Whether you have just started with content marketing or have been doing it for a while, there are always ways to improve it. Given the flood of content on the internet, this is more than necessary. In this article, I'll explain how you can take your content marketing to the next level.

Before you start making improvements to your content marketing, you should internalize the basic idea of this discipline once again: You want to attract the right target groups and subsequently gain their trust and build a relationship. So your content marketing is not selling anything. Rather, it prepares the ground for other activities such as sales and distribution.

When implemented well, content marketing can (almost) automatically bring you new potential customers. You use it primarily at the beginning of the customer journey, when someone has just started looking for helpful information on a topic. It also plays a role in the "loyalty" phase: here you want to motivate existing customers to make new purchases (see upselling and cross-selling) and turn one or two people into fans.

However, content marketing as a tactic is now so successful and popular that it is becoming increasingly difficult to prevail, depending on the industry. Google's first search results page is usually already crowded with competitors. And there is no shortage of informative or entertaining content on the web - quite the opposite.

The term "content shock" was coined years ago to warn of the moment when the amount of content increases faster than the time available to consume it. We have long since crossed this threshold. To ensure that your content is still successful, you need to professionalize and optimize your activities. I will now show you what levers there are for this.

Record content strategy in writing

Your content strategy is a document in which you record the basic key data of your activities. It answers two questions in particular:

• What do I want to achieve?
• How exactly can I do that?

So you become clear about your goals. And you record how you want to achieve them. In its most general form, such a content strategy is always used when someone creates content.

This strategy paper therefore not only applies to content marketing, but also to social media marketing, email marketing and ad placements. It can even be helpful when it comes to texts on the website. In other words, even if it contains references to the brand voice.

At the same time, it is not important for the content strategy to be as extensive and detailed as possible. In the first step, it is crucial that you take the time for these considerations and record the results in writing. In the simplest case, you should take care of the following points:

• What goals do you want to achieve? Only if you answer this clearly can you focus your content on this and eliminate topic ideas that distract from it. Possible goals are Increase brand or product awareness, make your own expertise more visible, increase sales.
• Which target group is the focus? The better you understand who you are addressing, the better you will reach them. Successful content answers exactly the questions that your target group has. They use the formats and approaches that best resonate with the target group.
• What resources are available to you? These include financial resources, but also technical resources and the people involved. Understanding this helps you to use these resources as efficiently as possible.
• What exactly does the implementation look like? Goals and plans are worthless if you don't think about how you want to achieve them step by step. In other words, you record which content you need in which formats for which platforms. You should also think about content distribution and monitoring success using content KPIs right from the start.
• And last but not least: How often and in what form do you check whether your content strategy is still working and up to date? Because it is a living document that you should adapt, expand and update over time.

Ideally, you should not answer these questions alone in a quiet room, but also get input from other people. This could be colleagues from your team or from another department. You can also ask friends and acquaintances. The idea here is to think outside the box.

Many people shy away from the effort involved in a content strategy. It may not feel right to spend time on it when you could be writing new blog posts instead, for example. If you feel the same way, here is a little motivational aid: According to Content Marketing Compass, it makes a significant difference whether a company has a written strategy or not.

If we compare the most successful content teams with the least successful ones in this study, we find that the most successful ones are six times more likely to have a written strategy. This should not come as a surprise: A strategy document like this makes it much more likely that everyone is pulling in the same direction and on the same rope. Last but not least, it will help you with some of the following points that will also take your content marketing to the next level.

Measuring content success and drawing conclusions

You can only achieve your goals if you regularly monitor your direction. This is not always so easy when it comes to content, which is why often only so-called vanity metrics are measured - they look spectacular, but don't always have the corresponding significance for your business. These include figures such as page views or newsletter subscriptions.

The problem with such metrics is that they give you an impression of how well your content is being received. But they don't give you any information on whether you are getting closer to your actual business goals or not. What makes content marketing even more difficult than other disciplines such as sales is that the goals are not always directly measurable.

Think about the above-mentioned goal of "building trust and relationships": You won't find a report on this in Google Analytics. But what you can see and measure, for example: How your newsletter readership reacts when you have a new offer. How many clicks here compared to your users on the website or an ad on Google?

Integrating content marketing with other activities

Ideally, your content marketing should interact seamlessly with other activities. On the one hand, as already mentioned, it prepares the ground for other points in the customer journey. On the other hand, all of these efforts can support each other.

Think about social media or email marketing: your content benefits when it is distributed via these channels. Conversely, it will hopefully be interesting and relevant enough to enrich your newsletter or social media posts. This is especially true for search engine optimization: it is important to have SEO in mind from the outset, especially for content that is relevant in the long term ("evergreen content"). Conversely, high-quality content helps to increase the reputation of your website on Google & Co.

The larger the company or agency, the more likely there is to be a loss of efficiency at this point. Therefore, check how well the collaboration works and whether, for example, things are being created in parallel that could actually support each other.

And if you are a freelancer or work in a smaller agency: Think about how you can implement and utilize a content idea multiple times. This content recycling can help you reach additional people with comparatively little effort.

Taking a close look at topic identification and implementation

Also question which topics you tackle and how you implement them. It is easy to miss out on the actual interests and issues of your target group. It's important to always take the perspective of your customers and to think and plan from their point of view. After all, your aim with content marketing is to provide these people with good and helpful information. Always keep this in mind when finding and evaluating topics for your content marketing.

Or you need to question more fundamentally how you select and approach your topics. Perhaps you should become more focused and sharpen your ideas. For example, instead of giving general WordPress tips, specialize in WooCommerce. Instead of writing about WooCommerce in general, target people who want to run an online store alongside their retail business.

Also research whether other content formats and platforms offer better opportunities. Instead of writing more texts, perhaps videos on YouTube would be better. Or you could start a weekly consultation hour via LinkedIn Live, i.e. do livestream marketing.

In another post, I'll describe in more detail how to plan and create content for contested topics. One last thought: don't just look for new topics, but also look around for existing content that you could polish up with comparatively little effort.

An example: You may have a post in your archive that was successful a few years ago but has since been displaced by other content in the search results on Google & Co. This raises the question of how you can revise this content to bring it back to the top with a new date. Search engines also see regularly updating, expanding and generally improving posts as a positive sign.

Include paid media in content distribution

When it comes to content distribution, free distribution methods are unsurprisingly the most popular. According to the Content Marketing Trend Study, 80% of the companies surveyed named "owned media" as the most important channel for their content. This means, for example, their own website, a newsletter distribution list or social media profiles. Whether you really own these profiles or not is something we could discuss now. After all, you are a guest here on the platform of a third-party provider. But at least you decide for yourself what you post here.

This is supported by "earned media", for example when customers report on their experiences or rate your product on a corresponding platform. You have no direct influence on this. At the same time, relying solely on free distribution is no longer a realistic expectation, especially for corporate content. Reach has been declining for years. This also has to do with the oversupply of content.

The sooner you understand that you should also include "paid media", the better. This includes ads in search engines such as Google or in social networks such as Facebook or LinkedIn. Other examples of paid media are sponsored posts on other sites or other forms of "native advertising", where your content appears alongside other article recommendations.

Especially in the beginning, it can make sense to rely on paid distribution as a supplement. Later on, the content will hopefully spread increasingly through other channels such as recommendations and links.

Provide more resources for good content

And last but not least, it helps your content if more resources are available for it. This is all about budget. Good content costs good money: a thoroughly researched, interestingly written and accurate article can only be created with the appropriate care and experience. And this is exactly what content marketing is all about.

One result from the Content Marketing Compass can serve as an indication here: The successful teams are four times more likely to spend at least half of their marketing budget on content. The Content Marketing Trend Study, on the other hand, shows that most companies have not yet reserved more than 15 percent of their budget for content. At the same time, more than half expect the budget to increase this year.

It's no coincidence that I only talk about money at the end of my article: it's more important that you go through all the other points first and find potential for improvement before you spend more on your content marketing.

As this article has hopefully made clear: if you want your content marketing to be successful (again), you need all-round professionalization. Every aspect of content production can be improved, starting with a written strategy.

What I would not recommend, however, is increasing the amount of content. However, according to the Content Marketing Trend Study, 72% of B2B companies and 54% of B2C companies surveyed have decided to do just that. At the same time, the study shows that two thirds already publish something several times a week or even daily.

This doesn't mean short social media posts, but detailed and elaborate content such as infographics, studies, videos, webinars, white papers and more. This makes me wonder: who is supposed to consume all this? So instead of continuing to contribute to the flood of content, ask yourself how you can make your content more interesting, varied and helpful.