Great content brings big ideas to life in a valuable way, spinning rough or often disorganised insights and ideas into high-performing content gold that will drive readers to take the desired action.
Content creation is the process of generating topic ideas that appeal to your target audience, creating written or visual content around those ideas, and putting that information in front of the right people, in the right format.
Content is not only a way for your business to communicate with your audience, but also a marketing vehicle that can serve as brand awareness, improve your search engine optimisation, increase the value of your website, and drive your audience to take direct action. Such actions include signing up to a mailing list, calling up for more information or making a direct purchase. There are several ways that you can leverage good content to generate a return on your digital marketing investments, but it all starts with quality. Content is of no use to your website if it is not original, relevant, informative, and optimised.
Whether you are looking to produce high-quality content in house, hire a freelance content writer or engage a content marketing agency to run a content strategy for you, this guide will help you understand the value great content can bring to your business including a range of tips on how it’s done.
Defining your target audience
When writing a content piece, you should first think about who your reader is. Who is your target market? Are they men or women, old or young? Is there a particular product or service you want to promote? If so, who would use that product or service? When defining your target audience, it helps to think about the sort of customers you are attracting now and deciding whether these are the right customers? If not, you might want to take a closer look at your branding strategy.
It sometimes helps to create an avatar or customer profile based on your current customers, that reflects the demographics of your audience. This will help you to craft content that will mirror their interests, tone of voice, and answer their problems.
Understanding the behaviour of your target audience will also determine what format you should use to deliver your message. If you aren’t positioning your content in the right format to drive engagement and conversion within your target audience, you’ll ultimately have nothing to show for your efforts regardless of the quality of your content.
Finding your content niche
A good marketing strategy aims to resolve consumer problems. Think about what your products and services can offer people and how this can enrich their lives or act as a solution to a problem they are experiencing. This often involves finding your niche. Although you may think that narrowing down your target audience will cut out potential customers, you’ll find that marketing to a niche audience will have a greater ROI and help generate more leads.
By narrowing your focus to a niche market, you can direct all your creative resources around one specialist area. This could be a product or service that you provide that sets you apart from your competitors. This is a particularly effective approach for smaller businesses whose digital marketing budgets just can’t compete with huge corporations.
When thinking about your niche market ask yourself:
- Can we monopolise the conversation in this industry sector?
- Will this type of content provide value to our target audience?
- Can we provide sufficient insight and expertise in this area?
Aligning Creativity and Strategy
Social media posts, blog posts, emails, e-books and videos are widely considered the strongest forms of content that a business can utilise in crafting its digital marketing content strategy. But just because these content types have the universal appeal it doesn’t mean that they will all be the right fit for your business.
It is important to become familiar with the strengths and limitations of each of these formats before making a final decision about the strategy you want to employ. You should also be thinking about which formats your audience is most likely to engage with. For example, if you are selling financial services, posting content to Instagram, however well crafted, will not reach your target audience and will yield little engagement.
Crafting your Content
Your content is the voice of your brand and should communicate unique perspectives and value propositions. The trick is to create a story that resonates strongly enough with your readers to encourage them to act in a certain desired way. Crafting your content will involve determining topics, generating story ideas, and maintaining high levels of creativity and writing quality and leverages the power of persuasion.
It takes constant creativity to fuel a content engine and keep it running smoothly. Brainstorming sessions are a great way to stimulate the mind and come up with a high volume of ideas. They won’t all be a homerun but pitching in is a great place to start.
Conducting keyword research and assessing google trends can offer deeper insight into the challenges your content should help readers to solve. You’ve found your niche where your initiatives can gain a competitive advantage.
Writing Tips for Improving Your Content Marketing Strategy
Relevant
The content you produce must be relevant to both your business and your audience. By conducting thorough keyword research and looking for search engine trends, you can craft content around topics that your audience is interested in and searching for online.
Informative
Your content must provide value to the reader by being informative and helpful. This will help you to become a trusted source in the eyes of your audience, building brand loyalty with customers. Whilst providing the information is important, it is equally important that your tone is friendly, helpful, and light.
Original
It might be easy to steal a few quick lines from another website or copy and paste a blog into WordPress, but this will not help you build trust and authenticity with your audience. A big part of brand building is tone, humour, and insight. Finding your voice can be difficult but bringing personality and personability to your brand will help audiences recognise you and encourage them to interact with you online.
Optimised
High-quality content helps your business build trust in two ways. One is through your audience who will view your business as a reliable source, the other is through Google. Google assesses thousands of websites daily and seeks to prioritise those with original and up to date content within its search rankings, making it easier for potential customers to find you online.
Navigating the Google algorithm is a challenging and ever-changing exercise but one that has big payoffs in the long run. A content marketing agency will be able to offer their expert knowledge in this area as they keep on top of the latest trends in Google algorithm prioritisation and use the most up-to-date SEO best practices to optimise content.
By considering these tips, you should find yourself on the path toward creating more well thought out and targeted content that hits your customers pain points and helps drive better brand storytelling overall. But if you find yourself getting stuck anywhere along the way or would like help to build a content strategy that will support business growth, you can get in touch with our content marketing team at info@azzurro-blu.com. Our marketing agency specialises in providing content marketing services to our clients that boost their sales, brand awareness, and drive traffic to their site.
To find out more about our content marketing services and how we can help your business, please call us on 01224 600005.
