MKTG Principal: Create stellar contents is not magic, follow these 10 steps to success
For many businesses content marketing is one of the largest customer acquisition channels and these days some companies spend millions of dollars to create stellar contents to draw customer attention.
Follow these 10 steps to create engaging contents that drive business.
1. FOCUS on quality not just on quantity
The number one rule of content marketing lies in produce quality, consistent content over rushed infrequent pieces for your customers.
Most customers that produce weak content and infrequent amounts of content suffer in creating a powerful lead generation machine for their business. The rule of thumb is to start small and high quality.
For B2B businesses 1,500 words or more usually do the best. If you are in the B2C business 700 words or more will convert the best. Similarly, if you can only commit to one blog post per month stick with that and continue pushing great content and increase from there.
2. Proof read your work
It’s hard to be a good writer and editor. You really have two options when it comes to making sure your content is error free.
Use Grammarly, a free tool that is a chrome extension as well as an app. All you do is insert your content and Grammarly will find errors. If you publish a lot of content like me, buying the premium version will give you access to things like editing sentence structure and premium tools.
Hire an editorial team. Obviously, this is a more expensive option, but this individual will do a much better job making sure the content is error free. I use my editorial team to proof read all my content and add any relevant examples to make my content more relatable.
3. Do research on your topics
Use tools like BuzzSumo to help you analyze which posts do the best by keyword or URL. Buzzsumo becomes a boon for content marketers because they can analyze and see what articles did best instead of guessing. You can even sort through which posts did the best one which social channel over others.
4. Writing in-depth contents
Content marketing may be a sexy term, which is why more than 78 percent of marketers believe that content is the future of marketing. But there is a major difference between fluffy content and in-depth content that teaches you about a topic.
Content marketing should be an opportunity to inform someone about something, and is a way to give away everything you can for free. You may say that it could mean that people could steal your ideas, but the reality is most people don’t care enough to implement what works and don’t have the interest to go through the errors in the process. The way you can create content that is in-depth or evergreen content is to share everything you know about the topic.
5. Build your readership
Have you ever started a blog and realized that no one is reading the content you are publishing? Promotion should be 80 percent of content marketing and writing should be 20 percent. What this means is use the 80/20 Rule in marketing, if you are spending two hours writing a meaty blog post, you should be spending almost eight hours promoting that content to influencers, people who you have linked to on your website and even reaching out to people who could use your content.
6. Write consistently
The moment you start writing an article is the beginning of a relationship between you and your readers. And just because you stick to a schedule doesn’t mean you will actually follow through with it. The moment you stop producing quality content is the moment that engagement drops bringing up suspicions of the blog or business being out of business. The best thing you can do early on is starting small when it comes to the amount of content you are trying to produce.
7. Outlining your work
Some of the best pieces of content are articles that flow with the thought process of the actual writer versus jumbled up content that doesn’t speak to what a reader may be thinking about. Studies have shown that outlined content does significantly better than content that is written on the fly.
8. Learn about what content works and what doesn’t.
This involves constantly working on the contents and seeing which pieces work better than others. For example, try writing a short article that’s only 300 words and then a few longer, in-depth articles. You can track metrics like click through rate, visitors, social shares, and even comments on the articles.
The key to successful content is testing it.
9. Writing for a specific niche or audience
Similar to selling a product, focusing on a specific niche is incredibly important to attract the right types of readers that will end up buying your products or services. An easy way to do this is to get to know who your readers really are and to see what are their concerns and struggles. That is what they will search for most and what will get read on your website.
10. Optimizing your website
Believe it or not, but website design, feel and performance are major factors that influence whether people will actually visit your website or not. Modelling off the best websites out there to learn more about how they laid out their website with a call to actions, and opportunities for readers to put in their email address appropriately.
Content marketing, if done correctly, can be one of the most profitable customer acquisition channels for your business. But the reality is nothing comes without hard work and dedication and that's what you can do to succeed in content marketing.
