One reason why content marketing is so fascinating is that it’s constantly evolving. Of course, that means producing powerful, optimised content can be a challenge for businesses. To succeed in 2017, you need to stay ahead of the game.

That’s why it’s crucial to get up-to-speed with the top 2017 content marketing trends. The predictions below are a great place to start when you’re looking to enhance your business’s 2017 content marketing strategy and outperform competitors.

More Tailored, More Targeted

Effective content marketing involves creating and promoting blog posts, infographics, videos and other types of content that have real value for your target market. In other words, businesses need to produce content that’s tailored to their customers.

Now it’s time to take personalisation further by creating niche content for specific segments of your audience instead of relying on a blanket approach. Each piece of content should have one particular group in mind so that it’s as relevant to those individuals as possible.

Recent research by Demand Gen Report found that almost 70% of B2B buyers rate relevant content as the most crucial part of a business’s website. There’s no better way to drive conversions than by directly addressing specific needs.

Showing Companies’ Human Side

To make more meaningful connections with their audience in 2017, businesses shouldn’t shy away from revealing the faces behind the brands. Try highlighting individual team members’ skills on your ‘About Us’ page or posting behind-the-scenes photos on Instagram.

Be inspired by the ‘People behind the brands’ feature on Dorel Juvenile’s site or the ‘I Am Reiss’ film – they prove even huge firms can successfully show their human side. Focus on the people at the heart of your company and you’ll draw attention to its vision and values.

Going Live…

Live video streaming is ready to take off in 2017, thanks to Twitter’s Periscope and similar apps. Receiving and responding to viewers’ real-time, off-the-cuff feedback helps you to deepen your understanding of your target audience’s tastes.

HubSpot’s overview of innovative Facebook Live videos includes Benefit’s ‘Tipsy Tricks’ series. It’s shaped by viewers and broadcast regularly, no doubt boosting customer loyalty.

Unlike business blogging – the cornerstone of content marketing – live videos aren’t for everyone. But if you want to appeal to a young, trendy crowd, give them a whirl!

Enriching Content with Rich Media

Technical wizardry doesn’t stop at live videos – cutting-edge 2017 content marketing will also encompass 360-degree videos, augmented reality, virtual reality and more.

Rich media creates immersive experiences, enhancing audience engagement and conversion levels. As reported by Adweek, 53% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands that use VR.

Specialist Skills

With content marketing becoming increasingly precise, technical and competitive, it’s likely that large numbers of businesses in 2017 will seek expert advice in pursuit of optimised content. Boosting your visibility on Google and among consumers requires specialist skills.

What the Trends Mean for You

Essentially, what the 2017 content marketing trends boil down to is the fact that businesses should aim to create more engaging, compelling experiences for their target market.

If that sounds daunting, keep these tips in mind:

• Be selective – you don’t need to try and cover every single trend
• Focus on forms of content you’re confident you can deliver effectively
• Consult an SEO and content marketing expert to help you stay on track.

Do you have any content marketing predictions of your own? Which trends will your business focus on? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the Comments below.

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The term ‘Content Marketing’ might be something that you see popping up in various places on a regular basis, but what do you really know about it? Do you overlook it because it sounds too tedious, too far out of your comfort zone or maybe something that you just don’t need to do?

Well, If you want to market yourself online effectively (and if you have a business, it’s a pretty crucial step these days), then it’s time to get busy. Content Marketing is your friend and you need to become besties with it to increase your reach, build your audience and drive your sales.

What is content marketing?

So, where do you start? Well, let’s take a lot at just what Content Marketing actually is. According to the Content marketing Institute in America, it’s:

“…a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

That pretty much sums it up in a straight-laced kind of way. In simpler terms, what it means for you, is:

• To know exactly what your product or service does or offers
• To know who your target audience is (i.e the specific people you want to reach out to)
• To create, post and share your useful content (we’ll look at different types of content later)

Which, in turn, will:

• Attract more visitors to your website
• Create more conversions (that means more customer enquiries by telephone or email)
• Increase your sales

The key to good content marketing is posting content that’s incredibly relevant and useful to your audience. With focus on any relevant SEO keywords and searched terms, your content will appear in people’s search results, and drive more traffic to your website.

The higher up Google’s search results you can appear shows both existing and potential customers that you know what you’re talking about and are an expert in what you do. Combined, all these things give customers confidence in you. They promote trust and loyalty, so they feel ready to use your services or buy your product, rather than a competitor’s.

With your expert content, you’re not only giving authority, you’re also gaining authority – from the people who are reading, liking and sharing it and looking to you for expertise and answers to their problems.

What types of content marketing should you use?

Anything you post online is a form of content marketing, so everything has to be of relevance in some way. And ‘content’ can take many forms, so you’ll need to find which ones work for you as well as your audience.
You could stick to some of the more tried and tested types, or go off track and try something different. It will take some time to drill down to what works best, whether it’s for you, or more importantly, your customers, but here’s a list of the most common forms of content marketing.

1. Blog posts

Probably at the top of any ‘to do’ list of content marketing, blogs should be the first thing to post on your site. It allows you to write, in as many words as you want, about any relevant topic to promote yourself and your business.

Regular blogging of useful and original content that includes SEO keywords can build up a reserve of knowledge on your site for your customers. This reinforces your expertise and your brand and makes you more visible on any Google searches. And with 60% of business marketers saying that regular blogging is one of their main content marketing priorities , you can see how much importance blogs receive.

The flip side to blogs for your own site, is a guest blog for someone else’s site. If you’re invited (or offer) to write a guest blog, this gives you a fantastic opportunity to get your content in front of a whole new audience and widen your online reach.

2. Images

No one likes to read blogs or any other online content that looks like one, solid block of copy. Your readers will very soon lose interest if it looks like too much effort to get to the end. Images are a great way to break things up and make content more interesting for your readers.

Hubspot claim that content that includes relevant images or visuals can get 94% more views than content that doesn’t. Put that together with content that includes your SEO keywords and you’re onto a winning strategy.

You should optimise your images as well so they include your keyword(s), alt text and a description so they add to your SEO arsenal. Images are a useful addition to your web content in more ways than one – they can help explain an idea, get your point across or serve as a natural ‘end point’ to a section of your content.

3. Infographics

An increasingly used gadget in the content marketing toolbox, infographics are a powerful partner. So why are infographics so successful in content marketing? Search Engine Journal suggest that 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual and 40% of people respond better to a visual than they do to plain text.

Using infographics can also be a good way to cut down on your written content if you need to. As they’re virtually self-contained, you may need less dialogue other than a brief explanation. This also makes them perfect for sharing across social media such as Twitter and Pinterest.

If you’ve got stats or data that are genuinely helpful to your cause, then infographics will get technical or detailed information across in one bite-sized, easily understood graphic.

4. Video

2016’s king of content is stealing the show. No longer a piece of content marketing that businesses are just looking to explore, video marketing is a big deal and it’s here to stay. Recognised as a slice of content marketing that can increase conversions by 80% on your landing page, it’s definitely an area that could yield a high return.

Stats show that a massive 64% of users are more likely to make a purchase after viewing a video online and a whopping 92% of people who watch online videos share them across social media. So, if building your audience on very solid ground is your aim, online video is the game.

There are no rules as to what your video could or should include, but timing is key. For the best results, your video length should be somewhere between 30 and 120 seconds. This makes it easy to watch in its entirety and easily shareable on social media. Again, any content should be of value to your audience, so they’re ideal for a business overview, how-to guides, testimonials or just an introduction.

 The cornerstone of any hardworking website

So, with four methods of content marketing listed here, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s lots more to explore and discover in the world of content marketing such as case studies, email newsletters, testimonials, and even ebooks. And if you’ve been creating content for a while now and have existing resources take a look at our last blog – 39 more ways to get more mileage out of your existing content

By creating quality and genuinely useful content for your audience, whichever methods you choose, it’s the best way to get that all important traffic to your website. An increase in your visits won’t happen immediately, but by using these tactics, you’ll gain traction over a period of months and your rankings will improve considerably.

We’ve only really scratched the surface on good SEO and content marketing here. Used individually, they’re the cornerstones of any hardworking website. Used together, they’ll increase your traffic and build your audience faster. Find out more on how and why they work together so effectively in our next post.

What areas of content marketing do you think will work best for you? If you’ve already used some of them, which ones gave you the stats you were looking for? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

At the heart of any effective SEO strategy in 2016 is the need for high quality content that is written with a target audience in mind. The drive to keep creating fresh content can be challenging for businesses, especially smaller companies with limited budgets and time.

The great news is that if you have been creating great content for a while now, you already have a wealth of existing resources to mine in terms of your marketing, authority and the visibility of your brand.

In this blog, we’re going to take a look at 39 simple ways that you can get more mileage out of your existing content. I want to help you get as much value as possible from every article, video or ebook that you produce. Using these techniques you can multiply your content and resources but save hours of time.

Here’s how:

Repurpose Content

One of the most effective ways to get more mileage out of your existing content is to repurpose it. This can be of fantastic value to your target audience too because it recognises that people access information in different ways. Some people love listening to podcasts, others love reading blogs, while some prefer watching videos – repurposing helps you to cover all bases.

1. Bring together a series of your blogs on the same topic and turn them into an ebook

If you look back through your blog, you will probably find that you regularly write about specific themes or topics. Here on the SEO+ blog, for example, my articles fall under four broad categories: SEO, Social Media, Content Marketing, and Analytics. Within those categories, I have regularly revisited topics such as local SEO or SEO basics.

If you have a series of articles on the same topic, you could bring them together and turn them into an ebook. Depending on the depth of information in the ebook, you could then offer this as your ‘irresistible freebie’ incentive to sign-up to your mailing list or even publish the ebook for download to Kindle; the latter can be an effective way to attract some passive income.

2. Publish a transcript of a webinar you have run recently

Are you someone who runs webinars as part of your business model? Although plenty of people enjoy listening to a webinar, the chances are that many of your target audience would benefit from reading your webinar notes or even a transcript of the full webinar. This would give them something to refer back to in the future.

Create a transcript of a webinar and send it out as a freebie for all attendees or even make it available for download or purchase to people who missed the webinar itself.

3. Use the notes you produced for your webinar as the basis for a blog article

Another way to repurpose your webinar notes is to use them as the basis for a blog article. Your article could include a link to sign-up to a recording of the webinar as another way to build your mailing list.

4. Pull out key quotes and sound bites from a blog article and post them on social media

Different styles of posts are suitable for different social media platforms; a platform like Twitter is all about short sound bites, whereas posts can vary in length on Facebook.

A great way to get more mileage from your blog posts is to pull out key quotes and post them as Tweets or Facebook statuses.

If you have a WordPress website, you could use a plugin such as Inline Tweet Sharer to turn sound bites of your copy into tweets that readers can post and share on their own Twitter feed.

5. Turn a blog or webinar notes into a Slideshare presentation

For clients who prefer information presented visually with plenty of images and short, snappy bullet points, you could turn a blog or webinar notes into a Slideshare presentation. All you need to do is upload a PowerPoint presentation, PDF, Word document or Open Office presentation – as just a few examples – and you will quickly have a presentation that you can share on social media or on your blog.

6. Include a webinar or Slideshare presentation in the materials for a coaching programme you offer

If you run an online or face-to-face coaching programme, you can repurpose content such as your blogs, Slideshare presentations, webinars, or tutorial videos as course materials or bonus resources.

7. Turn a ‘Facts & Figures’ style blog post into an infographic

Infographics are another way to repurpose and present information to people who prefer visual resources. In a round-up of infographic statistics for 2016, HubSpot recently reported that people’s willingness to read content increases by 80% if it is accompanied by coloured visuals. Content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without images.

When talking specifically about infographics, they are three times more likely to be Liked and shared on social media than any other type of content. HubSpot also reports that people following directions with text and illustrations do 323% better than people following directions without illustrations.

If you have ever written a blog that explores data or presents the findings of a factual report, turning it into an infographic is a sure-fire way to increase its mileage. And if you’re after a free and easy to use tool give Visme a try. It’s an easy to use drag-and-drop online tool that works right in your browser and free to use. It’s actually a bit different than most other creative tools because it allows you to create both true form Presentations and Infographics while allowing you to add full interactivity to any object. Users can share, embed or even download for offline use.

8. Record a series of podcasts based on your whitepaper

If you have produced a whitepaper on any topic, you could create a podcast series about your findings. This can be a great option for people who don’t have the time to sit down and read your whitepaper but listen to audio files while cooking dinner, doing the housework or driving. You could even sell your podcast series on iTunes to create a new stream of passive income.

9. Produce transcripts of your videos

As we mentioned in the context of webinars above, some people love watching videos but others prefer to work from written content. If you have produced any videos about your products or services, you can add value by offering a written transcript of the video for people to download and keep.

10. Record a video version of a recent blog topic

On the flipside, many of your customers may prefer to watch a five-minute video instead of reading a blog. You could therefore take a popular blog topic and record a video about it. For example, a virtual assistant might create a video series of productivity hacks, while a jewellery designer might turn a ‘how-to’ series of blogs into a video tutorial programme.

11. Sell a recent webinar as a downloadable, ‘on demand’ product

Webinars can take a great deal of planning and research, so it seems a shame for the content to be available on a one-time-only basis, unless you’re trying to create scarcity and a time limited offer to attract sign-ups.

Instead, you could try recording each webinar you run and selling that webinar online as a downloadable, ‘on demand’ product.

12. Read through your old blog topics and see if you have mentioned anything in passing that would make a good blog topic in its own right

If you are looking for inspiration for fresh blog content, read back through some of your old blogs and see if you have mentioned anything that could be fleshed out into a separate blog article. Remember to include internal links in your new article to the old, related content that inspired it.

13. Turn old blogs into ‘How-to’ guides ordered by topic

You may have older blogs that are no longer attracting any traffic. If the content is ‘evergreen’ – i.e. as relevant now as when it was written – you could create a page of your website where you publish or even sell ‘How-to’ guides grouped together by topic. For example, people could run a search for ‘local SEO’ and access all the blogs on that topic in one ‘How-to’ guide.

14. Turn a list article such as this one into a series of Tweets

Most blogs feature a number of list articles like this one. Why not take the main list items such as ‘Get more mileage out of your content by recording a video version of a recent blog’ and publish them as Tweets?

15. Use your FAQs page on your website in your corporate brochure or client welcome pack

FAQs pages on websites are helpful for visitors and search engines, but you don’t just have to repurpose your content online. Instead, you could add your FAQs copy to a corporate brochure or client welcome pack to provide valuable information offline too.

16. Create templates from your offline materials to be shared and downloaded online

If you have templates that help you organise your day, such as a daily planner, accounts spreadsheet, freelance contract, product guides, or task organiser, you could turn them into branded, downloadable PDFs available for sale or as a bonus material at the end of a blog or as part of a course.

17. Turn quotes from an article into a series of memes

People love a good meme – Facebook feeds everywhere are full of inspirational quotes, hints and tips. Memes also work well on visually-driven platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest.

Software such as Canva or PicMonkey gives you the opportunity to pull out advice from your blog posts and turn it into memes. Don’t forget to brand your design and add your web address to let people know who created the meme. If you use a picture that you find online to illustrate your quote, it’s important to check that you are allowed to use it commercially under the terms of its Creative Commons license. You can find free-to-use images on websites such as Pixabay, Morguefile and Pexels.

18. Create a downloadable ‘resource kit’ from your blogs, webinars, ebooks and more

Over the years, you’ve probably created a huge amount of resources that your clients would find useful. Try pulling together a variety of blogs, videos, webinars and ebooks as a downloadable ‘resource kit’ – you could even charge a fee for this, adding to your passive income stream.

19. Turn your best content into an online course

A step up from point 18 above is to turn your best content into the materials for an online course that you then sell through an online teaching marketplace such as Udemy or Lynda.com.

20. Use a blog as the basis for a downloadable checklist

If you have a blog that includes plenty of actionable hints and tips, you could always create a downloadable checklist as a sign-up incentive or even as a ‘no-strings’ gift. I have done this with a number of blogs, such as the Ultimate Landing Page Cheat Sheet.

21. Take the analytics data you have gathered internally and turn it into a case study

Whenever you post content to your website or social media pages, it’s important to keep track of the analytics data to understand how it is performing. You can use the information you gather for more than just your own reference purposes by turning your findings into a case study that your clients might find helpful.

Refresh Content

Instead of repurposing your content to give it more mileage, another option is to refresh and breathe new life into your existing content.

22. Add images to image-free blogs

As we saw in point 7 above, content with relevant images gets 94% more views than content without images. It’s worth taking some time to review your older blog articles – would any of them benefit from one or more additional images?

Once you had added images into your blog, re-promote them on social media to see how people respond.

23. Update images with more Pinterest-friendly pictures

Tastes change and you may find that you have blogs that, although packed with images, no longer visually reflect your brand. Instead of deleting the blog, you could replace your old images with new, fresher ones that reflect your current branding. Look for Pinterest-friendly pictures that will look great when pinned to your boards and those of your followers.

24. Rewrite a blog article that you feel you could improve

Have you ever read back through an old blog article and thought, “What was I thinking when I wrote that?” It could be that your tone of voice has got clearer recently or just that you’ve learned a lot since you originally wrote the article in question. A great way of attracting new traffic to an old blog is to rewrite and re-promote it.

25. Update a blog article with new information

You may also find that a blog needs updating rather than rewriting. Maybe you wrote an opinion piece about a topical news issue and now have the benefit of hindsight to see how the story unfolded. Perhaps circumstances have changed within your industry or best practice has evolved. Have a look for blog articles that would benefit with bringing up to date.

26. Write a longer version of an old blog

Just a few years ago, circa. 2012, the trend for blogging was to write short, snappy articles of 300 to 500 words (and sometimes less than that). These days, the blogs that perform best in searches are those with meatier content. New data from experts such as HubSpot shows that content that exceeds 2,000 words performs best in terms of social shares, backlinks and encouraging dwell time on your website. In fact, one study found that the most successful blog articles take about seven minutes to read.

Therefore, if you have any 2012-style shorter blogs now is the ideal time to go back and flesh them out.

27. Add a video to an old blog or into a marketing email

According to stats from HubSpot, adding a video to a marketing email can increase the clickthrough rate to your website by 200-300%. Equally, adding video to a landing page can boost conversions by 80%.

Videos can skyrocket your marketing and SEO for a number of reasons. Stats show that 80% of people recall videos they have watched for at least 30 days, and 90% of us use videos to inform our buying decisions. Adding a video to a blog article can help to keep visitors on the page for longer, which will push up the average time spent on your site – a positive signal to Google that you’re producing engaging content.

28. Fix any broken internal and outgoing links

In my recent Ultimate Guide to Backlinks and How to Get Them for The Huffington Post, one of my suggestions was to identify and repair broken internal, outgoing and incoming links on your website. Broken links can impact on the reader’s experience of an article and prevent them from quickly accessing relevant connected information. It’s worth spending some time just checking that all the links on your website work and take people to the right destination.

29. Add links to newer content that hadn’t been published when the blog was originally written

When writing blogs, people often remember to include links to older related content. What they forget, however, is to go back to that older content and add in links to relevant, newer articles.

Have a read through your old blogs and see if you can identify articles that relate to your more recent content. By adding links to and from each of the relevant articles, you can enrich the reader’s experience and help them access more information that they will find of interest.

30. Update the SEO of old articles

SEO should be an ever-evolving part of your marketing efforts. Best practice changes from year to year – for example, five years ago it was usual for web pages to have a long list of keyword tags, often duplicated from one page to another. These days, it’s recommended that you use a single keyword or long-tail phrase as your focus keyword and have a unique one for each page of your website.

Similarly, meta descriptions and title tags could once be longer, whereas now we recommend less than 55 characters for title tags and less than 155 characters for meta descriptions.

A good starting point here is to refer to Google Search Console to identify the pages with the most impressions in SERPs. Are there pages that are ranking well in searches but not attracting clickthroughs to your website? It could be that the meta description lacks a call to action or a compelling reason to click through. Rewriting this copy could make a huge difference to your traffic.

It’s also worth checking whether all of your blogs have unique H1 titles and whether you have added alt tags to all of your images.

Recycle Content

Another strategy to get more mileage out of your existing content is to recycle it.

31. Delete or archive old posts (if they are harming your site)

In my experience, there are very few reasons to delete an old blog post but it is a situation that comes up from time to time. If the blog post is very thin on content – fewer than 300 words – or about a time-specific issue that is no longer relevant, you may feel that its presence is doing your website more harm than good.

If you do delete an article from your blog, it’s important to make sure the URL redirects to a different, relevant page of your website or that you have an engaging 404 Not Found error page that redirects people to another part of your site.

32. Merge several small articles into one longer blog

If you do have lots of thin content, you might want to consider merging several small articles into one longer blog. You can then apply a 301 Redirect channelling all of the traffic to the old URLs to a new URL.

33. Create a ‘Best of’ article that features links to your most popular posts

One way to recycle your old content and bring new traffic to it is to create a ‘Best of’ style article. For example, in December you could publish a blog rounding up your ten most popular articles of that year with links to all of the relevant content.

34. Try using different titles to promote the same articles

Another effective strategy to recycle your content is to try promoting it using different headlines or introductory copy. You may find that some of your clients prefer headlines that are questions, while other prefer ‘How to’ headlines. By varying the headline you promote on social media, you can attract different people to the same content.

Re-promote Content

Once you’ve put in all this hard work to repurpose, refresh and recycle your content, your next task is to promote it.

35. Promote more than once

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make with their content creation is to only promote it once or, worse, to fail to promote it altogether. As individuals, many people worry about over-promoting something and being seen as pushy. In reality, social media channels are fast-moving. For most people, their newsfeeds are so busy that content posted in the morning may be hundreds of posts down the page by the afternoon. This means that when you post a link to your content, many of your followers may never see it.

By re-posting the link several times during the week – especially on different days and at different times in the day – you can help to ensure that the greatest number of people possible see the article.

36. Post links to older content on all of your social media platforms

It is also beneficial to post links to older articles on all of your social media platforms. Someone who started following your brand recently may be glad to read an article that you posted last year.

37. Send out links to old content in your latest newsletter

If you send out a regular newsletter, you could always include links to some of your older articles in the newsletter. Try including a ‘From the archive’ or ‘#Throwback Thursday’ heading near the footer of your newsletter featuring links to past articles that you think your customers may love to read.

38. Promote an article on new social media channels

Have you recently started using a new social media channel? Instagram, for example, is going from the strength to strength, and maybe somewhere you’ve only recently started placing your attention. If so, you may not have promoted some of your older content on this new platform.

39. Share in Facebook and LinkedIn groups

Similarly, you may have joined certain Facebook or LinkedIn groups recently. Many groups have days of the week when you can post promotions or links to your blog, presenting a great opportunity to re-promote existing content to a new audience.

So, there you have my 39 favourite ways of getting more mileage out of existing content. Do you reuse your content once you create it? If so, what are your favourite methods for repurposing, refreshing, recycling or re-promoting? If you currently neglect your old content, are there any methods from the list above that you’re keen to try?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences in the Comments below.

Hopefully, this article hit the spot. If so, can I ask you to use the social buttons below to spread the word? It takes seconds. Thank you.