- Best practices are actually the results
of experiments that paid off.
These established rules are helpful
for getting started with content marketing
and adapting what's worked
for others for your own campaigns.
But slowly relying on best practices can limit
the results you're able to achieve because many
of these successful approaches
become less effective over time.
Instead, use some of your resources
to experiment and find out what works to drive results.
In this process, you'll discover your own best practices.
Experimenting with content can mean testing changes,
looking into small details like blog post timing,
or innovating on a larger scale like launching
a series on a new platform.
To get started, identify what aspects
of your content marketing program you want to test.
There's three categories of activities worth testing.
Areas that aren't working, areas that could use improvement,
and areas that are performing really well.
So let's take a look.
When content just isn't working,
it's time to significantly alter different parts
of your campaigns to figure out what does earn results.
Like if your blog posts just aren't performing
after a year-long investment, it's time
to experiment with a different type
of content like video or audio to see what makes an impact.
As compared to when your content is driving results
but it's clear more can be achieved.
Like if a company's video series does get customers
to sign up for your emails but not enough yet
to justify the costs.
Then that's certainly content worth experimenting with.
This calls for testing the details of a series
like the topics you're focused on,
the way it's promoted, the design and editing of each video,
and more to see what can improve its performance.
And last but not least is experimenting
with your most successful content marketing programs
to notably increase their effect
on the company's bottom line.
For instance, if your podcast is a leading source
of conversions for your company,
you want to test ways to improve your podcasting activities
to maintain that momentum.
Maybe you increased the number of episodes published
monthly or experiment with a different show format
in a few episodes to see what the response
is when you alter what's been working.
While there's an endless list of tests to consider,
one of my top recommendations is testing unexpected ways
of using existing content formats
and distribution channels to gain results.
Speaking of results, it's important
to gather data as part of your testing
to understand what changes and new approaches
are worth adopting and which were just a one-off success.
Decide what data point you'll be looking
at to measure progress whether that's the number
of conversions, opens, clicks or shares
that resulted from an experiment.
It is important that these results
are statistically significant, which basically means
that the result is not attributed to chance
and are meaningful enough to take action on.
Now it's your turn to improve
your content marketing programs
by experimenting consistently to discover
what works to engage your customers.