How to Be More Than Content With Your Content
September 30th, 2019 by
It’s not a good idea to buy everything in bulk—veggies, bread, condiments are a big no-no—and content’s no exception. Just like that 2-week-old bag of spring mix in your fridge, your content can go bad (It can even have an expiration date!) and not yield the results you expected. To drive your website’s visitors to action, you’ll need to bring something fresh to the table. If you’re currently struggling to elevate the value of your content and prevent it from getting smelly and dated, maybe you should take a closer look at your strategy (if you have one) and identify where your team is missing the mark.
The Big Secret
Quality. Over. Quantity.
Less isn’t always more, but it’s definitely a start when it comes to an overwhelming amount of lackluster content. Creating content for the sake of having it won’t impress your audience—it may even bog them down and send them down a rabbit hole rather than your marketing funnel. However, you shouldn’t ignore the significance of great content’s impact on your organization’s overall marketing success. Content marketing is extremely cost-effective and offers a great return on investment compared to traditional marketing techniques. Major ingredients in a quality content salad include keywords, internal links, and headlines to break up text.
Your audience turns to your content for insight, entertainment, and to inform their purchase decisions; but they don’t want to spend ALL of their time navigating your content—they have to buy something eventually, right? While you shouldn’t bury your audience with a mass production of daily blogs, social posts, and digital downloads all at once, you still gotta give the people what they want. The content production sweet spot lies somewhere in the middle; to get there, you’ll need a game plan for your team. Follow these best practices to help you develop top-notch content that gets results:
1. Know Your Audience
Understanding your audience personas will help you stay abreast of relevant topics to cover and leverage behavior on social platforms to deliver your content to the appropriate channels. Knowing your audience really comes down to researching and understanding their pain points, learning how these problems affect them, and tracking their progression through the marketing funnel so that you can deliver the right stuff at the right time. Awareness of their stage in the buyer’s journey will help you deliver content that is both better tailored to the users you want to reach and more likely to earn you more conversions, more frequently.
2. Develop A Strategy
Content serves to help your audience solve problems big and small while reinforcing the strength and uniqueness of your company’s offerings. Developing a content strategy will better help you understand the best time, place, and content type to post. When developing your content strategy, Hubspot suggests focusing on these key points: content format, channels for posting, and a system for managing the creation and publishing of your content. A CMS, or content management system, can help create and organize your digital resources and enhance the user experience. In addition, you should be on top of your editorial calendar—will that blog be outdated if you wait to post it? How useful is Tuesday’s weather forecast while you’re getting dressed for work on Thursday morning? Vary how often you publish time-sensitive content so that you don’t have to deal with the stress of constantly churning out new material.
3. Set Goals
You post content for a reason, whether it’s solving problems for users, generating leads, or increasing brand awareness. If you align the content you produce with a S.M.A.R.T. goal or one of your company’s goals, you’ll buttress your strategy with a specific purpose in mind. In turn, you’ll know what you plan to measure when the time comes to start analyzing your content’s performance. Your goals can include increasing leads by a certain percentage or even driving more social engagement. By setting goals, you’ll create a plan for your content that can be checked and adjusted.
4. Switch It Up (And Around!)
If you really want to ramp up your content’s impact, get creative. Within the digital space, there’s plenty of wiggle room to do just that. That awesome client testimonial on your website has the potential to be a killer case study, or you can transform it into a stellar infographic. The stories you tell don’t have to live solely on your website. You can repurpose your content so that it can be posted on multiple platforms; you can introduce your stories to new audiences without having to do more legwork. How’s that for bang for your buck?
When it comes to all of these best practices for creating awesome content, Search Influence has it down to a science. We have the tools and expertise to help you optimize your content’s potential, whether you aim to strengthen your social media presence or paint a better picture of your content’s performance with analytics. Share your goals with us, and we’ll help you get there.
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It’s true that content is an important piece of the puzzle for your online marketing efforts. However, it is important to be strategic with the types of content you push live on the site. If the content isn’t a good fit for the audience, it won’t be as effective.