Content marketing is one of the best ways to drive awareness, purchase intent and favorability. According to Nielsen, content such as video or native advertising can increase brand lift by as much as 42%!

The creation of content that’s both informative and helpful is also key to improving trust with customers. It’s especially powerful in the mid-funnel, helping to drive consideration through education. So, it should be no surprise that nearly 70% of consumers also prefer to learn about products and services through content rather than traditional advertising. 

Of course, not all content is created equal. As you build plans around high-quality content, here are a few tips to ensure it’s both profitable and flexible. 

1. Keep it Evergreen

The best way to maximize return is by creating content that’s going to last. 

Leverage original research and data, fact-based information, and visual charts, to tell a compelling story. 

A solid SEO strategy should complement these efforts, driving both link-building and search traffic around targeted keywords within a larger topic cluster.

2. Improve User Experience

Quality content isn’t enough to improve the return on content marketing without a strong design and information architecture that removes friction. 

Users should be able to read and interact with content without hurdles. But if the site takes too much time to load, has confusing navigation, and way too many pop-ups impeding their forward momentum, the content you create isn’t going to be consumed. 

Remove obstructions such as ads and pop-ups, and always be looking at ways to make navigation simpler and more intuitive. Remember that the user’s experience with your content is important for search.

3. Improve Calls to Action

As a marketer, a call to action or CTA, always seems obvious. But it’s amazing how easily they can be minimized or completely forgotten. You won’t be able to maximize content marketing ROI if you aren’t clear about what you want users to do next. 

Of course, leading up to CTA, you need to consider the user’s journey and keep their intent in mind.

What do users need? What are the pain points they’re trying to solve? What will they want to achieve after viewing or reading your content? Perhaps it’s to learn something, acquire a specific benefit, or make a purchase decision. Help your users narrow down those choices and take action – that’s a big key to increasing your content’s return. 

4. Great Headlines Sell

Whether it’s a banner ad or long-form article, your headline should catch attention by speaking to your users’ needs.

Headlines can have a direct impact on the return of content marketing, which is why A/B testing headline variations is also an important tactic to employ. The strongest headlines ultimately should convey a value proposition to users. 

Test several headline variations to help increase click-through rates on your content by as much as 5-10%.

5. Repurpose and Extend

Content curation is just as important as content creation. 

In many cases, improving return of content isn’t about creating something all-new, but rather editing or refining what you have already created. 

Summarize blog content into infographics. Use snippets from email newsletters for social posts. Expand a series of blog posts for an ebook. Embed a YouTube video on a landing page to drive organic search performance. Syndicate blogs within a sponsored article campaign.

The more you can reuse and repurpose content for other channels, the more you’ll get out of the content you’ve created. Plus, this strategy will help you maintain consistency in new formats as you reach different audiences.

In Closing

Content is critical for businesses large and small, but planning and creating high-quality content that customers will respond to isn’t easy. To ensure you’re maximizing your content marketing investments, following the above are just some of ways you could improve the ROI on your content development.