SEO Content Marketing Strategy Checklist and Tips

Ready to refresh your content marketing strategy this year? In order to help you stay ahead, we’ve created this article with the ultimate content marketing checklist, covering everything including useful tactics, the best tools, competitor analysis, and more.

Content marketing is a vital part of a company’s marketing strategy, with 84% of companies in the USA practicing content marketing methods. The intent of Content Marketing is to help you build your online reputation, develop relationships and generate leads.

What strategies should you be using to take your brand to the next level? Read on this article and explore the 25 content marketing tips you really should be implementing this year to help to push your brand ahead of the field.

Key areas within this content marketing checklist include:

• Improving your online reputation: Managing your brand’s reputation
• Analyzing competitor tactics: How to find inspiration from what rivals are doing
• Find the best content topics: Using the Topic Research tool to identify key trends
• Creating SEO-friendly content: Implementing keywords and managing content length and readability levels
• Find your best-performing articles: Auditing your content to discover what posts are successful

Content Summary

Introduction
Document Your Content Marketing Strategy
Analyze Your Competitors’ Tactics
Analyze User Experience
Find the Best Content Topics with Topic Research
Match Content with Each Stage of the Customer Journey
Collaborate with Your Sales Team
Speak with Customer Support to Identify Client Problems
Browse Forums to Find What Your Customers Are Interested In
Create SEO-Friendly Content with SEO Content Template
Take Advantage of User-Generated Content
Create Short Videos for Facebook and Instagram
Organize a Webcast on YouTube
Develop Additional Infographics and Illustrations
Create More Interactive Content
Optimize Articles in Real Time with SEO Writing Assistant
Publish Research or Articles Based on Statistical Analysis
Publish Comprehensive and Useful Guides
Collaborate with Other Brands in a Joint Marketing Promotion
Leverage Micro-Influencers
Support the Most Important News and Events
Find Your Best-Performing Articles with Content Audit
Transform Multiple Articles into an eBook
Update Blog Posts with Good SEO Potential
Tailor Your Content for Mobile and Voice Search
Improve Your Online Reputation with Brand Monitoring

Introduction

As of 2018, 84% of US companies with 100+ employees use content marketing tactics. While this doesn’t come as a surprise, it does emphasize how vital content marketing is for brands.

Yet, it’s all too easy to find yourself in a content marketing rut.

Content marketers tend to have their own routine, using best practices for content creation, distribution, and analysis.

However, if your practices remain stagnant for too long, your brand and content become outdated. Although you may be a well-oiled content machine, it’s imperative to analyze recent content marketing trends and experiment with new techniques and tools.

To help you discover new tools and stay ahead of content marketing trends, we’ve prepared a content marketing checklist. Use these tactics, ideas, and tools to give your content marketing strategy a much-needed boost for this year.

Document Your Content Marketing Strategy

Did you know that only 39% of content marketers have a documented content marketing strategy for their organization? Among top-performing organizations, however, this number increases to 65%.

It’s been proven that those who write down their goals are more likely to achieve them; the same concept applies to documenting your content marketing strategy. Find time to write down and review your organization’s content strategy, goals, and efforts. Then, analyze your content marketing progress. Are you on track? Where can you improve?

Analyze Your Competitors’ Tactics

When you feel your content becoming repetitive or monotonous, it’s time to look for inspiration. Start by analyzing your competitors’ tactics and discovering how to adjust your content strategy to stand out from the crowd.

Identify a section of your content strategy you’d like to improve and analyze how your competitors accomplish these objectives. Then, begin brainstorming ways to outperform your competitors using their tactics. For instance, if your competitor writes blog posts on a specific topic, take it a step further and develop a content series featuring videos, downloadable guides or create interactive content.

Analyze User Experience

User experience is no longer an afterthought; it’s a necessity. Your content should adapt to the user’s device, meet and exceed their informational or entertainment needs, and user experience should play a leading role in your website’s information flow.

Review your website’s user experience and find ways to improve. Perhaps you can streamline the buying process by bundling content together? In fact, in a 2018 Demand Gen Report, 52% of buyers strongly agreed brands should package relevant content together to help expedite their research phase.

Other areas of user experience to analyze can include content flow, page load speed, and accessibility for devices and impairments. All of your content marketing efforts must create a unique and immersive experience for your audience.

Find the Best Content Topics with Topic Research

Are you struggling to find content topics that resonate with your audience and drive traffic to your website? The Topic Research tool identifies trending topics within your target audience and helps you create quality content around them.

By adding this tool to your content marketing checklist, you’ll receive content ideas based on:

• Questions your audience asks about a particular topic
• Headlines which resonate the most within a particular market
• Articles your audience is interested in

You can also filter topics by popularity, efficiency, difficulty, and volume to help narrow down your content ideas.

Match Content with Each Stage of the Customer Journey

Customers require different types of content at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

For instance, at the awareness stage, your audience may watch videos to learn more about your company or products, while at the decision stage, they may look for case studies to help them make a choice between products.

If your current content marketing strategy only satisfies one aspect of the customer journey, reevaluate your strategy to match your content to each phase, as a large number of your potential customers may not be able to reach the final stage and make a purchase.

Remember, the buyer’s journey extends past the initial purchase. Retain loyal customers by building a relationship with them through your content.

Collaborate with Your Sales Team

You can do all the research in the world, but your sales team truly knows what your customers need. Facilitate a conversation between your content marketing team and the sales staff to collaborate on new types of content that fill a need and educate buyers.

Speak with Customer Support to Identify Client Problems

Customer support teams solve problems every day; they know what issues your customers face and what solutions are necessary. Make their day a little easier and keep customers happy by creating content that educates and directs them to the answers they need.

Browse Forums to Find What Your Customers Are Interested In

Another tactic to add to your content marketing checklist is browsing forums for new information about your audience. Look for industry or relevant forums your customers are active on and see what conversations they’re engaging in. Then, use this insight to guide your content marketing strategy by analyzing their pain points, motivators, and topics of conversation.

Create SEO-Friendly Content with SEO Content Template

Content marketers understand the importance of search engines and optimized content. After all, 51% of all website traffic comes from organic search.

Expedite the content creation and optimization process with the SEO Content Template tool. Using the targeted keyword you input, the tool generates a content template based on the top ten results in Google search.

In your personalized content template, you’ll also receive:

• Related keywords to feature in your content
• The recommended content length and readability level
• Relevant backlink sources
• Metadata optimization tips

With the efficiency of the template tool, you can spend less time creating and more time orchestrating content for your strategy.

Take Advantage of User-Generated Content

With everything involved in a successful content marketing strategy, you may feel like there’s not enough time in the day to consistently create new content. Instead of developing content by yourself, take advantage of user-generated content.

Your loyal fans are already tagging you on Instagram, writing about your brand on their blogs, and posting about it on social media, why not use this genuine content for your own efforts? Curate the best user-generated content and add it to your editorial and social media queues.

This tactic offers a win-win situation for content marketers. Not only are you generating a library of content resources, you’re also improving your online reputation by using content created by real customers. 74% of consumers rely on social media to inform their purchasing decisions, and 84% of consumers say they trust peer recommendations above all other sources of advertising.

Create Short Videos for Facebook and Instagram

In the span of a single day, more than 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook, and 80% of users can recall a video ad they’ve watched in the past month. There has never been a better time to leverage the power of video and add Instagram and Facebook videos to your content calendar.

Also, if you happen to create long-form videos such as webinars or video recorded podcasts, don’t hesitate to use smaller segments on social media. By dividing longer videos into short, sharable clips, you are actively building your social media content library and distributing your content to an audience who may not have seen the full version.

Organize a Webcast on YouTube

Reach new and current customers in real time by going live on YouTube or other social media platforms. Show viewers behind-the-scenes content, host an informational webinar, or deliver your video content in real time.

Plus, live videos on YouTube provide marketers with the ability to also interact with users in real time. During your webcasts, ask questions, respond to audience inquiries, and create a dialog with viewers.

Develop Additional Infographics and Illustrations

While reviewing your content marketing checklist, consider adding more infographics and illustrations to your blog content or website. Did you know the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text, and 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual?

Audiences want to consume information right away. With this in mind, infographics help relay pertinent information faster and more easily. Rather than reading an entire article, readers can instantly receive the information they need by viewing an infographic.

And, according to a survey by Venngage, 40% of online marketers stated that of their visual content assets, infographics performed best and drove the most engagement.

Create More Interactive Content

Between Buzzfeed quizzes and Instagram stickers, interactive content is all the rage. And research by the Content Marketing Institute found that 81% of content marketers agree that interactive content grabs attention more effectively than static content. Interactive content can serve a purpose at every point in a customer’s journey, from initial awareness to the final purchase.

Try utilizing different forms of interactive content, such as calculators, assessments, and contests, to see which type your audience reacts to best.

Optimize Articles in Real Time with SEO Writing Assistant

As a content pro, you spend a great deal of time optimizing content. But have you ever wondered just how optimized your content truly is? When you use the SEO Writing Assistant, your Google Doc or WordPress content is analyzed in real time for effective optimization tactics.

By utilizing the SEO add-on, you’ll receive optimization recommendations based on the targeted keyword of your choice. And, since the metrics are interactive, you can see your progress as you edit.

Publish Research or Articles Based on Statistical Analysis

As you begin to align your content with the customer’s purchasing process, also consider publishing articles featuring original research or industry-related statistics. As customers research your business and products or services, they’ll want validation that they’re making a wise decision. Showing your knowledge of the industry can help support this confirmation and position your brand as an industry leader.

Publish Comprehensive and Useful Guides

Almost every business offers added-value content, such as downloadable guides, to potential and returning customers. This year, make it your goal to publish the most comprehensive and helpful guide available in your industry.

Think about areas where your customers might have questions, need assistance, or want to learn more about, and develop guide topics from these results.

Collaborate with Other Brands in a Joint Marketing Promotion

Make it your goal to work together with other brands. Find brands that share your goals and values (but aren’t your competitors), align with your industry, and would be willing to collaborate on a promotion.

Using this partnership, you can run a giveaway or contest, join forces to fund and publish new research, or develop interactive content for your mutual audiences.

Leverage Micro-Influencers

Did you know that 81% of marketers find influencer marketing to be successful? This year, find micro-influencers who resonate with your audience and partner up for a promotion, giveaway, or campaign.

While micro-influencers have anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 followers, research has shown these accounts drive higher engagement rates than their celebrity-status counterparts with millions of fans. In fact, MediaHub, a digital marketing solutions firm, reported retail and entertainment clients received about 50% higher engagement using microinfluencers. The firm also found influencers with 1,000 fans drove an 85% higher engagement “lift” than those with 100,000+ followers.

However, be sure to follow all FTC regulations and rules surrounding influencer marketing efforts.

Support the Most Important News and Events

Have you heard of the content marketing tactic known as “newsjacking”?

This content technique involves creating and optimizing content around the latest industry news and events, with the goal of ranking on search engines, being shared on social media, and starting a conversation around the news.

Set a Google alert for specific topics, keywords, or brands and add news content to your strategy.

Find Your Best-Performing Articles with Content Audit

This year, make it a priority to identify and leverage your top-performing content using the Content Audit tool. This audit tool reviews your website content based on a series of criteria including backlinks, social signals, user-experience data, authors, content length, and metadata.

In addition, the Post Tracking feature also allows you to track external content performance based on backlinks, social shares, and keyword rank.

Once you know which content is performing well, use the other tools and tactics mentioned in our content marketing checklist to make it stronger and reach new marketing goals.

Transform Multiple Articles into an eBook

Do you have several high-performing articles with a similar topic? If so, combine these articles into an informative eBook. Website visitors looking for more information during their initial purchase research will appreciate having an authoritative resource available on the topic.

However, do not simply copy and paste the articles together as a shortcut. Your eBooks must provide a seamless content experience with a single narrative. In addition, ensure your articles are up to date before including them in an eBook.

Update Blog Posts with Good SEO Potential

As the Internet transforms and advances, so too do our SEO techniques. This means your older content may need a bit of an SEO reboot.

This year, take the time to review old content with the potential to rank for relevant keywords and give it a bit of an SEO boost. Look at everything from the media to the metadata and discover how you can improve upon this content for the purpose of ranking higher and driving more traffic to your website.

Tailor Your Content for Mobile and Voice Search

Thanks to recent technological advances, voice search is the future of search marketing. In fact, comScore reported that 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020. If your content isn’t optimized for mobile devices and voice search features, it won’t be found by future customers.

Improve Your Online Reputation with Brand Monitoring

In today’s digital world, brand reputation is everything. Manage and track your company’s online reputation using the Brand Monitoring tool. This tool identifies mentions of your brand online, as well as those of your competition.

By using the tool, you can discover new opportunities for your content, keep an eye on competitors, and refer situations to customer service, if needs be.