It’s been decided: creating quality content is the most effective way to market a business.
We are surrounded by content noise when we scroll through our social media feeds. Every business, every entrepreneur, every influencer is publishing content and trying to be heard. It’s a fight that can’t be won by everyone. But, there are ways to stand out from the rest and be in the lead of the battle.
Quality content is the type of content that achieves its marketing goal. Such goals could be:
- Increasing awareness
- Generating leads
- Growing the level of engagement
- Ranking well on search engines
- Gaining social shares
By identifying your goals, you are one step closer to generating quality content. But the question still remains; how can you create quality content?
Follow these tactics and you are well on your way.
1. Monitor your social media streams
Be sure to pick up on social cues and trends by constantly checking your social media streams. Take note of what your followers are posting about. Follow people in your industry such as customers, competitors, partners, etc. Get inspired by the content you see and see what gets the most reactions. Notice which posts have more engagement and why that could be.
2. Understand your customers
Make the customer feel like they are the only one and focus on their needs. Take each relationship as unique and treat it that way. To achieve that, you need to understand their behaviours and develop effective personas. Conduct research to know who they are and what will gain their interest. By illustrating your core customers, you can create quality content that they are interested in. This strikes a chord with your audiences and maximizes engagement. Customer knowledge is powerful and gives you the ability to catch their attention by knowing what they like, who they are, what their typical behaviour is, etc.
3. What are your competitors doing?
Check out what type of content is most likely to be shared by your competitors. Identify influential bloggers and social media influencers that they are collaborating with. Don’t copy what they are doing. You want to make sure that you aren’t missing anything and can use it as a guide, but you want to stay unique. You want your audience to choose to click on your content, not your competitors. What makes yours different than theirs and what type of content would your users find more valuable.
4. Test your titles
Your titles should contain your primary keyword, but at the same time entice people to click and read. It needs to stop people from scrolling through their feeds and follow your link to your quality content. Your titles need to be catchy and mysterious. Get creative and consider what would intrigue your clients to engage. Check out this article to learn how to make the best click bate worthy titles.
5. Create engaging content
High quality content is only achieved if its engaging. Hook in the reader with your title and with your introduction. Your content should make them curious and intrigued to read until the end. Leave the reader with questions and give them the ability to leave comments and react to your content. Not only is engaging content helpful to achieve credibility for your brand, but it is better for search engines to notice your content. Another technique that helps clarify a point and catch your readers attention, is using anecdotes. People will be able to relate or have a better understanding of your content.
6. Be accurate
To build trust with your clients you need to provide them with the correct information. Don’t tell them anything that you can’t back up with proof. Referencing can only help and is worth to do. Consider who you are linking to and evaluate their credibility. Not only does it build trust, but it also improves search engines. Check out our blog SEO 101: A Guide for Beginnersto find out how and why you should be linking within and outside of your company.
7. Optimize your quality content
At this point you should have created your content and are ready for the last step before you publish: optimizing it for search engines. This is better known as SEO and has more depth to it.
Easy tasks to optimize your content:
- Subheaders
- Level of Readability
- Add images. Be aware to only add images that help or add value to your content.
- Links to internal pages to keep your reader on your site. Also, add external pages to back up your credibility.
- Use different content forms. Compliment written content with other media as it will improve your SEO.
8. You’re so close, but we’re not done yet. Now, it’s time to measure your contents performance
You might think that it is high quality content, but you will only know for sure once you analyze the numbers after its been published. Look at your marketing goals you established before and compare them with your ranking on google, customer engagement, retention, and conversions. Learn from your performance and improve for your next content creation! Need some more guidance on how to assess and adjust your marketing goals? Our blog 5 Simple Content Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs provides more information.
Thanks for reading! Tweet us if you have further questions about how to create quality content.
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