13 growth hacks to enhance your content marketing strategy

Content marketing is a cornerstone of any successful digital marketing strategy. After all, content is essential for the success of any marketing strategy, be it SEO, email marketing, social media marketing, or anything else.

Content marketing has traditionally been a long-term, sustainable marketing strategy that takes time to deliver real results.

Well, that’s not the case anymore. There are growth hacks for content marketing that can help you get great results much faster.

In this post, you will learn 13 such growth hacks to take your content marketing game to the next level.

But first, let’s understand what growth hacking is and why you should care about it.

What is growth hacking for content marketing?

Growth hacking refers to the use of strategies that deliver quick results. Certain content marketing strategies work faster and deliver better results than traditional tactics.

Using these, you can grow your business at a rapid pace and get the best return on investment (ROI) from your content marketing efforts.

The image below perfectly illustrates the characteristics of a content hacker.

Source: Marketinginsidergroup

Considerations for using growth hacks for content marketing

There are some concepts you must understand before you start using the growth hacks listed in this post. Let’s discuss these briefly.

#1. SEO

As a growth hacker, you must stay updated on Google’s algorithm changes and the latest SEO tactics. You should also be adept at using SEO tools like AccuRanker, which can help you find your competitors' rankings and target keywords to find content opportunities. Utilizing the Google Trends API can provide valuable insights into the trending topics and search queries relevant to your content.

#2. Data Analysis & Optimization

You should be able to analyze data and draw insights from it. This is a necessary skill as most growth hacks require some form of data analysis and are often data-driven.

#3. Recognizing Opportunities

Identifying content opportunities is a key characteristic of a content hacker. You should always be on the lookout for the next big idea or hack to drive content marketing success for your business.

#4. Content Virality

Understanding why content goes viral and which types of content have the highest potential for going viral is also crucial for a growth hacker. While there are no guarantees that a piece of content will go viral, you should know how to maximize the chances.

#5. Content Originality

While many growth hacks require you to replicate your competitors’ strategies, it’s vital that you understand the importance of creating original content. Creating original content is a must for building credibility and a loyal audience base for your website or blog. Make use of tools like Surfer SEO or frase to create the best content with ease.

13 growth hacks for content marketing

Here are some of the best growth hacks you can use to elevate your content marketing strategy and achieve rapid growth.

#1. Audit your Existing Content

Conducting regular content audits is one of the top growth hacks for content marketing.

By regularly analyzing your existing content, you can understand what works for your audience and what doesn’t.

Use any SEO and analytics tool to identify your top-performing content. You can use various metrics to sort the top-performing content, such as:

• Traffic

• Social shares

• Conversions

• Number of inbound links

Choose the metric that’s most important for your business goals.

Here are two images that show top-performing content based on traffic and social shares.

Once you have an idea of what kind of content works best, focus more time and effort on creating that kind of content. This is a simple content hack to drive more audience engagement.

#2. Analyze your Competitors and Find Content Gaps

One of the quickest hacks to find the right keyword and topics for your content is to analyze your competitors and find content gaps.

So, what exactly are content gaps?

These are keywords that your competitors are ranking for, but you’re not.

To conduct a conduct gap analysis, simply enter your key competitors in your analytics tool, as shown in the example below.

The tool will run an analysis and provide you with a list of keywords that you’re not ranking for and can target.

Here’s an example of a content gap analysis for CloudTalk.

Once you have the list, sort it by search volume and keyword difficulty and target the most valuable keyword first. Create content that’s better than what your competitors are ranking for and outrank them.

#3. Use Long-Tail Keywords for Better Targeting

Keyword optimization is one of the key pillars of SEO and is nothing new.

But one hack you can use is to find and optimize for long-tail keywords to get higher SERP rankings.

These are long keywords that are more niche and cater to a specific audience. As these tend to have lower search volumes than shorter, more popular keywords, they’re easier to rank for.

In the example below, the shorter keyword “how to build backlinks” has a very high keyword difficulty and is difficult to rank for. But if you use the longer “how to build backlinks for e-commerce,” you can not only rank for it but reach a more relevant audience.

#4. Focus on Video Marketing

The use of videos has grown steadily over the years, with 91% of marketers using them in 2023, as per the latest Wyzowl report.

Source: Wyzowl

If you want to use this trend to your advantage, start using videos in your content strategy.

Videos are a great way to deliver a lot of information in an engaging way and are perfect for sharing on social media platforms.

You can use videos to tell people how to use your products, tell your brand story, and educate, inform, or entertain them in various ways.

#5. Make It Easy for Leads to Sign Up for Emails

Every marketer needs an email list to nurture leads, and building one can be tricky.

One hack you can use is to provide multiple opt-in points to let your site visitors sign up for your emails.

You can place a top banner with a sign-up option, add a form to page footers, create pop-ups, and more.

Make sure you offer some incentive for them to sign up. This can be access to free content, a discount or offer, or anything of value to your target audience.

Content Marketing Institute, for example, has a permanent “Subscribe” button at the top of its website. It also uses top banners to offer its latest courses and content to users in exchange for their contact information.

Source: ContentMarketingInstitute

#6. Test New Content Formats

Just like relying solely on your blog is not prudent, relying on 1-2 types of content is equally unwise. You should experiment with various content formats and use the ones that work best with your audience.

Some formats you can try include:

• Podcasts and webinars

• Interviews

• Online events

• Livestreams

• Audio content

• And more!

#7. Distribute Content via Multiple Channels

Relying solely on your blog to reach your target audience is like “putting all your eggs in one basket.” It’s limiting and risky.

Blogs take a long time to gain authority and get a high traffic volume.

That’s why it’s a good practice to distribute content through various channels.

Online forums like Reddit and Quora are perfect for this, as these require minimal time and effort. Simply find questions related to your area of expertise, answer them in brief, and link to related resources on your website.

Here’s an example of a Quora answer that’s helpful and also directs people to a relevant resource.

Source: Quora

#8. Keep your KPIs in Mind

One rule of thumb when creating content is to keep the objective in mind. Your entire content creation strategy will depend on what you want to achieve with your content.

Do you want to educate and inform your readers? Do you want to promote your products or services and use content to drive conversions?

Clearly identify your end goals and make a list of key performance indicators (KPIs) you will use to measure your content’s performance.

For example, if your goal is to let people know about your new website, then monthly traffic is a good metric to track.

#9. Create Content That Gets You Inbound Links

This is another hack where you analyze your competitors’ performance to get more backlinks for your website.

How does it work?

First, conduct an analysis to find the top-ranking content on a target keyword. We’ve used “Google ranking factors” in the example below.

Next, find the top-ranking content for that keyword and sort the results by the number of backlinks, as shown below.

This will help you find the content piece with the highest inbound link volume.

You can go a step further and identify the referring domains that are linking to that content.

Once you find the content that’s getting the most backlinks for a specific keyword, you need to reverse-engineer it and create better content.

You can then reach out to the referring domains’ editors and pitch your more in-depth, high-quality content as a replacement and claim those backlinks for your site.

Also, when you create in-depth content that offers a lot of value, it automatically becomes link-worthy content that earns organic backlinks.

#10. Reverse-engineer to Create Share-Worthy Content

This content hack is very similar to the previous one, except you need to identify top-ranking content by the number of shares.

You can use a tool like BuzzSumo to find content that’s getting a lot of shares and reverse-engineer it to get the same results for your website.

Here’s an example of the top-ranking content for the keyword “content marketing hacks.”

Source: Convinceandconvert

This gives you an idea of which types of content people find the most shareworthy. Analyze the top five results in detail to understand what’s great about the content that makes it share-worthy.

Then, replicate the strategy to create even better content for the target keyword.

Also, add easy sharing options to make it hassle-free for readers to share your content. Social share buttons and options like “click to tweet” can help with that.

#11. Use Guest Posting to Drive Referral Traffic

This is a well-known hack that involves sharing content on authoritative sites with high monthly traffic and using backlinks to drive referral traffic to your site.

Let's face it: even with all the growth hacks you try, it takes time and effort to build consistently high monthly traffic for a new site.

This hack gives you a shortcut. It’s like piggybacking on the popularity of a well-known site to build awareness for and drive more site traffic to yours.

Many authoritative websites allow guest posting and even have regular contributors. Forbes, for example, even has author bios for all its regular contributors, who are often leading entrepreneurs in various fields.

Here’s an example.

Source: Forbes

#12. Repurpose Content to Get the Most Out of It

All the growth hacks mentioned till now require considerable time and effort. A lot of them require you to find top content and reverse-engineer it.

This one, however, is quite simple and quick.

If you have a blog or website where you consistently post content, you will have tons of old content. You can repurpose it into new formats to put it to good use and get the most out of it.

You can share excerpts of your blog posts on social media or convert long-form educational content to videos. The possibilities are endless if you experiment and see what resonates best with your audience.

#13. Offer Membership Plans for Paid Content

This is a growth hack that’s been popular in recent years, especially among small businesses and influencers.

Here’s what it entails:

• Create paid content, such as weekly newsletters, ebooks, or podcasts.

• Make your content exclusive by asking people to become members of your online community.

• Offer various membership tiers to get access to different paid content and other exclusive services.

• Earn a consistent stream of money without working too hard.

Luckily for you, some websites and apps make it even easier for you. Some popular examples include Buy Me A Coffee, Patreon, and Substack.

You can even create paid Telegram channels or members-only podcast channels.

A great example of this is the Hacking Creativity podcast. Its founders started a profile on the Buy Me A Coffee platform, which is a crowdfunding platform where people can financially support the creators they like.

They created various membership tiers with different price points to get subscription revenue from loyal viewers.

Source: HCPodcast

Final thoughts

Using the right growth hacks, you can get better results and ROI from your content marketing initiatives. The best part is that these content hacks do not take a lot of effort and still deliver great results.

Now, you don’t need to try every single growth hack mentioned in this article. Instead, choose the ones that are more relevant to your business and that you can easily implement.

So what are you waiting for? Start using these growth hacks and supercharge your content marketing performance. All the best!