Content Creation
Content is king – more true today than ever before. With consumers overwhelmed by constant digital noise, producing content that genuinely engages your audience is the key to cutting through the clutter.
For today’s brands, an effective content strategy is essential for earning audience trust, generating leads, and driving sales. But what exactly makes for compelling content that gets results?
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll walk through the elements of creating content that truly connects with your ideal customers. Follow these best practices and watch your content efforts pay dividends for your business.
Know Your Audience and Their Intent
The foundation for impactful content is having a crystal clear picture of who you’re creating it for. When drafting any piece of content, first get specific on:
- Demographic profile: Age, income, location, household size, job title, etc.
- Values and priorities: What matters most to them? What pains and challenges are they experiencing?
- Intent: What are they trying to achieve or what need state are they in? How can you help?
- Objections: What barriers might prevent them from engagement? Address these head on.
- Preferred platforms: Where does your audience consume content most? Tailor the format and style appropriately.
Any content you create must speak directly to the reader and their current mindset. Truly effective content markets to a single person, not a generic group.
Outline a Content Strategy Aligned With Business Goals
Your content efforts should ultimately align with and support specific business goals like:
- Raising brand awareness
- Generating qualified leads
- Nurturing prospects down the funnel
- Educating customers
- Retaining existing customers
- Building authority in your space
Outline the types of content pieces that will help you progress towards each goal, along with key metrics for success. Envision the entire customer journey and how content guides them through each stage.
Having a documented strategy ensures your content has purpose and drives ROI, not just vanity metrics like social media likes. Refer back often to stay focused on execution.
Produce a Mix of Content Formats
There are so many types of content to leverage today – variety is key to sustaining audience engagement. When brainstorming content, think beyond just blogging by including:
- Social media posts – compact but compelling snippets that can link to deeper content
- Short videos – documentary-style videos and quick tips work great for social and websites
- Podcasts – especially useful for commuters and passive information absorption
- Infographics – make data more visually engaging and shareable
- Research reports, ebooks, whitepapers – demonstrate thought leadership
- Webinars, virtual events – position your brand as an educator
- Email newsletters – distribute your best content directly to subscribers
Mapping out a diverse content calendar ensures you always have fresh assets to promote across platforms.
Optimize All Content for SEO
Your content strategy and SEO strategy must be fully aligned for maximum impact. All content should be optimized for organic discoverability by:
- Including core keywords naturally in title/headers/content
- Leveraging meta descriptions to intrigue searchers
- Adding alt text to images and videos
- Including internal links to related content
- Promoting new content on social media
- Securing backlinks by pitching guest posts
These best practices will boost content visibility in SERPs. But avoid over-optimization and focus first on crafting content for your audience vs search engines.
Make Content Visual and Interactive
With so much text-heavy content published today, you have huge opportunities by making content visual:
- Infographics and data visualization
- Charts, graphs, and maps
- Illustrations, cartoons, and comics
- Memes and gifs
- Photo essays
- Interactive content like polls, surveys, quizzes, calculators
- Videos, especially explainers, how-tos, or documentaries
These visually compelling content formats stand out and are naturally more engaging on social media. Look for ways to turn boring blocks of text into dynamic visual content.
Promote Content Across All Marketing Channels
Don’t let your content go to waste! Repurpose and distribute each piece you create across all available marketing channels:
- Feature on website landing pages, category pages, and blogs
- Re-cut into snippet social media posts
- Highlight in email newsletters and autoresponder sequences
- Turn into ads on paid platforms like Facebook and Instagram
- Submit to relevant online publications for backlinks
- Promote through PR outreach and pitches
- Develophanded out at events and conferences
- Print and mail as direct mail campaigns
Constantly look for ways to recycle evergreen content assets. This amplifies their reach and ROI.
Analyze Performance and Continuously Improve
Like any marketing effort, you must analyze content performance to identify opportunities:
- Track web analytics for traffic to each piece of content. Watch for rising performers to double down on.
- Monitor social media engagement rates. Look for formats and topics that resonate best.
- Review email clickthrough rates to see subject lines and content resonating with subscribers.
- Check rankings of pieces optimized for SEO. Improve those falling in rankings.
- Survey customers and prospects on their favorite and least favorite content.
- Calculate cost per lead for gated content like guides and webinars.
Use these insights to shape future content efforts. Continuously experiment with new topics, angles, and formats. Immediately stop or rework those not getting traction. Let data guide your content strategy.
Partner With a Content Marketing Agency
For most businesses today, an effective content strategy at scale requires outside support. Partnering with a content marketing agency provides you with:
- Ongoing ideation and content calendar development
- Writers and designers for diverse content development
- Platforms and technology for content promotion and insights
- The people power to maintain consistency long-term
This frees your time to focus on high-level strategy while execution is handled by experts. Contact us today to learn more about amplifying your content marketing through our data-driven approach.
The Next Steps for Your Content Marketing
We hope this guide provided you a blueprint for delivering content that truly resonates with your customers. Consistency and high-quality execution are the keys to seeing tangible business growth from your content efforts.
For any questions on implementing your content strategy or if you need support creating standout content that converts, just let us know! We’re here to take your con
