Gotta catch em’ all.

There’s a reason content marketing is such a big deal these days. Your target audience is actively searching for valuable content. By answering their questions or solving their problems, you can build credibility, form invaluable relationships, and — of course — capture qualified leads.

Here’s how you can make the most of your content marketing strategy:

1. Drive More Traffic to Your Website

Before you can work on increasing conversion rates and promoting engagement, you must first drive visitors to your site. Start by optimizing your content for search engines and social media discovery. Once you’ve increased your daily traffic, you can start transforming visitors into leads.

2. Attract the Right Visitors

You can drive all the traffic in the world to your site, but if you’re not attracting the right visitors, you hard work will never pay off (literally). Take advantage of the many services out there that can help you target the most relevant audiences for your brand. Even if you have to shell out some cash, building a qualified list of prospects is worth every penny.

3. Create an Email Newsletter

Make it as easy as possible for people to subscribe to your publication via email by featuring a prominent button on your website. Then consistently send them an email newsletter that draws them in and keeps them coming back for more.

4. Offer Gated Content

Offering longform content — white papers, ebooks, reports, and case studies, for example — presents an opportunity to exchange a piece of your industry knowledge for contact information from qualified leads. People who are willing to hand over their email addresses for insights are likely interested in learning more about (and eventually investing in) your services.

5. Offer a Discount

Each visitor who lands on your site has already chosen to browse your products over the competition’s. Pop-up coupons and discount codes can provide added incentive to make the final plunge and invest in your brand’s services. As a bonus, you gain access to their contact information to promote future deals. It’s a win-win.

6. Offer a “Free” Gift

People love free stuff. One way to attract new customers is by offering exclusive access to a recent ebook or some other type of premium content. A complimentary product or service gives potential customers a sneak peak of your offerings — and gives you a list of qualified leads in the process.

7. Host a Webinar

Informative blog posts and visuals are valuable in their own right, but there’s nothing more interactive than live streaming video. Host a webinar covering an interesting topic, and use a (very small) portion of that time to promote content on your website that requires an email address to access.

8. Advertise on Social Media

If you don’t already have a strong presence on all applicable social media channels, you can start there. Gauge which pieces of content are getting the most attention from followers, and give those an extra boost via paid advertising.

9. Invest in Remarketing

Content is a big investment, so you want to be sure that the content you’re producing is reaching people who have shown interest in your brand. Remarketing allows you to reap the full benefits of the time and resources you’ve already invested in content creation. Target users who have previously visited your site, then hit them with an offer they can’t refuse.

10. Build a Strong Brand

Don’t get so caught up in your tactics and tricks that you forget the most important part of your content strategy — the quality of the content itself. Consistently publish content that is truly helpful, useful, inspirational, entertaining, or educational to your readers. You want people to fall in love with your brand; so endeavor to produce content that aligns with the values and aspirations of your target audience.

Longneck and Thunderfoot offer content marketing services and strategies to transform your company blog into an authoritative trade publication. Click to learn more about how to produce great content and prove ROI on your marketing efforts.