How to Make Your Content Marketing More Effective

While you are building and growing your virtual assistant business, content marketing will play a vital role in client acquisition. A strong content operation will first and foremost attract attention to your business’s online platform. Done properly however, it will also be able to turn passive visitors into paying customers.

Getting to that point is about more than putting up the occasional blog post, though. A truly effective content operation should be built on strategy and organisation. That can begin with some of the following efforts.

Consider Readers as Clients

This sounds obvious at first. But when you think about it, it’s likely that your average blog post is about you, your business, or simply some thought you wanted to convey. These aren’t major problems, but the same posts should be written instead with specific consideration of clients. This is something we covered when we wrote about ‘How to Use Your Content Marketing to Help More Clients’ — stating that “your clients are anybody who interacts with you.” This includes your content marketing. The idea is that anybody who is a potential client ought to be treated as a client. Content should, in turn, provide clear value, rather than vague or un-targeted points of interest.

Use Visuals

Strong visual appeal has been a tried-and-true necessity for websites in general for years now. but it’s also an important aspect of written content (even when it comes to email marketing). In the simplest of terms, content that is too text-heavy, or which lacks empty space, tends to overwhelm readers and cause them to tune out. Naturally, that’s not what you want your content to accomplish, and this is why the visual appeal should be a major focal point. Forbes’s tips for visual content offer a number of nice points to start with, including matching visuals to the content, highlighting high-quality images and videos, focusing on a target audience, and so on. In the end, though, it’s also a good idea to show your content to a few impartial observers when you can, so as to get honest feedback about the visual appeal.

Establish Authority

Establishing authority as the producer of your content matters for a couple of reasons. One is that search engines are said to be placing an increasingly high premium on experience and expertise. That’s a little bit more about your SEO efforts, however. With regard to the pure effectiveness of your content, authority is also reassuring to the reader. A potential client who sees a post without an author might dismiss it as a generic article. But if you can put your name on a post, ideally along with a headshot and a biographical blurb that conveys your expertise, the content will immediately look and feel more legitimate.

Embrace Data & Analysis

Gathering and making sense of data relating to your content operation is a fairly in-depth task unto itself. However, it’s also an increasingly essential one. In writing about various aspects of digital marketing in today’s online environment, SEO agency Ayima emphasises technology and the role it can play in developing sound strategies. The idea conveyed is that data analysis tools and/or professionals can measure the effectiveness of your content and potentially the needs of your target audience. This information can then be used to shift your content efforts in a more productive direction.

Write Guest Posts

If you aren’t already writing guest blog posts, it’s something you should consider as a form of content outreach. Lifewire looked into guest blogs and described the idea with perfect simplicity: “Guest bloggers offer to write content for other, similar blogs in their industry” in exchange for links back to their own sites. Embracing this common practice, and making sure that your guest blogging content is informative and helpful, is a simple but essential aspect of a well-run content operation.

These strategies won’t necessarily comprise your entire content marketing effort, but they can certainly take it to a new level. And when you combine effective marketing with VACT’s training for setting up a business, you’ll be on the cusp of success as a virtual assistant.

*This post was prepared by Lucas Anderson