13 Ways to Maximize Content Marketing Effectiveness

Dress Your Content Marketing For Success

Face it—you can craft the most awesome content marketing in the world, but if no one reads it, it’s an epic fail.

Beyond crafting amazing information, you must dress your content marketing for success.

Here are a baker’s dozen ways to maximize content marketing’s effectiveness.


  1. Craft a strong headline (or title). Titles are worth the investment in time to ensure that you’ve got the best way to lure readers in. Remember it has to be complete and stand on its own. Start with a working title and return to polish it after you’ve finished working.
  2. Lure readers in with an image. Since people are visual, incorporate a photograph near the top of the post. If you’ve got the time and the content lends it itself to additional images, include them.
  3. Dive into your content quickly. Get to the point with a strong introduction. Don’t waste your readers’ time by talking around the main point. (Also, assume your audience is at least as smart as smart as you are.) Incorporate your keyword phrase in your first sentence to lure people in.
  4. Break information into logical sections and use appropriate headings. Feed readers bite size chunks of information rather than one long endless stream of text so that it’s easier to consume either on-the-go or while multi-tasking.
  5. Structure ideas to help readers. Ensure that your information has a logical flow to the concepts.  Specifically think in terms of creating lists and tables. These forms underscore your content’s structure.
  6. Format content marketing for easy consumption. Use a combination of bold, italics, color and typefaces to highlight special text where appropriate. Use combination of design and typographiy elements to bring attention to your points.
  7. Link to relevant content. Associate useful content where it can help your readers.
  8. Include appropriate visuals. Enhance your content with infographics, charts and other visual items.
  9. Boost social proof. In addition to showing how well others liked the content, it’s useful to remind readers that your content can be shared.
  10. Add a call to action to get readers to act. Where appropriate, include a visual signal.
  11. Include author information. Let readers know who wrote the content. Where possible, add a photograph. This lets readers see who wrote the information and attracts their attention.
  12. Provide content metadata. This is a fancy word for including a date stamp, categories and excerpt. This gives readers more information about the content.
  13. Encourage comments and conversation. While comments aren’t an effective way to measure your social media or content marketing effectiveness, they’re a good way to attract engagement. At a minimum, ask a question at the end of the content marketing to get your readers thinking. Also, respond to every comment to increases the number of the comments for each post. It not only shows potential readers that people are interested in the information, it shows that you care about your content and your readers.

By formatting your content marketing for success, you’ll increase its effectiveness to achieve its goals.

What other elements would you add to this list to dress your content marketing for success and why?

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen

Here are some related articles you may find of interest.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/maggiejane/4043763379

Tags , . Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to 13 Ways to Maximize Content Marketing Effectiveness

  1. I couldn’t agree more with step #10. Too often I read articles that only bring attention to a problem or issue but then give me no course of action to follow. What good does it do to know there is a problem if that’s where it ends. If nothing else, there is a good opportunity to start a discussion.

    I also don’t think we can forget the importance of still delivering quality content. The wrapping paper should look nice, but there should still be a gift in the box 😉