For businesses of all sizes, content marketing can be an extremely effective way to grow a presence online, attract attention from potential customers, and position a brand in an authoritative and trustworthy way. Affordable, easy to implement and highly valuable when handled correctly, content marketing is a clear front runner in the digital marketing space. After all, content marketing costs an average of 62% less than other related tactics yet delivers over three times the results.

If your business is new to content marketing or you simply need a little direction in fine-tuning your approach, these five tips can give you a leg up on your growth strategies and help you further define your brand.

Beef Up Product Descriptions

Do you have an e-commerce operation or otherwise feature descriptions of products or services on your website? Your descriptions are absolutely essential. Without a way to touch, see, try on or evaluate your products in person, prospective customers don’t have much else to go on when weighing you against your competitors.

Instead of just listing out dimensions and composition, use product descriptions as a way to highlight benefits, explain selling points, and emphasize differentiating factors that make your opportunities better than the competition.

• Create buyer personas to target your key demographic in order to emphasize the correct selling points.

• Justify the use of superlatives; don’t throw out terms like “amazing” or “incredible” without being able to back up these claims.

• Inspire imagination so that shoppers can visualize your products and the opportunities available.

• Incorporate social proof if possible, like reviews on third-party sites or features in news publications.

Create Dedicated Landing Pages

Are you sending all of the customers who find your brand through social media posts, Google Ads, or email marketing messages to your homepage? While occasionally effective, dedicated landing pages are a better way to convert leads and generate positive attention.

Instead of bombarding visitors with way too much information, or information that doesn’t directly apply to your offers, create a landing page for each unique opportunity. If, for example, you’re giving away a free ebook, there should be a distinct landing page with signup information and a comprehensive, keyword-rich overview of your offer.

More landing pages mean more conversions: According to research, companies with between 10 and 15 landing pages increased leads by up to 55 %. Be sure your landing pages are distinct, too.

Lean Into Email

There’s no better way to keep in contact with your current and prospective customers than a great email campaign. Direct, effective and easy, keeping in touch via email content can keep your brand front and center. Email subscribers are three times more likely to share content.

When crafting email messages, start with a killer subject line that offers a specific look into the content of your message. Be sure the preview text — or the first line or two of text that’s visible before opening an email — is descriptive and intriguing to increase reader interest. Emails aren’t novels; write for the web, utilizing a logical structure, short paragraphs and a clear objective.

Employ Modern Keyword Techniques

To some marketers, keyword use is seen as an old-school approach to SEO. In some ways, this is true — historical strategies, like keyword stuffing, are heavily penalized in today’s search engine algorithms. But that doesn’t mean keywords aren’t still a vital part of nailing a strong ranking in the SERPs.

• Make sure to align your keyword strategy with your overall content strategy.

• Just as you’d look at grouping content clusters, do the same with your keywords. LSI (latent semantic indexing) is key for relevancy. For instance, if you’re covering a topic about home security systems, it’s important to also incorporate other related topics/terms to this. Doing so increases relevancy.

• Keywords should focus not on what your competitors are ranking for and what you want to rank for, but the searcher intent. This will help drive the targeted traffic you’re looking for.

Develop Dedicated Strategies

As with all areas in marketing, a dedicated strategy is a big part of actually seeing success. Testing the waters in a wide variety of areas, like blogging, email marketing, social media posts and beefing up keywords can certainly generate results, but your odds are best if you set specific goals and create actionable ways to achieve them.

For example, if you want to increase leads to your website, using promoted posts and Google Ads can lay the initial seed, and strong, effective landing pages can take you to the next step. Don’t forget about Google Analytics or other tools to gauge success. When you can see the tangible effects of your objectives, it’s easier to be sure you’re on the right track.

Content marketing isn’t always easy, but with a great return on investment and plenty of opportunities, investing time and energy into content can give your business a valuable way to conquer the competition. From product descriptions to keyword usage, there are many ways content can help your business grow.

Article written by: Suttida Yang