If you’re going to start a blog or just add some content to the website, but don’t know where to start. Here we are with our comprehensive guide on how to create the content that gives results.
Why is Content Crucial?
Every good marketer knows that “Content is the king”. It’s impossible to get top ranks and first positions in the search results without high-quality, unique, and useful content added to your website. It’s a basis of marketing practice though. Adding informative articles/posts/guides/videos/reviews, you can attract new clients, retain consumers, and just enhance customer engagement.
Here are a few figures and facts that demonstrate the effectiveness of content in driving your business:
- Small and medium businesses receive 126% more users, when implementing content marketing in comparison with the companies that don’t.
- Content marketing approach brings in 3 times more potential customers, costing 62% less than a regular marketing.
- As the statistics show, about 61% of online purchases are made by the customers who read your blog.
What is Content Creation?
It’s a process that consists of at least 5 stages. That starts with an idea and ends up with the published post with great visuals added to it. It can be anything: a written guide, review, infographics, video, or any other format that will appeal and engage your customers.
Content Planning and Strategy
A good plan and strategy are needed to reach the stated objectives. That’s why it’s crucial to define:
- Where you go;
- How you’re going to get there.
Thus, content strategy defines everything. That’s why think over what kind of brand you want to be, its tone and even the way you’ll market the content created. The effective strategy includes the following steps.
Define and Set Your Content Goals
For what? It’s vital to define what exactly are you’re eager to achieve by adding content to your resource:
- Win over the user;
- Increase organic traffic;
- Improve sales;
- Enhance customer engagement, or… your variant.
Only once you determine the aims start creating content. It’s because each article, video, infographic, post should be aligned with settled objectives and goals, contributing to your desired results. Otherwise, it won't work out.
Research Your Audience and Create a Buyer Persona
Who? It’s about your audience. Can you answer: Who are your users? Do research and create your buyer personas before starting content creation. You’re to know to whom you write. That's why you're to learn everything about people who will read your posts, watch your videos, etc.
Use various tools and channels to gather as much more data for creating a stiffly accurate buyer persona. Take into consideration the next issues as demographic, pain points, values, hobbies, budget, motivations, and so on. That’s what is required for creating the right content to appeal to your users, engage, and support them.
Content Promotion
Where? Make your content visible and reachable for the people, otherwise, what’s a point? Thus, you need to use all the possible channels to attract as much more visitors and leads:
- Social media;
- Email marketing;
- Paid promotions (PPC);
- Guest posting and syndication, etc.
Remember, whatever decision you make, it’s to be based on the created buyer personas.
The Content Creation Process
How to create really worth-while and insightful content? Let’s observe the essential stages of the process in the direct order.
Step 1. SEO Research
When you need advice or a piece of information, what do you do? Right, you search for it. Do you remember the feeling when you click on the first links and find nothing you look for. It can be quite irritating and frustrating. Thus, think about your customer. That's where SEO research is needed.
Knowing what kind of content you need, take care of the post to be relevant and competitive. Doing the research, you’ll find out what search volume has this or that keyword or phrase and whether it’s worthy of your time and efforts.
Step 2. Brainstorming and Topic Ideation
When you gather a base of the keywords — classify them for future articles and posts. After that, brainstorm content ideas. Topics are to be fresh, relevant, and unique to make the content stand out from the rest alike resources. Topic clusters will help you with the issue.
Step 3. Writing
Articles, reviews, guides, infographics, videos, podcasts, etc. Whatever you’re going to create, the process remains almost similar and includes the following guidelines:
- Write to your customers, using their language, humor, etc.
- Use titles, meta descriptions, and other teasers to appeal to your audience and add value for them to read the post.
- Create something unique and share your experience, thoughts, knowledge. Don’t simply copy and/or rewrite the information already available on the net.
- One post — one idea. Don't try to tell everything in one piece of content. Don’t confuse your reader. It’s better to create several posts on semi-related topics and link them.
- Stay true to your voice, don’t experiment with the issue not to lose your readers.
- Be concise and clear, derive value from your content without sifting through confusing metaphors, jargon, etc.
- Add various visuals, don’t make it long plain text. Today you can use such tools as Crello that is not just a flyer creator but provides images, animations, videos, and other visuals for any purpose and taste. That will make your post more readable, captivating, engaging, and interesting. Everyone likes images more than just text.
Step 4. Editing
Always remember to proofread your work before publishing it. Take into consideration a few things such as using active voice, ensuring proper grammar, using short sentences, using clear language, and leaving plenty of white space. It's recommended to have several workers review the articles or posts as well. Additionally, you can use editing tools like Quillbot, Grammarly, and Hemingway Editor to help with the editing process.
Step 5. Publishing
It’s always better to schedule content. Publish the articles depending on certain weekdays to get more views. Set a schedule based on your audience research. Thus, if you’re going to publish an article related to the holiday, event, or any other occasion, then you need to do it at a specific time. After publishing, keep the content relevant and update.
Bottom line
So, the right content is an effective asset for driving your business and reaching the stated objectives. Herewith, content creation is an essential part of the marketing strategy. These steps are key on your way of building efficient content plans. Follow this guide for creating appealing content that gives results, generates leads, retains consumers, and enhances your customer engagement.