12 Growth Hacks to Enhance Your Content Marketing Strategy

Creating the perfect content marketing strategy for your brand is no small feat. No matter how well you know your audience or how long you’ve spent optimizing your content, every content marketer has faced the challenge of gaining readership and brand awareness.

It’s important to keep in mind that when you are publishing original content online, your main product is the content that you develop. Applying a variety of digital growth hacking strategies will help you gain exposure without spending too much of your marketing budget.

This marketing blog will explore different ways on how to use digital growth hacking to expand and enhance your content marketing strategy, plus teach you how to learn from your content and get real results.

Why are Growth Hacks So Important?

While developing a curated content marketing strategy is lengthy, there are a number of different strategies to facilitate “growth hacking.” This is a relatively new marketing buzzword that’s been gaining a lot of traction recently.

The top marketers using growth hacking strategies describe the process as using unconventional ways to get new customers, generate brand growth, and beat the competition via workflow automation. The goal of growth hacking strategies is to acquire as many users or customers as possible while spending as little as possible. These digital marketing strategies allow you to get more information and ultimately, growth, from the content you produce and publish.

With these ideas in mind, let’s take a look at 12 ways to use growth hacking techniques to enhance your brand’s content marketing strategy.

1. Write Click-Worthy Headlines for Your Content

When it comes to effectively driving real results, start with your headlines. Headlines filled with fluffy words that fail to inform your audience won’t benefit your digital marketing strategy. Your headline is essentially the first impression your content makes. When thinking about headlines, make sure that you’re always aiming to get people to click. You want users to view all your content even if they only go off of that headline.

Create headlines that attract social shares, increase your web traffic, and enhance your brand awareness with your audience. They’ll allow you to keep publishing engaging content that readers want to continue reading. You can use free online headline analyzers to determine the strength and optimal length of your headlines.

Additionally, keep in mind that your headlines should be direct, readable, and command attention while being relatable to your audience. This balance takes time to master and is often a trial-and-error process that directly correlates with your brand’s reputation and image.

2. Include SEO Keywords to Increase Targeting 

While some marketers start to put aside the importance of SEO, it’s definitely still a valuable and relevant growth hacking strategy to consider optimizing. One of the main benefits of utilizing keywords is that it allows you to maintain a consistent connection with your audience.

By understanding what your audience is looking for, you have a better chance of being in their search results. When you effectively use SEO keywords, you also gain a better idea of what interests your audience and potential consumer base.

A variety of tools are available to help you develop your keywords strategy. For example, Google Ads can help you find keywords that relate to your audience. With keyword research, make sure that you focus on targeting a specific audience to stand out from your competitors.

3. Use Pop-Up Content When Appropriate

When it’s time to inspire action among your audience, pop-ups are a great way to engage website visitors. If you have a particular message or action that you want your audience to take, a pop-up is appropriate. For example, adding a blog pop-up to ask users to sign up for your newsletter is a solid way to increase blog readership.

However, it’s important to be mindful of when and how you use these features. The last thing you want to do is to overwhelm your website visitors and dissuade them from engaging with your content marketing.

If you decide to use a pop-up within your content, use language that is clear and concise, followed by a click-worthy call-to-action (CTA). When used in moderation and at the perfect moment, pop-ups can be extremely helpful in boosting your content growth.

4. Feature a Variety of Copy Lengths Throughout Your Content

While you definitely want to keep your content direct and straightforward to ensure clarity, it’s worth considering the length of the content, too. Ideally, your content should keep website visitors engaged and wanting more. If you’re wondering whether to keep your content short and sweet or long and developed, the answer is usually the latter.

Using data from their own most-read blogs, HubSpot says that, for SEO purposes, the ideal post length should be between 2,100-2,400 words. Ultimately, the length of your content has a great effect on your brand’s ranking and conversion rates.

With all that said, It’s important to remember that the quality of your content shouldn’t be diminished in favor of quantity. Don’t make outlandish attempts to extend your content if you can say something succinctly. Create content that effectively explains your ideas and gives your readers enough information to process.

5. Create Vibrant Infographics to Accompany Your Copy

Sometimes, your content may need a little pick-me-up to keep your audience engaged and your brand’s reputation fresh. Creating interesting infographics to accompany your content takes an extra level of effort and time. Yet, they pay off in the long run by potentially increasing the average time that your audience spends with your brand’s content.

Additionally, infographics serve as a new way to repurpose your existing content and position your marketing in a new light.

6. Tell a Story with Your Content

No matter what form of content you use, you should always aim to tell a story with the information you’re providing.

What is the goal of this content? What do you want your website visitors to get out of it? How can you relate to your audience’s emotions or personal experiences? These questions are helpful to ask yourself when you’re starting to develop your strategy.

If there isn’t a story to tell, consider how you present your content. Website visitors want to know if they should buy your product or service, because you understand their problems and offer a solution. Relatability allows you to establish a genuine, lasting relationship with visitors, encouraging them to continue engaging with your content.

7. Implement a Variety of Visuals Throughout Your Content

You’ve heard it before: A picture is worth a thousand words. When it comes to optimizing your content growth, sharing visuals with your website visitors is a great way to catch and maintain their attention. Every successful content marketing strategy utilizes images to engage digital audiences. Images and other visuals, such as videos, gifs, and the aforementioned infographics, allow you to better illustrate your story with your audience.

As with pop-ups, when using visuals to enhance your content marketing, be careful not to overwhelm your audience. Use visuals sparingly, so when you do use them, they’re more effective and impactful. Choose visuals that speak directly to the subject of your content. A little goes a long way when it comes to this kind of content expression.

8. Optimize Your Email Marketing Strategy

One of the best ways to enhance your content’s growth is to use email marketing to engage your audience.

Despite the emergence of social media, email marketing remains on top as the most effective digital marketing strategy to reach your target audience. Even though an effective email marketing strategy takes time and practice, it’s well worth it if you are trying to find a consistent way to boost readership and create brand loyalty.

9. Use Social Media Channels to Promote Your Content

Beyond email marketing, you can also use social media to promote your content and continue the conversation. Social media platforms, like Instagram and LinkedIn, allow you to connect with your digital audience directly and gain insight into their interests. In the increasingly digital world that we live in, social media is a vital growth hack for content marketing.

Additionally, social media is a great tool for promoting content because you can do so across multiple different platforms.

For real growth hacking results, you need to utilize cross-promotion social media strategies. Be open to posting about your content multiple times in a variety of ways, as a gif, infographic, link, etc. In this light, social media holds an entire realm of opportunity, and it’s one of the most innovative ways to grow your business.

10. Make Your Content Easily Shareable and User-Friendly

At its core, your content should be easy to understand, navigate, and share with others. Once you’ve enticed your audience to click on your content, you need to provide a positive user experience. By creating easy-to-read and -navigate content, you’ll maintain a healthy relationship with your readers, which ultimately leads them to share your content with others.

Constantly enhancing the user experience of your content makes a big difference in how your audience interacts with your brand overall. Ensuring that your content is easily accessible and shareable is one of the easiest ways to grow and expand your brand’s reach.

11. Build a Community with Your Content Offerings

Another great marketing growth hack is to think about how you can build a network through the content offers you provide. Use your network for more than just self-promotion. Your content has the ability to connect people from similar backgrounds with common interests, and building a community is in your brand’s interest. These communities can easily come together on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, thanks to their Groups features.

By building a community for your audience, you’ll also be able to identify key thought leaders and influencers within your industry. As loyal readers, these high-power promoters can share your content with their followers, providing another stream of growth for your brand.

12. Think Beyond Your Brand’s Blog

If your primary form of content is blogging, it’s easy to ignore other forms of content that can grow your brand’s reach. Content is continuously evolving, so digital content marketers need to be flexible and willing to adjust their growth hacking strategies.

Think about how to use the information and expertise you gather for a blog to create different pieces of content. Is your content better suited for YouTube, podcast, digital slideshow, or other audiovisual medium? No matter what format your content takes, the goals of your marketing efforts and values of your brand should remain at the forefront of its creation.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, content marketing should aim to generate conversions by fulfilling the needs of your existing audience, as well as potential new members, which in turn builds brand awareness and loyalty. Implementing these growth hacks for marketing will provide the growth boost you need to achieve just that.