Understand your priorities for your readers, the industry, and the individual you’re interviewing.
Have a list of questions that are thoughtful and organized, and work toward answering a single question or reaching a specific goal.
Set Interview Goal
Are you trying to get tips from an expert? A day in the life of? Solve or bring light to a certain issue? Make a human connection?
Choose a goal for your interview, organize it into an outline, and remove any question or information that doesn’t help you move toward that goal.
Be Personable And Make The Interviewee Comfortable
Awkward silences, a lack of rapport, nervousness, and other social aspects can interfere with an otherwise excellent interview and affect the information you collect.
You may want to consider using cognitive interview techniques, which have been adapted from criminal investigation for journalism.
Record Your Conversation
As humans, our brains prioritize stimuli to determine what is important and what we should pay attention to and remember.
This attentional filtering becomes more severe when you’re making notes, thinking about the technical aspects of an interview, and nervous. As a result, it’s easy to miss important details or implications.
So, save some time and improve your accuracy and insights into the information provided during the interview by making a recording that you can refer to as often as necessary.
Be Precise And Ask For Clarification
Some people love raisins in cinnamon buns. Others do not. And just like the raisins debate, how you define a word or concept may vary greatly from someone else.
So, if the information you collect during an interview seems vague, or you’re unsure of something the interviewee says, ask.
The worst thing you can do is assume that it isn’t true or deliberately influence the meaning of someone’s words.
8. Measure And Track Everything
Measuring something is generally easy. The difficult part of measurement and tracking is measuring and tracking the right things.
SEJ’s annual State of SEO Report reveals that SEO professionals often have a mismatch between their goals, the methods and strategies they use to reach them, and the variables they measure.
Content marketers and marketing are no exception.
Let’s say you want to use content marketing to increase conversions. So, you create a video for your hot tub company.
In this instance, tracking and analyzing traffic data to the video would be a mistake. Those numbers are only part of the story.
Instead, track clicks and use traffic data to better understand who clicks through to your content and where viewers go after they consume it.
And this is vital: Don’t stop your analysis at the click.
Every visit from a viewer is only one step in a larger journey – and this journey matters.
Returning to the previous example, your video might have generated fewer clicks and conversions overall.
Dig a little deeper, however, and you might discover that those few conversions were of much higher value than average, and the viewers return to your site more often than your average site viewer.
In this instance, while traffic numbers might make it look like your video failed, analysis of the customer journey reveals that your video was actually a big success, attracting a more qualified, valuable, and engaged audience.
9. Repackage Content With Purpose
You invest a lot of resources in creating amazing content. Don’t simply publish it in one format and waste the rest of its potential.
Before creating content, consider all the different formats and ways you can share it to get attention.
By planning, you can collect images, video footage, sound bites, expert quotes, and everything you’ll need to share and market your content in various ways to maximize your return on investment (ROI).
But refrain from repackaging content with the sole purpose of spreading it everywhere. Carefully plan your content to appear when and where you need to.
As explained in the video above, Search Engine Journal uses the data gathered for its State of SEO Report to create:
White paper reports.
Podcast.
Articles on data not included in the main reports.
Infographics.
Carousels for social media.
Video clips.
Some of these are released before the main report is published to help spread the word and generate interest while sharing interesting insights about the SEO industry.
Then, when the report is released, it is followed by additional content to help generate interest, links, and findings.
Therefore, instead of a week of interest, the reports generate traffic and attention while informing readers for months without significantly increasing the original investment.
10. Stand Out While Blending In
One of the more common pieces of advice is to copy successful content and do what others are doing.
Makes sense, right?
After all, SEO, good writing, and other skills all have best practices you need to follow. Your audience also has preferences, expectations, and requirements.
Your content needs to look like everyone else’s to some degree.
But here’s the problem with this advice: No one stands out if everyone does things the same way.
Therefore, learning how to blend in while standing out is an essential skill for content marketing.
So, instead of mimicking or copying successful content, collect several examples that have worked on a specific platform or for a specific audience and investigate to find out why they’re effective.
Then, you can use these insights to create and test your own content that allows you to stand out, be unique, and fulfill the needs of your target audience.
Conclusion
Effective marketing is more than choosing the right topic or quality writing.
By strengthening and utilizing these 10 content marketing skills, your content will help you generate the right traffic and connect with your audience in a way that will have you dominating the competition.
More resources:
Featured Image: Viktoria Kurpas/Shutterstock