Blog | Content Clarity

Why you need to attract the right audience

What’s more important: gaining more impressions or attracting the right audience?

Most people have been pointing at numbers their entire lives to show off their success. Do you remember proudly showing your parents you got 100% on your spelling test as a child? Things don’t change as we get older. We use cold, hard numbers to prove to our boss we’re due for that promotion or round up money from investors. Many companies still use vanity metrics like website hits to prove ROI on digital marketing efforts.

But when it comes to measuring how your content is performing, what’s more important is focusing on the right numbers. Vanity metrics like impressions may have been the only metric in traditional advertising in the past – but they no place in digital where you can track so much more.

Let’s discuss why you should spend more time on goals such as attracting the right kind of audience instead of going for more impressions.

The importance of attracting a specific target audience

While your number of impressions might be more impressive than, say, conversions, impressions don’t necessarily translate to success.

Your marketing should focus on drawing in and converting your target audience. These are the customers who will come back to your website because they love what you have to offer and want more of it. Your target audience believes you can solve their problems – and tells their friends about your business, which leads to you gaining even more new customers. Retaining customers is key to growing your business and driving revenue. These are the types of goals you should focus on internally because they will produce a big pay off for your time and efforts.

“Hits” aren’t as profitable as qualified traffic

Many companies try to get the most “hits” on their website by going after broad keywords. This is a mistake. Businesses can get more qualified traffic by targeting specific, long-tail keywords.

If you’re looking to improve SEO and bring qualified leads straight to your website, implementing long-tail keywords is vital. As you may have guessed by the name, long-tail keywords are longer than commonly searched broad keywords. Although long-tail keywords are not searched as often, they lead to more conversions because they are more specific. Over time, you’ll see more traffic coming to your website from new audiences who are ready to buy.

What does a long-tail keyword look like? Let’s say you’re writing a blog about marketing. Obviously, “marketing” is a broad search term. You can create a long-tail keyword by adding more keywords to the main search term and making it more specific. For example, a long-tail keyword with the main search term as “marketing” could be “marketing tactics for bloggers,” “marketing SEO techniques,” or “marketing tips for startups.” Writing different blog posts with long tail variants will bring a more targeted audience to your website.

How long-tail keywords can benefit your business

It may seem like a good idea to use broad keywords on your website and blog because you know people are searching for them. The problem is that many other businesses have this same mentality and it’s very difficult to show up on the first page of Google for common keywords.

You’ll find it less competitive to rank for long-tail keywords, which means you’ll be more likely to be boosted to the front of search engines. Try using long, specific keywords to attract the right kind of customers to your website. Make sure you go for a group of long-tail keywords like in our marketing example above for the best results.

Now, you might be asking: how do I know the right kind of keywords to use to bring qualified traffic to my website? We recommend using Google Ads Keyword Planner and checking out its suggested “keyword ideas” based on the main search term you want to use.

What techniques are you using to attract your target audience? Let us know in the comments below!

How to develop a voice & tone guide

Although many companies have brand guidelines to ensure consistent visual identities, they usually lack an essential voice and tone guide. This is a huge oversight since copy is equally as important as remaining visually on-brand.

Voice & tone guides help ensure consistency when many different writers and/or agencies are working on your brand. They also guarantee a consistent experience across channels. With these types of guides in place, you’ll have smoother review cycles since you’ve removed some of the subjectivity.

Your voice & tone guide can (and should) be custom to your brand and needs – there’s no “one size fits all” template. Here are some tips to making your voice & tone guide user-friendly and effective:

Tips for creating an effective voice & tone guide

1. Keep it visual

The last thing you want is to go through all the hard work of making a voice & tone guide and have people at your company think, “I don’t have time for this.” Would you want to be handed an encyclopedia full of guidelines?

That’s why you have to make something that’s palatable and visually appealing. Your team members should be able to easily scan the guide and understand what it says.

Use simple language and short sentences so the content is simple to read. It’s best if the writing is conversational and concise. Technical lingo? Yawn. Business jargon has no place in your guide.

2. Define what your brand is and isn’t

To help you understand your brand’s voice and tone, start by looking at your company’s core values. Think about why you started your company, what makes it unique, and what values it upholds. If your brand has a mission, this is a good time to utilize it.

Once you’ve gathered this information, use it to come up with phrases or statements to describe your brand. Gather a few dozen adjectives and separate them into who your brand is and who your brand isn’t.

For example, let’s say you own a marketing agency that works with startups. Maybe your chart would look something like this:

After you identify adjectives that apply to your brand’s core values, you can clarify nuances. Maybe your brand is “fun” but not “goofy.” Be sure to include this chart in your content strategy.

3. Identify your brand archetype

When you’re defining your target audience, you most likely came up with buyer personas. You can perform a similar process by using a brand archetype to help round out your brand’s personality.

It can be helpful to look at a brand archetype wheel like the one below (or take a quiz) to identify the brand archetype that best fits your business. For example, given the personality traits of the marketing agency example above, they might choose Creator, Jester, or Outlaw.

(Image from Map & Fire)

Answer these questions to help identify your brand archetypes:

What personality would my brand have if it were a human? (Use your top 3 adjectives from your “What my brand is and isn’t” chart)
What relationship would my brand have with customers if it were a human? (A friend, teacher, neighbor, etc.)

4. Include do and don’t examples

A good way to develop a voice & tone guide is to create a “do and don’t” list like this one below:

(Chart from LeonardoCommunity)

Start with one overarching characteristic or idea then give examples under the do and don’t columns. This will help writers at your company get a clear idea of your brand’s voice and tone.

Another way to do this is to make a “like this, not this” chart. Here is an example of a chart with this layout:

This chart not only does a fantastic job of being visually pleasing, but it also gives examples of writing that is on-brand and works with the company’s voice, purpose, language, and character.

By creating a voice & tone guide, you can help people at your company properly communicate your marketing messages to ensure they create a connection with your target audience.

Would you like a voice & tone guide for your business but don’t have the time or team to make it happen? At Content Clarity, we work with agencies and businesses of all sizes to create effective voice & tone guides and performance-minded content plans. If you’d like to learn more, reach out to us today.

A marketer’s cheat sheet: 4-must track content marketing results

It’s important to measure your content marketing performance against your KPIs on a regular basis to make sure your content strategy is meeting your business goals.

By evaluating data, you can see how users interact with your content and if you are getting a return on your investment. If you aren’t seeing an ROI or there’s a decrease in user engagement with your content, you’ll know it’s time to make some changes to your content strategy.

So, where should you look first when it comes to tracking your content marketing results? Here’s your content marketer’s cheat sheet:

1. Time on page

It’s vital to know how long visitors stay on certain pages of your website to understand how they are engaging with your content and where their interest fades.

If everything is going according to plan and visitors are converting, that’s great! But if they are leaving your website after a few seconds, it’s time for you to make some improvements to your content marketing strategy.

Here are a few ways to get users to stay on your website longer:

Include different types of content. Some people are more visual and prefer to see videos or pictures whereas others prefer to read blog posts.
Make your content easy to read by breaking it up into small paragraphs or bullet points.
Have clear call-to-actions (CTAs) so users know exactly where to go next. For more tips on content engagement, check out 6 tricks to boost content engagement on your website.

You can measure time on page with analytic tools such as Google Analytics.

2. Bounce rate

When someone bounces from your website, it means they looked at one page and then left your site altogether.

If you have a high bounce rate, it is usually for one of these reasons:

They weren’t interested in what your site offers
They couldn’t find what they wanted to
Users quickly found what they were looking for then left (this is the least common)

When users are engaged with your content, they will most likely keep interacting with other parts of your website. If this isn’t happening for you, try optimizing your content by adding in internal links and well-defined CTAs. If you have a blog, put in a sidebar showing other related blog posts. Use this same tactic on your product page by suggesting add-ons and other products they might be interested in. Produce high-quality, relevant content to spark users’ interests and make them want to stay on your website longer.

Luckily, it’s easy to check your website’s bounce rate in Google Analytics. Neil Patel walks you through how to do it step-by-step in this article on Bounce Rate Analytics.

3. Conversion rate

Your conversion rate shows you the percentage of visitors on your website who convert (or complete a desired goal). This could mean they made a purchase, filled out a form, signed up for a subscription, or filled out your contact form.

A high conversion means you’re reaching your target audience, moving leads further down the pipeline, and getting closer to more sales. If your conversion rate is low, you’ll need to evaluate your content marketing plan.

Some ways to improve conversion rates are reviewing your editorial calendar and seeing which topics and timings generate the highest conversions. When you know this information, focus on writing about topics your readers respond best to and posting your blog posts at the times they are most likely to interact with your content. Another way to boost your conversion rate is to add a lead magnet to your blog that offers users value such as an e-book, whitepaper, or guide.

Here are a few places you can track your conversion rate:

4. Total social shares

In 2019, social media and content marketing go hand-in-hand. By measuring your social shares, you’ll have a stronger idea of how your content is resonating with your audience. You can use this knowledge to further refine your content and decide which social platforms to target.

Here are a few ways to increase your social shares:

Improve your headlines
Tell stories
Use visuals
Focus on your audience and their needs, not just your brand or products
Work with influencers

You can measure social shares with Google Analytics or social media monitoring tools like Hootsuite or sproutsocial.

What other content marketing metrics does your company measure to determine content marketing success? Let us know in the comments.

The ins and outs of developing customer journey maps

We’re all familiar with the basic customer “funnel” and the need to move customers from awareness to consideration to purchase. While you’re likely using marketing tactics to address each basic stage in the journey, if you’re like many other businesses, you may struggle to make everything work together.

But even though you may have one department or agency running, say, your social media and another managing your email campaigns, the customer doesn’t see it this way. To them, it’s a single brand experience. Consistency is key, as is carefully considering how to best use each channel and touchpoint to nudge potential customers along.

That’s where it’s helpful to map out the entire customer journey, from the moment they hear about your brand or product to when they hit the “buy button” and beyond.

Learn how to define and document your customer journeys with customer journey mapping:

Why should your business create a customer journey map?

Creating a customer journey map is one of the most important steps you can take if you’re looking to improve customer experience. It starts with understanding who your customers are, what they value, and how they behave. What are the factors that move them from awareness to purchase?

Journey maps can be anything from infographics and illustrations to diagrams. By combining storytelling and visuals, you can learn meaningful information about your target audience such as how they interact with your products and why some of them bounce from your website.

With a deeper understanding of your target customer, you can stop using overly broad (and often expensive) marketing tactics and focus your effort where it matters when it comes to building out your content marketing strategy and optimizing content to attract and convert new customers.

How to make your customer journey map in 3 steps

1. Identify your business goals for creating a map

Decide which goals you’re hoping to achieve before beginning your customer journey map. Maybe you want a journey map to help you distinguish the differences between several buyer personas. Or you might want to understand one high-value persona better.

Here are a few more questions to address before getting started:

Who is the customer you’re creating a journey map for?
What experience or campaign are you going to base the map on?
After the map is made, what will you do it with it? Will it be shared across teams or used in one specific department?

2. Gather customer research and build buyer personas

Gather as much information about your customers as possible through questionnaires, user testing, interviews, social media monitoring, and website analytics.

Learn about how your customers came to hear about your company, what they liked about your website the first time they saw it, and why they decided to purchase from you. Ask if they found it easy to navigate your website and if they had a good experience with your customer support.

After you’ve finished researching your customers, you can build buyer personas. Buyer personas are characters who represent your target customers. Give them names, ages, careers, and detail their passions and pain points. We suggest using HubSpot’s free tool for creating buyer personas called Make My Persona.

3. Record your customers’ touchpoints

Now that you have your buyer personas, think about how to best move each of them through each phase of the customer journey.

First, compile a list of all of the actions your buyer personas perform as they relate to your brand and products. Record your customers’ touchpoints (the times customers are in contact with your business – before, during, or after purchasing a product). Look for touchpoints on your website, social channels, paid ads, and email marketing.

Every touchpoint that exists between your business and your customer is important. Think about how a rude waiter at a restaurant can ruin someone’s entire dining experience even if the food was incredible. The more touchpoints you gather, the better you can understand your customers and answer their questions.

Now that you’ve collected data about your customers and made your customer journey map, you can look at what your business can do to improve customer experience. Focus on tweaking your touchpoints to push users further down the pipeline and turn them into customers. Remember, every touchpoint you change should bring you closer to the goal you established in step one.

Would you like a customer journey map for your business but don’t have the time or manpower to make it happen? At Content Clarity, we work with agencies and businesses of all sizes to create customer journey maps and performance-minded content plans. If you’d like to learn more, reach out to us today.

3 ways to improve microcopy on your website

Microcopy is the short and sweet copy that appears on buttons, labels, forms, and fields on a website. It guides users to the next step, clears up any confusion, and gives a snippet of your brand’s personality.

Because this type of copy is concise and it’s difficult to convey your brand using only a few words, microcopy often goes overlooked. But it’s an important component of your website because it has the power to improve user experience (or scare them away from your website altogether.)

Check out these 3 ways to enhance microcopy on your website and make sure it’s packing a punch:

Recognize where your users need help

Two scenarios where users need a hand are when they forget their password or get hit with an error page.

Users feel frustrated when they receive an error page and may assume it is their fault. If your 404 page uses technical words, users will most likely ‘X’ out of your website – and maybe even head to your competitor’s page.

A helpful error page tells the user how to recover their information and why they got an error in the first place. Try designing a creative error page that speaks to your brand’s personality.

Take a look at eHarmony’s error page. They use microcopy to assure their users that although they landed on an unavailable page, they are in the right place. After this heartwarming message, eHarmony presents users with a clear call-to-action (CTA) that encourages them to sign up for the website or login if they are already a member.

This same dialogue applies to users who forgot their password. It’s best to implement easy-to-understand, short instructions to guide users on what steps they need to take to recover their password. Anticipate how you can help your users by writing copy that answers their questions before they have the opportunity to ask them.

Surprise and delight your users

You can use your microcopy to show off your brand in unexpected ways that surprise and delight your users.

Dollar Shave Club incorporates sarcastic microcopy on their product pages to keep prospective customers on their toes. They say their product is “tested on interns (not animals)” to add a touch of humor and appeal to their manly audience who loves a good Dad joke.

Skyscanner takes a different approach by offering their travel-hungry users the option to search “Everywhere” if they don’t have a specific destination in mind. This simple microcopy leads to users spending more time on their website and inspires them to discover new destinations around the world. Talk about surprising and delighting.

Understand how your users think

To write microcopy that aids users in navigating your website, you need to understand how your users think. For example, if they add a product into their online basket, are they worried about getting charged when they press “check out”? If you think your users are the hesitant type, you might want to add in microcopy that reassures them, “Your card won’t be charged yet” or “You can cancel within 24 hours of placing your order.”

Spotify’s microcopy does a good job of clarifying that the platform is free and their music is available to everyone. This makes users feel secure in moving forward and downloading Spotify because they know they won’t have to pay to use the service.

Slip into your users’ psyches by performing user testing. Ask users’ to think aloud when they are going through your website to see where they are struggling. Listen to the words they use when they are walking through your site and adapt your wording to their plain language. User testing will help you get a better understanding of the questions users have when they are on your website and the type of microcopy you need to implement to resolve their doubts.

How do you use microcopy on your website to enhance user experience? Let us know in the comments!

6 tools that make content strategists’ lives easier

A well-defined content strategy is key if your company’s content marketing campaigns are going to succeed. Still, creating buyer personas, collaborating across teams, and finding relevant topics and keywords can seem like an overwhelming to-do list even for seasoned content professionals.

Whether you work as a front-end content strategist or a back-end strategist, it’s helpful to have some tools on-hand to manage your workflow and come up with creative solutions for optimizing and managing content.

Fortunately, there are useful tools for everything from content audits to keyword research. Here’s our list of the top 6 tools that make content strategists’ lives easier:

1. Make My Persona by HubSpot

(Image from HubSpot)

You probably have a basic understanding of your target audience — their demographics, where they hang out online, and what they are passionate about. Sometimes, it’s helpful to visualize it.

HubSpot helps you bring your buyer personas to life with its free Make My Persona tool. Start by picking your avatar and then filling out their demographic traits and career. By plugging in your buyer’s characteristics, you’ll get an infographic of your buyer persona. These can be useful reminders for your content creators — a tidy view of who your audience is, what they care about, and how to communicate with them.

If you pay for HubSpot, you can add the personas to your software to measure where they are at in the sales pipeline.

2. Gather Content

(Image from GatherContent)

We like to use GatherContent to streamline workflow, content creation, and operations on one platform.

This tool is especially great for big or complex projects (read: lots of contributors and reviewers) because you’re able to add assignments and due dates as well as track the status of the content. This allows projects to flow more smoothly – and makes it easier to notice production errors before they become an issue. Your team will be more organized than ever before with the content calendar and status updates, which can be integrated with Slack.

3. Google Docs

It’s utterly devastating when you create beautifully crafted content… then Word crashes and your unsaved document is lost forever. Google Docs is an easy (and free!) solution for content strategists to create and collaborate.

We use Google Docs for version control and sharing documents across team members as well as with clients. Change the settings based on your preferences if you want people to edit the document or only view it.

Some other notable features are that you can download your documents into other formats such as Word or PDF and access documents across multiple devices.

4. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Most content audits begin with an inventory. But when you’re working with a site that has hundreds or thousands of pages, a manual inventory is out of the question.

The Screaming Frog SEO Spider is the perfect free tool for automating content inventories (saving lots of time during your content audit). The website crawler lets you crawl websites’ URLs and gather key elements to analyze and audit the content (as well as search performance).

5. Feedly

(Image from Debunking Life)

Need some inspiration or help staying on top of trends? Feedly is an excellent platform for discovering insightful sources in your field. Check out what top industry influencers are talking about and see what your competitors are sharing.

This tool lets you arrange content into topic-based feeds to enhance your reading experience (also helpful when you work with clients across different industries). Come up with endless content curation ideas based on your niche and increase your expertise about the products and industries you help market.

6. Google Keyword Planner

Use Google Keyword Planner for gathering information about how often particular words are searched and the way those searches develop over time.

Start by looking for words or phrases related to your business or products. The keyword analysis tool will suggest the best keywords for you to use. This helps you discover the most relevant search terms to implement into your content.

Do you use any tools to help you build an effective content strategy? Let us know in the comments below and we’ll add them to our list!

Part 2: Why your business needs a back-end content strategist

To make the most of your content marketing efforts, you need a content strategist working behind the scenes to make sure everything is running smoothly. Although “content strategy” is a widely-used term, the field now is comprised of several types of sub-specialties.

In this series, we’re taking a look at the different types of content strategy roles and how they can benefit your business. Our first post covered the front-end content strategist’s role and responsibilities; now, let’s take a look at what back-end content strategists do.

What is a back-end content strategist?

In a nutshell, back-end content strategists focus on using technology to organize, manage, and make the most out of your content.

They make content models, develop systems to repurpose content, and offer advice about how you can use software to support your content needs. Unlike front-end content strategists, they think in terms of structure and technology – and use this knowledge to determine the best way to scale your content for the future.

How can a back-end strategist help your business?

Create content models

Back-end strategists build content models to improve the consistency of your content. This allows you to publish content across all of your channels in the same tone and voice.

They begin by looking at your business’s goals and creating a taxonomy (a classification system) that adheres to those goals.

The content model includes each content type your brand has produced (blog posts, images, web pages, etc.) and shows a relationship between those types of content. By creating a content model, a back-end strategist can see the motive behind all of your content and develop a logical structure for it.

Content models enhance the quality of your content, identify where you can repurpose certain pieces, and help you produce consistent content across web, mobile, and print.

Identify the best ways to repurpose content

Back-end strategists determine how to get the most out of your content investment by repurposing your content in a way that’s interesting and valuable to your customers.

For example, a back-end content strategist might suggest turning pieces from blog posts into infographics or videos to post on social media. They might also suggest taking listacles and turning them into a daily email series.

Reusing the high-quality content on your blog and website has endless benefits. It boosts your SEO, allows you to reach new customers, and shows your business as an authority in your industry.

Scale your content for long-term success

Another important aspect for back-end strategists is scaling your processes to ensure they keep performing in the future. One way they might do this is deciding how often to use evergreen content vs. time-sensitive content based on your content strategy. Unlike evergreen content that stays fresh year-round, time-sensitive content is only applicable for a short period of time (yet can drive major impact if done right). It’s important to have a healthy balance between these types of content to attract your target audience and convert them into customers.

A back-end content strategist could also suggest investing in well-researched, high-impact content like ebooks, whitepapers, or studies. These efforts create a mutual value exchange by helping you capture leads and grow your audience, in exchange for offering valuable content.

Lastly, back-end content strategists show you how to use certain tools to measure user engagement. By analyzing these metrics, you can see which types of content your audience enjoys and where to improve. Knowing these KPIs and using them to your advantage can help make your content future-proof.

Develop metadata for content storage and retrieval

Often, teams become stressed about having to track too many different moving parts, such as content history (when it was made, revised, repurposed) and where it came from (author, licensing rights for photos, etc). Back-end content strategists solve for this by developing metadata for the important information related to your content.

The implementation of metadata frees up your team from running through checklists and allows technology to take care of the small but significant details that can be a pain to manage. It also improves how the audience receives your content and can help you scale by keeping content organized and tagged appropriately.

Interested in hiring a back-end strategist to scale your content for success? Get in touch with us today to learn how we can help your business’s content thrive.

Part 1: Why your business needs a front-end content strategist

If you want your business’s content to thrive, it’s vital to engage content strategists throughout the process. But “content strategy” is a broad term; the field has evolved to encompass several different sub-specialties.

In this series, we’ll explore the different types of content strategy roles so you can determine the best fit for your organization. When most people envision a content strategist, they’re thinking of a front-end content strategist. Let’s begin there.

What is a front-end content strategist?

Front-end content strategists specialize in the editorial side of content strategy and creation. These are the folks who make sure your content aligns with the customer experience and focuses on the right topics for attracting and converting your target audience. They also help see to it that you have the optimal workflow, tools, and people in place for executing your strategy.

How can a front-end strategist help your business?

Clarify your content goals

A front-end content strategist works with you to determine why you’re interested in creating content for your target audience and assists you in developing measurable goals.

Maybe your main goal is to drive sales or you’re looking to engage your customers on social media. Some other common goals are to boost brand awareness or increase website traffic. Your strategist helps you clarify which KPIs you’re going to track and ensures they are in-line with your business goals and content marketing efforts.

Develop buyer personas and map customer journeys

Many companies make the mistake of producing tons of content for everyone…which is similar to creating content for no one. Some people won’t have any use for the content you write, which means you won’t experience any conversions.

A front-end content strategist tells you exactly who you should be writing for and how you can attract those people to your website. They nail down your target audience by studying and maybe even interviewing your existing customers. From there, they create buyer personas that detail the age, gender, demographic, career, and other personal information about your ideal customers.

It’s important to know the desires and challenges of your buyer personas to create valuable content that solves their problems and piques their interests. After gathering this information, a front-end content strategist maps customer journeys to determine where your customers hang out online and which channels you should target.

Choose which types of content to produce

Once they’ve documented your target audience and goals, a front-end content strategist starts evaluating the types of content you should make.

Your content strategy should focus on producing content that is valuable, actionable, and shareable. This could be blog posts, videos, webinars, ebooks, checklists, or whatever type of content is best suited to your goals.

Streamline and organize content creation for your business

Once your front-end content strategist decides the 5W’s (who, what, when, where, and why) of your content strategy, they make sure your team is prepared to execute your content marketing efforts.

Not unlike an editor in a busy newsroom, the strategist may be responsible for securing resources to develop your company’s content and ensuring that you have the right tools in place. They also help you decide on the most effective workflow for your team and the best way to accomplish it.

Could your company use a front-end content strategist? Reach out to us today, and our team of experts will get started on a custom, performance-minded strategy for your business.

4 basics you need to include in your content strategy

Content strategy can seem esoteric or intangible to some marketers, which might explain why many prefer to rush through the strategy part and go straight into building campaigns or creative concepts. Unfortunately, even if you have creative campaigns, your content marketing efforts will generate little results if you don’t have a solid content strategy in place.

Although it can take time, effort, and a substantial amount of research, a content strategy helps you reach your marketing goals and connect with your target audience.

So, what goes into a content strategy, and how should it be used to drive your content efforts?? Let’s take a look at some of the basic components you need.

1. Clearly-defined goals

Distributing content without setting goals first is like throwing spaghetti at a wall. It’s not about creating great content and seeing if it sticks – you need to narrow down where, when, and why you’re investing in content.

Start by defining your business goals. Are you looking to…

Drives sales?
Be seen as a thought leader?
Build brand awareness?
Boost organic traffic?
Earn your audience’s trust?

Decide what goals you want to achieve and how you’re going to measure success. By concentrating on a certain goal, you avoid putting out inconsistent content that doesn’t help your customers.

2. Key performance indicators

One might think failing to track metrics is a rookie mistake, but surprisingly, only 10% of respondents in Social Media Examiner’s 2018 report strongly agreed that they can measure ROI. This means you’ll have a leg up on your competition when you analyze metrics relating to your content strategy – and you’ll see where you can improve and shift your strategy if necessary.

So, where should you begin? The metrics you look at will depend on your content marketing goals. Let’s say you want to increase brand awareness. Then you should measure impressions, views, organic traffic, and social content metrics.

If you are hoping to increase conversions, pay attention to your conversion rate, ROI, and cost per lead. For more on this, check out which metrics to track when analyzing your content strategy.

3. Customer or user personas

You’re going to have a hard time driving content engagement, let alone conversions, if you don’t know who your readers are.

When you’re developing a content strategy, you need to come up with detailed buyer personas. This gives you a better understanding of who your customers are and the consumers you want to target.

Think about your customers’ interests, fears, and pain points. The more specific you can get, the better. Determine their age, career, and gender. You can even answer more personal questions like, “What makes them want to get out of bed in the morning?”

Don’t pull these personas out of thin air. Look at your customer data to help with the process of establishing your buyer personas. You can do this by including surveys on your site and interviewing your customers. HubSpot has some great persona templates to get you started:

(Image from HubSpot)

Once you’ve mapped out your target audience and know where they’re hanging out online, you can produce content that caters to their specific needs and solves their problems.

4. Content pillars

Okay, I get it: you are your brand’s biggest fan. But customers who haven’t heard of your brand don’t care about what it is, they care about what your brand can do for them. At the same time, you’re producing content for a reason: to drive your business goals. Creating content that’s too user-focused won’t work, either. So how do you meet in the middle?

When developing your content strategy, you need to think about how you’re going to create valuable content that engages your target audience and establishes a mutual value exchange. Identifying content pillars can help keep you on track.

Stick to educating, entertaining, and engaging your readers with content that answers their questions and solves their problems (while remaining brand-relevant). As time goes on, your readers will come back to your site for more of this juicy content – and be tempted to see what you’ve got to offer products or services-wise. It’s a long game, but it’s worth it. After all, content marketing generates about 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing.

Remember, you can add a short call to action at the end of your blog posts, videos, or whatever type of content you’re producing, but don’t go full car salesman on them. Keep it short, sweet, and straight to the point.

Like this: Are you sick of making content strategy mistakes, or feel like your efforts just aren’t moving the needle? We can help you with that. Our team of experts works with agencies and businesses of all sizes to create custom, performance-minded content plans that make you stand out from the competition and gain loyal customers.

Picture of a laptop and notebook on a desk.

10 free tools every copywriter needs right now

Let’s face it: writer’s block happens to the best of us. Sometimes your creativity fountain starts to run a little dry, or you’re struggling to balance SEO with readability. All copywriters need a few tools that can help them find the right words when they’re stuck.

After all, there’s more to writing quality copy than putting words on paper. It’s a balancing act: knowing which keywords to optimize for, which headline will hook readers, and what topics will appeal to your audience’s interests. Making it all line up perfectly is just plain hard sometimes.

So, what free tools can you use that will improve your writing skills, productivity, and organization as a copywriter? Here’s our list of the 10 best free tools every copywriter needs right now:

1. The Headline Analyzer

“On average, 5x as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you’ve written your headline, you’ve spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” – David Ogilvy

If you have a difficult time crafting catchy headlines, try The Headline Analyzer by CoSchedule. It scores your overall headline quality out of 100 and rates its ability to get social shares. The analyzer works for social messages, emails, articles, and other types of content.

The analyzer also offers suggestions to improve your headline and keeps a history of your previous headlines to see how your messaging changes as you adapt it.

2. Readable

Easy-to-read copy ranks higher on search engines. It also makes readers interested in hearing what you have to say, which impacts how they view your brand and if purchase from your business.

When you don’t have a dedicated proofreader, Readable is a fantastic free tool that helps improve your copy by giving it a readability rating score. This lets you match your copy to your audience’s reading level and understand how you can make your writing simpler to read.

3. Grammarly

(Photo from Ergonotes)

Finding pesky grammar and spelling mistakes is key if you want your copy to be taken seriously.

Grammarly is an easy, free tool that catches small errors, such as out-of-place commas, repetitive words, and awkward sentences. This is our #1 suggestion for catching grammar errors and improving word choice in any type of text.

4. Answer the Public

Do you ever have a day where you rack your brain for content ideas…and come up with nothing? Instead of slamming your head against your keyboard, try out Answer The Public.

Start by researching keywords or phrases relating to your products, your audience’s problems, the services you provide, or whatever topic ideas you think will interest your target audience. After you type in your keyword, you’ll be presented with a visual board of search phrases from Google, Bing, and other search engines.

For example, let’s say you’re writing an article on digital marketing. Type in “digital marketing” into Answer The Public’s platform and you’ll see a graphic with the most-asked questions about digital marketing:

(Photo from Answer The Public)

At Content Clarity, we like to use this tool for topic research and getting a better idea of what our clients’ prospective customers are looking for. This helps us build personalized, targeted content that attracts and converts customers.

5. Keywords Everywhere

Keywords Everywhere is a valuable free tool for keyword brainstorming. It’s an extension that can be installed on Chrome or Firefox. Once you’ve downloaded the browser add-on, you can look for headline ideas right in your search box.

The extension shows you the monthly search volume, cost per click, and completion data of keywords on multiple websites. It also includes the “People Also Search For” and “Related” keywords from Google with volume metrics all on Google’s search page.

6. OneLook’s Reverse Dictionary

Do you ever have an idea of the word you want to use and just can’t place it? Well, lucky for you, OneLook’s Reverse Dictionary lets you type in nonsense phrases like “a very common savoury white condiment often found on the dining table” – and presents you with the top words related to your search, ranked by relevance.

Besides helping you find just the word you’re looking for, this reverse dictionary is handy for discovering synonyms that you wouldn’t find in a traditional thesaurus. We like to use this for spicing up our copy and writing unique headlines that capture readers’ attention.

7. Trello

Trello is a free tool that lets you manage your workflow and a variety of projects in an organized manner. It’s ideal for working with a team because you can collaborate with multiple writers, editors, or even your clients.

Example of an editorial calendar on Trello.

(Photo from Content Marketing Institute)

You can organize your editorial calendar by creating cards for each blog post and assigning writers and editors to the cards. From there, the posts can be drag-and-dropped from “unassigned,” “assigned,” “ready to edit,” “in edit” to “published.”

Place deadlines for each team member and include notifications to inform people when it’s their turn to get started on a task. This keeps things organized visually and holds each team member accountable for their portion of the work. It’s also a whole lot easier than emailing different people with the dreaded, “Are you done yet?”

8. Evernote

(Photo from Creative Bloq)

Are you ever out and about enjoying your day when – bam! – you get hit with a brilliant idea?

With Evernote, you can easily jot down all your ideas and lists on your cell phone. You’ll even have access to your notes across all your devices. So, once you get home, you can log in to your computer and immediately have access to the material you wrote down earlier on your mobile. You can add tags to your notes to keep them organized and easy to find.

Another interesting feature is that you can save images, PDFs, and web pages to Evernote, which is useful for streamlining your research process.

9. Toggl

For copywriters who charge by the hour or want to track how long they take on a project, Toggl is the way to go. With this efficient time tracker, you can provide accurate quotes and improve productivity (since you’ll know exactly how long you’ve spent procrastinating).

Your entries are synced between the phone app, desktop app, Chrome extension, and website. If you want, you can start the time tracker on your computer and stop the timer on your phone.

By noting exactly how many hours you spent on particular projects, clients, and tasks, you can determine where you’re making money and what projects aren’t a good fit.

10. Unsplash

(Image from Unsplash)

No matter how good your copy is – people love words accompanied by stunning images. In fact, articles with images get 94% more views than those without.

Unsplash is perfect for finding beautiful free images to make your copy more engaging and keep people reading longer. This free tool has a library stocked with high-quality photos that will go with any topic you’re searching for. The photos are also more creative than the usual ones on other free stock photo websites.

What are your favorite tools that you can’t write without? Let us know in the comments so we can add them to our list!