Content marketing is an excellent way to engage your customers and get people talking about your brand, product, and services. However, like most things in life, creating quality content is easier said than done. Content marketers have to continually produce fresh content that is relevant and interesting to their audiences, which poses its own set of unique challenges.
So just how do you create this kind of quality content consistently?
Well, let’s have a look at how you can go about this.
Have a Fixed Content Marketing Goal
The first stage to creating quality content is asking yourself the question: just why am I creating quality content? You need to start with a goal – a unifying strategy that sets in place the purpose of your content.
Is your content meant to drive customers to your product page?
Are you trying to get viewers to sign up for emails or free trials?
Make sure you know what your goal is from the very beginning. As you develop your content marketing strategy, this goal will help you guide your decisions.
For example, let’s say that you’re looking to convert blog readers into email subscribers who you can later convert into paying customers. Now that you know what your goal is, you can more easily decide the number of viewers you have to attract in order to meet the signup goal. You’ll also be able to determine what kind of content will best be able to attract these readers.
Once you have this larger goal in place, it’s easier to determine — based on your average conversion rates — how many readers or listeners, viewers, users, you need to attract to the content you’re publishing, in order to hit your signup goal.
Understand Your Audience
Who is going to be interacting with your content? The answer is a vital part of what kind of content you create. The topics you write about or create video and imagery about have to be relatable and relevant to your audience.
One way to understand your audience is by creating an audience persona. This is a generalized and fictional representation of your ideal customer. These personas help you visualize your audience and, therefore, create the content that they would search for. They also help you understand where your audience goes for content.
Do they spend most of their time on Facebook or Snapchat? Do they find answers to pertinent questions on Reddit or Quora?
By becoming aware of where your audience spends its time, you can present them with content where they exist.
Do Keyword Research
When you’re coming up with ideas, you need to ensure your content aligns with your content marketing goals.
Brainstorm terms and topics you think your audience would be interested in, and then come up with keywords using a keyword research tool like Google’s Keyword Planner.
Refine your list – take out topics and keywords that don’t seem to make sense in relation to your business goals. Organize the surviving keywords and terms using a spreadsheet, and assign a priority level to each.
Use These Steps to Create Great Content
Begin with an outline that highlights the bare bones of what you want to say. Lay out your introduction, as well as the main points you’re going to use. Make sure your outline is able to immediately answer those fundamental questions: What, Why, How and Where?
Then, proceed to add the meat of your content: the statistics, details, quotes and images.
Make sure you back-up any claims you make in your content using the appropriate references (Google is your friend!). Your content should also have included the keywords you researched. At this point, you have a good post.
To take it to the next level, search for posts made by your competitors covering a similar topic. Figure out how you can make yours better. You can now write an excellent, eye-catching headline, and add a featured image.
Remember: to create content that brings value to your business, you really have to think about the value you bring to your viewers.
If It Seems Too Time-Consuming or Difficult, Just Hire Content Writers
You were warned earlier in this post. Creating quality content is easier said than done.
Not everyone is gifted at developing attractive content. Plus, if you spend too much of your time writing an excellent blog post every week, then you won’t have enough hours to devote to other aspects of your business.
There are plenty of excellent content and article writing services that you can employ instead in order to create valuable and evergreen content. If you elect to work with web content writers or article writing services, make sure to brief them on your broader content marketing goals, your audience persona and the keywords you wish to focus on. It is vital that you provide every detail you consider relevant to the kind of content you wish to create.
