world we live in, so both customer research and competitor research should be conducted regularly.
3. Try To Predict Questions and Give Answers
When someone performs a Google search, they’re usually looking for answers. They may be trying to find a specific product or place, or they may be looking for more information on a vague subject that’s only tangentially related to your business. For example, if you sell kitchen cleaning tools and supplies, you may find that a blog post titled “6 Ways To Prevent Dry Hands Caused by Dish Soap” is more relevant to your audience than an article about the different ways to use your products.
If you want to have a successful content marketing strategy long-term, try to predict the questions, concerns, and pain points that your target audience may have. Then, do your best to provide valuable, relevant information in your articles, social media posts, and web pages.
One of the most effective ways of making your relevant content visible is through the use of keywords and other search engine optimization strategies. This will also help you become more visible on search engine results pages so that when prospects type in their question, you’re one of the first names they see.
4. Consistently Reassess Your Strategy
With trends coming and going faster than seasons in the internet age, marketers need to pay close attention to the reaction their content receives. If your content is receiving fewer interactions or social media engagement is dropping off, you’ll want to know about it.
Regularly reassessing your content strategy will help you maintain a good ROI and ensure that you’re always publishing the most relevant content possible. Updating old content can also keep your brand fresh and modern.
5. Maintain a High Standard for Your Content
Something that is often overlooked in web content is readability. If you create posts that are complex and difficult to read, then the audience likely won’t be engaged with them. Blog posts that are nonsensical or are stuffed to the brim with keywords may also be off-putting. Additionally, it’s essential to ensure you don’t have articles or social media posts with lousy grammar and spelling errors, as this can make the content seem unprofessional.
On the other hand, if your content is organized well and easily digestible, your readers will likely remember you as a good source of entertainment or information, turning you into an authority figure. This will help you build trust with your target audience, which is vital for the success of any content marketing strategy.
Final Thoughts
Creating relevant content for your audience is all about understanding who you’re producing content for and what they want to read or experience. Staying on top of societal and industry-related trends also helps you maintain relevancy. Content creation and content marketing are processes that have to be reassessed regularly in order to keep up with the market as it changes.
The bottom line is this: To create relevant content, stay connected to your audience and keep one eye on your competitors and the other on widescale trends and changes. Relevant content is high-quality, helpful, and honed into your specific target market.
