Well everybody knows it, the best way to promote your brand is to “Just create an amazing content.” Content adds value, creates engagement and helps your business grow organically. Content marketing isn’t an easy task; it needs unified efforts, creativity, and consistency. Providing valuable content enhances brand reputation and establishes your business authority in its field. Developing right content marketing strategy with an action plan may be a demanding task, but it certainly does pay off the hard work.
A study done by Searchenginepeople reveals that 87% of B2B and 76% of B2C organizations are adopting content marketing to boost their brand growth and engagement.
Content is the king, the high quality and unduplicated content on a website can have a significant impact on your search engine ranking and SEO. Consistently creating high-quality content can create domain authority and acts as a key to moving your customer from interest to taking the desired action.
Let’s take a look at these 6 steps to create content for flawless content marketing:
1. Know Your Customer Persona To Define Your Target Audience:
Knowing your customers’ interests means understanding your target audience, and understanding your target audience means knowing your business better. This is the very first step in the world of online marketing and is the most effective way to define your target audience for a piece of content.
Recognizing your customer persona and your target audience helps you gather better information during your marketing and sales process. According to Broadview, 45% of B2B marketers have already discovered the power of personas, and 83% of them expect to use them shortly.
2. Title Or The Headline Matters:
Titles plays a “make or break” role in the field of content marketing. A catchy and a meaningful title can establish an instant rapport with your intended readers. Whether you are writing a blog, a newsletter, an article, white paper or any service page for your website, acknowledging it with a headline attracts readers.
As per Hubspot, blog titles with around 6 to 13 words generate most traffic than the ones which are either too small or large. A title is an initial click, of course, what lies behind it plays a huge role in the success of a content piece, but you will be lost in the cyberspace if your reader finds it lackluster, irrelevant or boring. Ensure to have user-friendly, well researched and search engine optimized content as your top priority.
3. Brainstorming For Fast, Better & Appropriate Content Ideas:
As a content marketer, the pressure is always on you to come up with unique content. It begins with coming up with great ideas, not just 1 or 2 but an endless stream of them.
There are times when you want to come up with a fresh content piece for your target niche, whereas you feel your brains battery is expired and your creativity is running low. It is then that brainstorming comes into use, and it certainly has its benefits.
Playing a word association games, breaking & building divisions in your content, checking out your competitors, using content generator ideas and mapping the topic are some of the tips that can strike you gold if you put your mind into it. Brainstorming, in essence, is an art of approaching things from a different angle. Also, to your advantage, there are plenty of tools out there in the market today which can help you generate tons of great ideas.
4. Research Adds Validity To Your Content:
Research is crucial, it is the foundation of the robust content marketing strategy. It is one thing that makes all the difference in the world for your brand. Your readers do not want to consume content that was created out of speculation, what they need is the right content, opinions, and facts as a backup for your point.
They are tons of ways to cite sources, and there are lot many tools offered by various websites like Hubspot, ActiveCampaign, Marketo and many others who provide different services for your campaign.
According to Zemanta, more than 50% of the marketers are using research as a part of their marketing strategy. Research always gives you a head start, it makes way for you to understand your audience and hence, helps you discover the language that your audience speaks.
5. Define The Content Format & Structure:
Once you are done with research and brainstorming, identify maximum potentiality of your content’s format and structure. Keep them in accordance to your customer’s preferences. One size may not fit all, hence consider doing associated research, testing (like A/B testing), so you do full justice to your content marketing.
For Example, if you choose to write a blog, you may want to consider using a catchy title, sub headers, bold texts, listicles, graphs and more. You don’t want your blog to appear dull and simple. Similarly, if you’re going to create an infographic, you must be able to design one which is more expressive with less content and less difficulty.
6. Find The Most Appropriate Content Distribution Channels:
Content distribution may be the last thing to do, yet it plays a crucial role in the field of online marketing. Identifying the best distribution methodologies and streamlining those efforts is no easy task. Most businesses today plan to produce more content but fail to do so, and a part of the reason for this gap is because of marketers sharing wrong material in the wrong places.
Identifying the right channels is all about asking the right questions, knowing who your audience are, what may fit in your budget, how you can connect with a particular target group and where your message fits in are some of the critical aspects before you plan your content distribution.
According to the survey, on WordPress alone; there are about 88.6 Million blog posts published every month, more than 78% of the brands today use social media for content distribution. There are paid media, niche channels, social communities online directories, forums and lot many things. So identify, what is best for your business and stick on to that.
Wrapping Up:
Content marketing is a balancing act; thus it’s necessary to know your organization’s goals, nature of your brand & its offerings and habits of your potential customers.
There is a lot of content everywhere! And there are many ways to distribute your content. Consistency is the key! Plan, create, connect and measure your steps before executing a content strategy. This approach will give you stronger and more intentional presence to your brand.
