In this post, we’ll explore some of the content marketing hacks that we’ve tried in the past and that have shown some great results for our clients.
As a content marketing agency, we work with our clients on various online channels. Brands have different goals from content marketing and in general, content marketing is a long term, paced growth channel.
However, running multiple growth experiments, we’ve found some content marketing hacks that can help us accelerate results for clients.
Hack #1: A/B test headlines
Your headline is the most important part of your content. Your headline or title is what gets people to ‘Click-through’ on your content.
A better headline is one which has a higher CTR (or click-through rate) and you can test this by running A/B tests.
The idea is to come up with a list of headlines, then shortlist the best ones, and then test them against each other with real traffic to see which ones work the best.
You can use the headline analyser tool from Co-schedule.
Hack #2: Choose Question-based Blog Post Titles
When in doubt, answer your audiences’ questions.
You can use question-based blog titles to improve clicks. People are looking to consume content that can answer their questions.
You can use a tool like Answer the Public to see what kind of questions people are searching for.
Hack #4: Pop-ups with user-friendly CTAs
Just like the headline, a strong, clear call-to-action is important to get the most important result from your content — conversions.
Here’s an excellent example of a CTA on a website pop-up:
Groove’s popup sends a very clear and strong message, and who would not want to grow their business.
Because of this CTA, Groove was able to grow their email list to over 5,000 in about 5 weeks. Just remember — “Make them an offer they can’t refuse,” it actually works in real life.
Content Marketing Hack #5: Gamify your content
Gamification deserves its own blog. But for now, let’s stick to what we want to achieve with our content.
The application of gamification in your content is all about giving your audience what they want to share.
There’s a strong tendency to share things that we connect with personally among our personal networks, sometimes just to show the kind of work we do. One way of doing that is by adding a plugin called Love It.
This simple plugin allows your audience to vote on your posts with a single click. The most voted posts can then be showcased on the sidebar or in a section at the end of other relevant posts, as you see fit.
Hack #6: Writing Guest blogs on other platforms
There are 2 ways of building your audience –
By writing detailed, in-depth articles on your blog and getting the right audience
By writing excellent, informative guest posts on relevant blogs owned by other people
When you’re writing on your own blog, you need to drive the audience to it. Remember the biggest part of content is distribution.
People are creating good content everyday, but it’s important to win the fight for attention and actually get people to your blog or website to read your content.
While creativity, uniqueness, and quality is important, distribution is a big variable for content consumption.
Groove (from the CTA example above) documented the results of their guest blogging on KISSmetrics, Buffer, Shopify and other sites and it was a whopping 1 million audience. It is essential to use ‘Other People’s Networks‘ to hack your way to content distribution.
Here are the 3 steps to follow:
- Find websites and other blogs where your target audience can be found
- Connect with the authors or editors and guest post for them
- Also link back to them from your website or blog
Hack #7: Re-purpose content
Easy, fast and effective — repurposing is awesome and it works. You can convert the best takeaways of your blog posts into a presentation, PDF, Instagram carousel.
You can repurpose a long video into multiple short videos.
You can repurpose a blog post into a Twitter thread.
You can reuse an IG reel as a TikTok and a YouTube short video as an IG reel.
There are many ways to repurpose and reuse content online.
Make sure you put in effort to actually adapt the content to the channel to get the best response.
Hack 8: Use relevant communities to promote content
Building a community around your content can encourage a lot of engagement.
You can also post in Other People’s Communities.
Here are some platforms to leverage:
- Reddit threads
- Facebook groups
- LinkedIn communities
- Slack communities
- Special interest groups on Whatsapp
Hack 9: Write longer content
There are lot of opinions in the industry around what the right length of content is.
To be fair, any content that answers the audience’s questions or provides them the value or solution that they are looking for will work.
But in most cases, this would be longer form cotnent.
As per Neil Patel, the “average content length for a web page that ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google has at least 2,000 words.”
So while this doesn’t sound like a quick growth hacking, writing more will most likely lead to better rankings for your content!
That said, this is not a rule, just a suggestion.
Hack 10: Use YouTube to Distribute Video Content
YouTube is the second most used search engine on the internet.
Let’s be honest: Even if you just want to drive traffic on to your blog, YouTube can still prove to be one of the big sources of traffic.
There are many ways that YouTubers are using to drive viewers to their blogs or websites, or landing pages.
You can find some of them here.
Conclusion
The struggle for attention with content marketing is real, but as we can see for ourselves, it is not a paradox at all. Consumers are everywhere — on social media, search engines, blogs and many more platforms.
The real challenge for your content marketing is to get their attention and then guide them through your user funnel.
Some of these content marketing hacks will help you accelerate your marketing.
And then it’s all about testing…
So Test, test and test your content and strategy, and just stick to the path that moves forward.
