In today's world where content is king, here are nine rules for successful content marketing!

In today's world where content is king, many companies have begun to invest a lot of time and resources in content marketing, but the results are often not satisfactory. How to do content marketing well? Coleman, the founder of the content marketing website Contently, shared his experience in content marketing over many years in this article. He distilled these experiences into 9 rules, hoping to inspire companies and content marketing practitioners doing content marketing.

When content marketing site Contently was first launched in 2010, it was pretty much a non-starter compared to some of the biggest companies in the industry at the time. The new company is dedicated to helping clients better market their brands by providing them with high-quality marketing content. At that time, one of Contently's main competitors was Demand Media, which did similar things to Contently, so Contently had a very difficult time developing in the beginning. However, in 2011, after Google launched a new anti-spam search engine algorithm Panda, Demand Media suffered because the purpose of Pando was to reduce the ranking of websites with low-quality content, which was Demand Media's weak point. Contently used this to quickly catch up and surpass others.

From the beginning, Contently has advised its customers to focus on the quality of their marketing content in order to win in the long run. The term "content marketing" seems to be very popular recently, and many people are talking about it, but Contently's CEO Joe Coreman found that for a long time, many companies of different sizes (even Fortune 500 companies) still didn't know what content to write for content marketing, what marketing effectiveness indicators needed to be monitored, and what the purpose of content marketing was. Many companies still didn't figure out the answers to these questions even after investing a lot of money, which made Coreman very puzzled.

I find that the cognitive biases that people had about content marketing in the past are now slowly being corrected. Many brand companies doing content marketing have now learned to take a step back and ask themselves questions like: "What have we gained from content marketing? Is our content marketing approach effective?" This undoubtedly brings greater challenges to those content marketing practitioners. Of course, this is a good thing.

If you want to do content marketing well, you can’t just write some content materials and start doing content marketing like you did before. Many people view content marketing as an art. To be successful today, you must master this art while taking a more scientific, data-driven approach to content marketing. Of course, the entire content marketing industry is still immature and lacks some more systematic content marketing framework knowledge. Therefore, based on his own experience in content marketing over the past few years, Coreman summarizes 9 commandments that must be followed in content marketing in this article, hoping to inspire companies that want to do content marketing and content marketing practitioners.

Rule 1: When doing content marketing, don’t expect miracles to happen overnight. First you have to plant the seeds and be patient.

If you’re your company’s first content marketing specialist, you need to set reasonable expectations first. Getting traffic through content marketing is a long and difficult process. If content marketing is successful, it will bring huge returns to the company and yourself, but many people rush into it and lack patience.

When Contently works with a client, we first develop an overall content marketing plan, then determine the initial content release schedule and reasonable key milestones that need to be achieved. Both parties must first reach a consensus on this aspect. For example, according to the overall content marketing plan, by the second month, the milestone to be achieved is not to obtain thousands of new user conversions, but the active engagement level of all marketing content released so far, such as email subscription data, page views, page dwell time, etc. So, in your pursuit of more business, you need to first identify milestones that you know you can achieve. This will save everyone from going crazy later.

The company's founders and CEOs always hope that content marketing can achieve immediate results. Despite this, content marketing specialists should still relax and know that the reason their bosses hired them is because they themselves have little knowledge and skills in content marketing. If your content marketing professionals are truly motivated and truly committed to driving growth, they have the freedom and authority to set their own smarter content marketing milestones. They should be able to use the minimum resources they need to drive content marketing efforts forward. Content marketing cannot succeed in a vacuum.

Set a goal for the amount of marketing content you need to create. Also, set a benchmark for the level of active engagement with your content. For example, increase the number of returning blog visitors by x percentage points, etc. If you don't reach your goals, adjust what you're doing and try again. This is a process, not a pursuit of perfection.

Currently, most content marketing efforts fail because the content used for marketing is too bad and there are no clear metrics to measure whether the content marketing efforts are effective. Many brand companies have been doing content marketing for a while and found that there was no effect, so they completely gave up any form of content marketing work.

Don’t question the effectiveness of any content marketer’s work until he has been doing it for 6 months. A three-month trial period doesn't work here. You have to remember that when doing content marketing, you are relying on other people, so you must continue to test and accumulate experience to see which methods are effective. After 6 months, you’ll need to show your achievements in content marketing. If you have been doing it for 6 months and still see no results, it is natural for your boss to question you.

Rule 2: Make sure you have readers first, and then learn everything you can about them.

You can’t identify your user base just by pointing to a user base data chart and saying, “These are the people.” There are a lot of people out there who haven’t bought your product, haven’t heard of your product, or may have read a little bit about your product but haven’t discovered your company yet. Your users must have some intrinsic desires, and you must quantify and define their desires in order to acquire these users.

You need to clearly define the characteristics of the target user group you want to reach, for example, what age group are they? Where do they usually live? What websites do they frequently visit? What content are they most interested in? How many times do they usually see advertisements or soft articles about a product before making a purchasing decision? You need to understand these users as precisely as possible through data.

Your initial content marketing plan needs to be developed based on the above understanding of current users. Are you planning to do only text-based content marketing? Do you do cross-media marketing? How often should you do content marketing? The answers to all of these questions will need to be determined based on your understanding of your target audience. You should think of the content you produce as a product in itself, so you must make sure that the content matches and fits the needs of your target users.

Successful content marketing requires matching content with market demand.

You should communicate more with existing users. What are the biggest concerns of these customers every day? What are the main challenges or problems they often encounter? When developing Contently, Coleman and his team spent a lot of time every day answering users' questions about content publishing rhythm, social sharing tools, SEO and other aspects. Based on these questions from users, they have published many practical marketing articles on their marketing blog The Content Strategist. The Content Strategist has become one of the most popular marketing blogs out there.

If you hear the same question from a customer more than twice, be sure to write it down. This would make for great marketing content. In addition, get your sales team involved and have them provide timely feedback on the issues they hear from customers, and create a hot issues icon based on the feedback collected. Dig into this data carefully to determine exactly what you should write about.

After doing some of the above work, you may find that you don’t need content marketing, or that now is not the right time for you to do content marketing. Therefore, before deciding whether to hire a dedicated content marketing specialist, it is best to first conduct a thorough analysis of your target users and then decide whether hiring is necessary. If you don’t take digital marketing very seriously, or if most of your customers are not acquired through digital marketing channels, then don’t waste your time and money on digital marketing. If your product has not yet been verified to match market demand, it is also recommended not to do content marketing for the time being, because at this time all your work focus should be on product/market matching. If you change the product direction, then all your previous content marketing work will be in vain, and even the best content will be of no benefit to you. At this stage, you have to be honest with yourself.

Rule 3: Be consistent and maintain a reasonable rhythm.

Many content marketing companies that have just started want to run before they have even learned to walk. A lot of people think, “Okay, with our content marketing strategy, we now need to build a blog, do social media, and create an email list, all at the same time. Let’s do it!” This is a classic example of wanting to run before you can walk. Before doing content marketing, the first thing you need to think about is to develop a content marketing plan that you can 100% execute. Typically this is 1-2 posts per week.

Once you can see measurable traffic, figure out whether that traffic is coming from your company's official website or from somewhere else. If it comes from somewhere else, where exactly? This is the first thing you need to figure out. Second, you need to start collecting your visitors’ email addresses in a proper manner.

Even if you only have 10 email addresses of subscribers, a list of email addresses is still the best way to create a good feedback loop early on. You can use emails to get those visitors who have visited your website before to visit your website again. You can spend 20-25 minutes creating an email content draft to send to users, which can provide you with a lot of useful data.

In fact, in most cases, email is more valuable than social media. I see many companies and brands invest a lot of resources and energy in content marketing on social media such as Twitter and Facebook, posting several times a day, but the most effective way to get target users to take action is to send marketing content directly to their inbox. Because email is a more personal thing. Even if you can’t completely figure out who will open a marketing email, that’s okay because there are plenty of people who will. If you do email marketing regularly, you will find that your email address list will grow longer and longer, and the initial traffic will continue to bring you more traffic.

Marketing content is only effective if the frequency of content release, content style and tone of voice are consistent.

To acquire users through content marketing, it is very important to market at a regular and reasonable rhythm. It's the same principle as the consistency and consistency you need to maintain in a relationship. You must regularly remind users that you are there, that you care about their needs, and that you can create value for them. If you can do this, then after a while people will start to expect to hear and see about you, and they will feel like they know you.

For companies or content marketers, consistency over time allows you to better test many different variables, such as headlines, formatting, use of images, and types of stories. You can control the variable of time and see whether these other variables have an impact on marketing effectiveness. For example, you still publish content at the same time every day as usual, but change the original short articles to long texts, keeping other variables unchanged, to see whether the length of the article will affect the marketing effect.

It is also important to use a similar tone when testing the impact of other variables on marketing effectiveness. Once you find the right tone of content that works for you, you should stick with it. If your users can’t recognize you through the tone of voice they’re familiar with, how can you expect them to build a long-term relationship with you?

Once you feel you have found a style of marketing content that resonates with your customers and is trusted by them, you should write down the specific characteristics of this style as a guide for writing future marketing copy, and include as many real examples as possible. Then, anyone who writes marketing content for you in the future can write marketing content based on this guide.

Rule 4: You have to be different. No one wants to watch the same old stuff every day. The world is getting increasingly noisy. Don't add fuel to the fire.

Many companies that are just starting to do content marketing will think: "Ok, because our company is mainly engaged in X products and businesses, it is obvious that we should write more content about X for marketing." This is a very wrong view. Before doing content marketing, if you don’t do some in-depth analysis or understand the competitors you face in the market, you will definitely not be able to do content marketing well. You need to find a content marketing area that no one has done yet but in which you can make a big difference, a hot content area that you can completely dominate.

To ensure your marketing content is differentiated from other companies, Coreman recommends using a tool like BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo is an online Internet content screening and collection tool. You can use it not only to screen the most popular topics on the Internet and collect content data from social media statistics, but also to search for what types of content your competitors have published in a specific topic area, etc. This way, you can find uncharted territories that no one has touched yet, and this is where you can shine.

Depending on your company’s business, you can gather relevant people in your company to brainstorm on marketing content topics and come up with a long list of marketing content topics. However, filter them one by one to see what areas of content each different topic covers and which content topics are suitable for writing. It's very time consuming and hard work, but it's well worth it.

Ask yourself this question: When doing content marketing, what content voice is useful only to us but not to anyone else?

Finding your own content marketing turf isn’t just about content topic. You also need to dig further to see what the intrinsic motivations are for people to read the content you produce. To a certain extent, you have to do some psychographic analysis of your potential readers. Find a unique reason why people are willing to read your content. If you can find it, then you are halfway to success in content marketing.

Rule 5: Make sure there are readers. You can’t publish marketing content in a vacuum.

Many startups spend a lot of time and money to build their own content platforms, but it’s all in vain because no readers read the content they post. It's like you threw a party and no one showed up. This is a very painful thing.

There are two ways to avoid this sad situation. If you have sufficient budget, you can consider spending a little more money to buy some traffic, and then learn how to retain readers on this basis. If money is tight, you can start your content marketing engine by publishing articles on free content publishing platforms where you may already have some readers, such as Medium and LinkedIn.

Spending money is probably the fastest path to successful content marketing, provided you do it the right way. There’s nothing wrong with using paid acquisition channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Outbrain as long as you maximize the value of every dollar you spend and iterate on your marketing approach based on what you learn in the process. This requires you to be able to quickly come up with hypotheses about your readers' reading preferences so that you can verify your hypotheses every day and quickly discard incorrect hypotheses.

Thoroughly review all the tools and channels you have access to right now. For example, when Contently was first founded, our co-founder Shane Snow had been writing for publications like Wired and Mashable. When appropriate, he can not only mention the Contently product in some of his articles, but sometimes even add a website link to Contently's marketing blog The Content Strategist in some articles. Shane Snow used this method to generate the initial traffic to the company's website.

So you have to dig deep. You may know some influential Weibo celebrities. You might want to find ways to ask them to help repost your content on Weibo. Send emails to your investors and ask them to share your content. When you need help, don't be shy or feel embarrassed to ask them for help.

In the early stages of content marketing, cooperating with some media, blogs, etc. in the market to submit articles is a very effective way to acquire readers. You write a great article and pitch it to some publication with decent traffic (preferably one that has something in common with your brand). You may submit a series of articles to the media in the form of a column opened by the company founder or CEO, or just publish a single article. You can write an industry analysis article on the most popular topic and submit it to a certain media. To avoid the article being too advertising-oriented, you should not introduce your company or products too much in the article.

To find out whether a media outlet will agree to publish your article, you first need to do some factual research. If you want to submit your article to The New York Times, Fortune, Techcrunch, Venturebeat or 36Kr, you may be disappointed in many cases, because these media are more professional media and have special requirements for article quality and content direction. What should you do now? When Contently first started doing this work, its submissions were mainly targeted at some slightly smaller professional marketing technology websites, such as MarTech Advisor and Digday. They knew that the readers of these websites highly overlapped with their own target users. Moreover, the articles submitted to Contently are mainly about marketing, so it is easy to submit successfully. If you start with second- and third-tier websites that match your company's business, your submission hit rate will be much higher, and you will also be able to gain more core users, and your content marketing engine can be started. If you do a good job of this at first, then you can target your submissions to larger sites with more traffic.

When sorting out potential media sites where you can submit your articles, you still need to do some preliminary preparation. First, make an Excel spreadsheet or any other form that you find useful, find articles that are similar to the article you are about to submit and are more popular on each potential submission website, and organize them all in the form. In this way, when you submit an article to the website editor via email, you can directly say in the email: "Hi, I found that on your website, the two articles X and Y about the topic Z are very popular with readers. I have just written an article that is similar to the two articles X/Y. I believe that readers will also like to read it, so I would like to submit it to be published on your website..." By saying this in your email, the editor knows that you did your research and preparation before submitting your manuscript, and that you took their interests into consideration when submitting your manuscript. In this way, the possibility of successful submission can be greatly increased.

In addition to the methods mentioned above, you can also publish articles on Medium (similar domestic websites include Jianshu), LinkedIn, and other websites that can be published directly for free.

The purpose of posting articles on websites other than your own is to increase readers' awareness of the brand, while also bringing you a certain amount of traffic and making you ubiquitous. This will make potential customers feel that they can often meet you in various places, thus leaving them with an increasingly deep impression. In this way, a certain amount of customer conversion will follow.

Rule 6: Spend enough time and energy on creating marketing content

You have to accept that writing quality content takes a long, long time. If you can’t create quality content, everything else you do will be a waste of time.

Whether you’re creating text or visual content, there’s always an urge to get it out there quickly. You want to see the results of SEO earlier, you want to see high content sharing data earlier, and you want to convert marketing content into customer conversion data earlier. However, if you focus only on quantity and speed of content publishing at the expense of quality, you will hardly achieve any results. I believe many people have said similar things, but few people truly understand and absorb these words, and even fewer people can act accordingly.

You can focus on SEO, but don’t make it your primary goal. If you focus too much on it, it will push you to create crappy, keyword-driven content. In fact, truly effective SEO lies in your continuous creation of high-quality content. After Google launched the anti-spam search engine algorithm Panda, Google's goal was to improve the ranking of websites with the most relevant and high-quality content and provide search users with more valuable content for them to read. Google is getting better and better at this, and all you have to do is follow the trend and create high-quality content.

Low-quality content can actually be very detrimental to you, and even worse to the company behind it. Between the two options of producing two high-quality, well-researched, carefully polished articles each month and cobbling together two lesser-quality articles each week for the sake of speed and quantity, you should always choose the former. Because in the end, the articles that can bring more and more visitors and readers to your website and increase the number of article link shares must be those truly high-quality, informative articles and highly readable articles.

So from the beginning, you should make producing high-quality content your priority. If you don’t pay attention to this, you will owe more and more “content quality debt” in the process of content marketing. In order to avoid this debt from damaging the company’s brand during the company’s development, you will have to go back and do it again.

Rule 7: Keep tracking and evaluating the effectiveness of content marketing, focusing on the most important indicators

In the process of content marketing, there are several indicators that must be tracked and evaluated. For example, if your main goal is to drive growth, then the unique visitor indicator must not be ignored. In addition, user engagement rate is also crucial.

If you only track and evaluate the click-through rate and exposure of your articles, you will lose a lot of other useful data.

Engagement is a combination of several other metrics, including time on page, reader scrolling behavior (does the reader scroll to the bottom of the article page or close to the bottom of the page), repeat readers (do readers return to the website to read more content in the future?), and recommendation power (does an article prompt readers to click on another article or choose to subscribe to emails?). You need to categorize and rank your articles based on their engagement, placing those with the highest engagement at the top of your site.

By carefully and deeply mining this data, you can figure out which articles are most popular with readers and most helpful in acquiring readers and users. In this way, you can invest more of your content marketing funds in this type of article, or produce more similar articles, so that your content marketing effect will get better and better. By the same token, if you find that some articles are not read by anyone, then you should decisively stop producing such content.

Additionally, you can’t underestimate the importance of gathering valuable reader feedback. You need to track this feedback carefully. When you first start doing content marketing, it would be very exciting if the potential customers said they really liked your content during the communication process. When we first started Contently, we talked to a lot of potential customers, and many of them said they were already familiar with our marketing blog, The Content Strategist, and loved the content. This makes the communication between us much more efficient and smooth. As CEO, this is something I am very proud of and take very seriously. This lets us know that we are on the right track and it also differentiates us from our competitors.

Later, Contently also used the Salesforce software platform to collect user feedback. We had our sales team survey customers on Salesforce to find out if they had previously read an article from The Content Strategist marketing blog. Not surprisingly, there is a very high correlation between people who read The Content Strategist blog posts and those who subsequently become our customers. This means that if your content has high reader engagement, then these readers tend to take further actions and eventually become your customers.

There is another situation, that is, you have not yet completed any customer transactions or are unable to monitor the user engagement data of your marketing content. Another way to prove the value of your content is to measure how many times your content gets viewed and how much it would cost to get those views. Of course, this isn’t a perfect approach, nor is it a long-term solution, but if you’re just starting out from scratch, especially if you’re in a rush to prove your worth as a content marketing manager for your company, this is the fastest strategy and way to demonstrate your self-worth.

The above method is indeed feasible, but it cannot measure the ultimate success of content marketing. Because no matter what, you ultimately need to figure out who is reading your content, how long they stay on your site pages, and what other actions they take. You need to quickly shift your content marketing effectiveness measurement method from counting content exposure to monitoring content engagement.

Rule 8: Use design to maximize the effectiveness of content marketing. Only if the design is beautiful and pleasing to the eye will readers take it seriously.

As mentioned earlier, contributing to other media and blog platforms will certainly have a certain effect, but in order to maximize the effectiveness of your content, you still need your own content platform so that readers can interact directly with your brand while reading your content. As for whether to create an official blog, website, WeChat public platform, etc., it is up to you to decide.

Whatever content platform you decide to create, it needs to be designed to be aesthetically pleasing, but of course, practicality is more important in any case. The design optimization of your content platform (such as website) will have a very important impact on the effectiveness of marketing content. Good design is very helpful in increasing the number of article readers and shares. I found that some websites are designed like this: after reading an article, you continue to scroll down and will scroll directly to the next article without any other clicks, and the web page can scroll down endlessly like this. Such a website design will encourage readers to read more articles on the website. By the same token, the social sharing buttons on the website scroll along with the page, so that more readers will click the sharing buttons to share. If you want to build your own content website platform, WordPress is a good tool to choose. Its various plug-ins and functions should be able to meet the various functional requirements of your website.

Coreman suggests creating a checklist of techniques you can use to maximize your article’s readership and sharing. In addition, the design of other aspects of the website should be as simple and clean as possible. In the process of website design, it is actually very easy for people to fall into their own thinking and not consider the true feelings of readers. Do you want users to read? Go share? Go subscribe? Go buy? If so, then you need to make sure you are guiding users to take appropriate actions based on the content. Take it step by step and don't rush. If you want too much from your readers or try to present too much to them all at once, it will often backfire.

Design is also your best weapon for producing content that feels completely your own and doesn’t come off as over-the-top. Many content sites are very successful in design. The design of their content sites makes people look like they exist independently of the brand, but at the same time they can link to product pages in an inadvertent way. Doing so has several unique advantages: first, it can prevent readers from feeling that your content is an advertisement and allow them to read it purely as an interesting story; second, it can show the outside world that you attach great importance to producing high-quality content; third, it encourages readers to view you as a platform similar to other media they appreciate and add you to their RSS readers. In this way, you can create a subtle psychological change in your readers.

This sounds good, but you still have to be careful about the degree and timing and not overdo it. You need to create a content site that looks and feels like your core brand, but doesn’t just replicate it. For example, use the same color tones, visual effects, and fonts as your brand in your website design. You need to make readers subconsciously think of your main product while reading the article. Don’t overuse your logo and make sure users can easily navigate between content and your website. If readers trust you to be a source of valuable content, and if they end up feeling like you’re selling them a product, then you’ve destroyed their trust. Once trust is broken, it is difficult to restore.

One of the most difficult design issues is how to get users to take follow-up actions after reading the article. Many companies are tempted to simply add product purchase information at the bottom of the article. Their thinking is: "If readers are already browsing this page, we should make full use of this page to expose our products." This improper practice is often the Achilles' heel of content marketing, even for the best content. I understand why people do this, but I know there is a better way.

When Contenty and The Content Strategist were not very well-known, our team put a very thin horizontal bar at the top of each article that read: "The Content Strategist is produced by Contently, a company focused on X, Y, and Z", which succinctly introduced Contently's three main value propositions. This approach is very effective because it doesn't sound like an advertisement. In addition, he also objectively introduces what the company does without affecting the user's reading experience. A similar approach can be taken to recommend eligible companies.

This casual way of introducing the brand will not make people feel disgusted. Even though it’s not so noticeable, readers who are truly curious and interested in working with you will still click through to check it out.

Rule 9: When testing content marketing methods, you also need to look to the future

As you’re testing version 1.0 of your content marketing strategy, what does version 2.0 of your content marketing strategy look like? What will version 3.0 look like?

After gaining a large number of users and repeat users through content marketing, Coleman and his team have greater freedom to look to the future, gradually try some new content marketing methods and strategies, and continuously evolve marketing content. For example, try writing marketing content specifically for only large companies or only for small companies. They no longer need to provide the same marketing content to all users.

Think of your user base and user characteristics as a milestone. At a certain point, you can evolve your marketing content. It’s helpful to mark these milestones early in your marketing strategy so you don’t forget to make changes to your marketing content. You also won’t stick with your past content marketing methods just because they worked for you.

You have to tell yourself: "Okay, when we have a certain number of readers, we will consider doing X; when we have more readers, we will consider doing Y." In the process of content marketing, it is easy to fall into the same type of content, which requires you to constantly ask yourself this question: "How can we better serve different types of readers and users?"

The clearer you classify your readers and the more targeted the content you provide to different types of readers, the faster you will acquire different types of readers and the more interested they will be in the content you provide. This requires constant testing. A/B testing is a great way to test your content. Once you have a certain amount of traffic, you can test different variables such as article titles, language style, story types, content depth, etc.

Other things that can be tested include:

• Different design features: You can’t test too many variables at once because you won’t know which one is working. Contently has made several major design adjustments to The Content Strategist. Even if the previous version performed well, it's always a good idea to imagine how to make it better. But you can’t just do it arbitrarily; you need to be as data-driven as possible. Never feel at any time that there is no room for improvement.

• Timing and frequency of social media posts and emails: Every time the Contently team meets, they evaluate the impact of different posting schedules on the data and then determine the timing and frequency of future content releases based on this.

• Different content writers: Once you have multiple creators of marketing content, you need to track and evaluate the performance of different writers. After evaluation, you may find that some authors are better at writing breaking short news, while some authors are better at writing in-depth articles. You need to make the best use of talents based on the evaluation results and let different authors maximize their value.

At a broader level, Coleman says these are the three areas you should be testing:

In fact, no matter how you test, you cannot compromise on the quality of your content. When it comes to content marketing, the word “quality” is synonymous with “providing real value.” What is something that the reader didn’t know before? Does an article change the way the reader sees something and the world around them? Does the article provide them with the tools to take on challenges or clear obstacles? Has it led to any positive changes?

To avoid falling into the current dead end of content marketing, you must trace back to the original question: Why are you creating this content? This is a very serious question, why? When you answer this question with action, choose the unexpected, risky, and less traveled path to your destination.

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