You’ve almost certainly heard it said that content is king. Most financial institutions understand that producing quality content is a vital strategy. However, what does this mean in practice? How can you harness the power of content to your advantage?
The infographic above shows just how many elements go into creating the ideal content. It’s no wonder that writing their first blog posts confuses so many people.
So, how do you start? Here are five simple ways to help you create content that your target audience will enjoy and share.
Why Is Content So Important?
Before we begin with how to create content, we need to examine why it is so important in the first place.
Most organizations are now aware that having an effective digital marketing strategy is imperative for success. Numerous components will comprise a strong strategy. So, how do you know where you should focus your attention? All elements of a digital marketing strategy have importance when it comes to promoting your organization effectively online. However, some of those elements are more vital than others.
Content is, arguably, your strategy’s most important component. Content helps you to build up trust and to connect with readers. It is also a catalyst for other marketing strategies. This is why it is so important. The infographic below shows some of the benefits of content marketing.
Quality content offers your organization four primary benefits:
- It educates your readers. You need to educate customers when they are trying to decide if a service or product suits their needs. They cannot make an informed choice without fully understanding all the options that they can choose from. Quality content will educate your target audience about what you’re able to provide. To educate readers, you must focus on their concerns and questions. By considering the issues they need to solve, you can present solutions using your services and products.
- It fuels your SEO efforts. Most people turn to search engines whenever they have a concern or question. Optimizing content so that it appears in searches will bring your website new leads. Strong content is key to this since it allows you to place keywords for searchers to find. Great content allows you to get to the first page of search engine rankings. This ensures you have attracted more visitors to your site.
- It drives your social media marketing strategies. Social media platforms represent a great way of connecting with your audience. Offering direct pathways to feedback and conversations, social media pushes fresh leads toward your website. Strong content is key to this, allowing you to take conversations on social media deeper.
- It builds backlinks. This is an important element of bringing new visitors to your website. Backlinks to your website encourage visitors to a different site to click through to yours. This allows them to learn what you have to offer. When content contains information and ideas that are worth sharing, you can generate backlinks.
It’s clear to see that content lies at the heart of any good digital marketing strategy. If you don’t have any good content, you cannot attract enough attention to collect more leads. Without more leads, you cannot convert into customers. Creating excellent content ensures you have greater success in all your digital marketing efforts.
With all this in mind, how can you begin creating the kind of content that your target audience enjoys?
1. Focusing on Your Audience and Their Goal
You can’t begin writing content until you know who that content is going to address. The key is to determine who they are and what they want.
Developing a buyer persona is vital in this process. The infographic above shows more about buyer personas and how to draw one up. You can use this as a guide to determine your organization’s ideal buyers and then tailor the content toward them.
2. Listen to Your Audience
So, now you know who your target audience is likely to be. But how do you know which topics your audience will find appealing? You could always guess, but that isn’t a reliable way to make sure you’re personalizing appropriate and valuable content. You need to get your information from the horse’s mouth.
The best place to begin is by joining Facebook Groups and forums where you can find your target audience. Check out what your ideal customers are saying in those groups. What kinds of comments are they making? What are they talking about? You can use these comments, ideas, and suggestions as the basis for your content creation.
Determining the pain points of your target readers is paramount at this stage. Which problems are they facing? What are they worried about? How can your organization’s products and services help to solve those problems and relieve those worries? Once you have these answers, you can begin creating valuable content to address the issues at hand.
How does this work?
Imagine that your ideal customer posts a comment about being unable to afford his or her multiple loan repayments. You can address this pain point by creating a blog post about the benefits of consolidating loans. You can then recommend one of your products that will solve his or her problem.
3. Create A Variety of Content
If you thought that blog posts were the only type of content to create, it’s time to think again. The above infographic shows that there are many other options to pick from.
Of course, it’s important to choose the right type of content to suit your purpose. Each piece of content you create should have a specific goal. So, which types of content are most effective in your organization’s field? Which types of content are best for which purposes?
There are four main purposes for creating content – entertaining, educating, persuading, or converting the audience. The above infographic shows the types of content that work best for different purposes. If you stick to solely creating blog posts without considering any other content types, you’re missing out on opportunities.
Content must be original, catchy, and varied. It’s also important to be aware that you don’t always need to write it. Visual content is becoming increasingly attractive to audiences and has considerable marketing power, as the below infographic shows.
Some of the types of content you can create for your website include:
- Interviews
- Tutorials
- News stories
- Research
- Presentations and slideshows
- Lists including to-do lists, tips, methods, and tools
- Reviews of products and services
- Infographics and visualized data
- Opinion posts
- Stories told from personal experience
- Case studies
- Podcasts
- Guest posts
- Contests
Giving your audience members plenty of variety is the best way to keep them engaged and coming back for more. This gives you more opportunities to convert visitors into customers and to expand your reach.
4. Being Consistent and Proactive
So far, you’ve defined your audience, identified their interests and pain points, and determined which types of content to create. The next step is to make sure your content is consistent and that you’re taking proactive steps.
Creating great content is only part of the bigger picture. You need to create it consistently and regularly to achieve the desired effect. The chart below shows that blogging frequency is vital for driving up web traffic to your site.
While there’s no single answer for how often you should post content, you should certainly stick to a schedule. If your audience members have no idea when your next post is likely to appear, they could easily miss it. Your goal is to attract readers and to keep them coming back for more. Therefore, you need them to eagerly anticipate your next post.
If you have an editorial calendar in place, you can ensure your content development process runs smoothly. It will enable you to capture ideas, set an effective publication schedule, and track your goals. It will also allow you to coordinate the release of your content across several platforms. Finally, it will allow you to discover which pieces of content you can repurpose.
Being proactive and planning your content is also important. This will allow you to stay ahead in the game. Plan your months’ worth of content, at least two weeks before you’re due to post it. Decide on the topics and themes, outline your posts, schedule your social media messages, and write e-mails in advance. This will ensure that everything is ready to go on the date.
5. Focusing on the Headlines
When you’re getting started with creating content, it’s important to focus on your headlines. A strong headline will spark the interest of readers and invite them to read more. Evidence shows that while 80 percent of people read headlines, just 20 percent read the remainder of the content.
With this in mind, it’s easy to see why creating excellent headlines is equally important as creating strong content. They’re the first thing read by your audience, and, on that basis, they’ll decide whether your article is worth reading.
Headlines will fail if they aren’t appropriate to the article or have no relevance to its theme. You must, therefore, make sure yours match the content that you’ve created. There are also more tips and tricks to help you generate headlines that will attract attention.
- Integrate data and specific numbers into the headline.
- Give readers a clear reason to continue reading. Words, such as “tips,” “lessons,” “reasons,” “ideas,” “tricks,” “facts,” “strategies,” and “secrets,” all work well in headlines.
- Grab the reader’s attention by conveying a sense of urgency in your headline.
- Make your headline easy to understand by using simple language.
- Choose interesting adjectives to include in your headlines. Adjectives that have proven to be effective include “essential,” “strange,” “free,” “fun,” “effortless,” and “incredible.”
- Use emotive language. Words with an emotional impact (sometimes known as power words) can spur your readers to act. Some good examples include “miracle,” “sensational,” “courage,” “uplifting,” “breathtaking,” and “spectacular.”
Once you’ve created your eye-catching headlines, you need to remember to measure their long-term success. This will help you recognize which types of content are driving leads and improving your organization’s conversions. You can measure the success of your headlines by monitoring customer inquiries and social media shares. This will allow you to pinpoint the changes that you will need to make in future content. It will also allow you to maximize the benefits of your content strategy.
Seeking Professional Content Writing Help
The five tips that we’ve given you here will help you start with your organization’s content creation strategy. However, it can still be a challenge to generate content that does the job that you need it to do.
Determining your ideal buyer persona, pinpointing the pain points, and coming up with suitable topics is just half the battle. You also need to develop eye-catching headlines and write in an engaging style that readers will enjoy. Once you’ve done all this, you also need to continue consistently creating more content on a regular schedule. You also need to vary the type of content you create to keep your audience interested. With all this in mind, it’s easy to see why content creation is difficult for many organizations.
Many organizations find that the best solution is to use the services of a professional content writing company. With the necessary skills and experience to draft compelling content, professional content writers can produce real results. Thanks to their expertise in the field, they generate exciting ideas and write search engine optimized posts that interest readers. Their varied and engaging content is more likely to reach a wider audience, drive up traffic, and increase conversions.
If you want to get as much value as possible from your content marketing strategy, content writing services can help. Their writers do the hard work, so you don’t have to. They provide content on an ongoing basis for a consistent approach.