While content may not be easy to right, however it’s a necessary marketing strategy. It’s important to engage your experts and thought leaders to help develop valuable content for your target market(s).
When developing content you should consider a few things:
- Products or services most desired by consumers may be affected by seasonality
- Content should be built for the long term and the short term
- Readers will only consume content that is easy to understand, fast to read and if it provides value
Here are 6 helpful tips for developing interesting and engaging content.
1. Discovery and Brainstorming Meetings
These meetings can help you plan and discuss the fundamentals for content creation. This includes:
- Marketing strategy: Discuss what has been working and what hasn’t. Then adjust your content types and distribution strategy accordingly. This will help you become more efficient and increase your results.
- Ask questions customers do: Use those questions for building content. The whole point is to develop content that will provide interesting and engaging content that will provide value and satisfy a client’s need.
- Publications trending: Have your content published and linked to the company’s website. Back-linking is an important SEO strategy.
2. Marketing and Industry Research
Research is an essential tool that will help drive your business, marketing and content marketing strategy. It will also help you understand your audience so you can build an engaged online following (including social media). It’s important to stay up to date with information related to your industry. If you know what’s going on, your consumers will be more confident in the company and the content you build. The objective is to become a valued thought leader that people go to for information and ideally your services (or products).
3. Content Calendars
This is a must-have. Planning your content marketing and keeping your plan updated and responsive to market trends (sourced by tip #2) will help you execute your content creation. Personally, I love to use Excel. Be sure to include:
- Social media (what the post will say, the link it will go to, image it will include, and date/time), traditional content (blog posts, infographics, case studies, etc.), press releases and events.
There are many free templates on the internet – I recommend using these:
– Social Media Calendar: HootSuite or Hubspot
– Editorial Calendar: Hubspot
4. Keywords
Keywords should be researched (in tip # 2), included in your content marketing strategy and included in your content marketing calendar (tip #3). A keyword based content strategy will help you increase your organic online search rankings on terms that your potential clients would be searching for. This will also help you align your topics with the search results for your industry or market. It’s important to remember that keyword-optimized content is fine for SEO, but interesting and engaging content should be based on customers’ expressed desires and questions, which will help you to provide value to your target audience.
5. Be Dynamic and Keep It Fresh!
Stay on top of market trends and more importantly topical content. Be reactive and adjust your content calendar (tip #3) accordingly. Consumers will want new content, but not all the time. Also, consider changing your content format, depending on your marketing and content objectives. Examples include: blog posts, infographics, videos, social media posts, images, contents, ebooks/whitepapers, case studies, brochures, case studies, testimonials and press releases.
6. Feedback & Results
Last, but definitely not least, you will need to gather customer feedback and tracking your performance. This will help you gather feedback from your market and to adjust your marketing and content strategies moving forward.
