It can be easy when planning content to become fixated with getting as many blogs, articles, whitepapers, ebooks etc out to market. Business owners, commercial or sales leaders often have a number in mind which usually includes high volume that warrants the resources and costs. However, this can sometimes come at the cost of quality and by bombarding the marketplace you risk turning off your audience.
So what's the answer? We have listed 4 best practice tips to follow so you can have both the volume you need without compromising quality.
Make content valuable
Your content needs to be relevant to your audience and not white noise or making up the numbers. The inbound marketing methodology works by grabbing the attention of your target market at every stage of their buying journey. Ideally your prospective audience need to find you and make the decision to engage, as opposed to you ‘interrupting’ them all the time to the point of annoyance.
Instead try to help them address their pain points, showing that you care and have the skills or products that can help improve their world. Once deemed relevant and valued your hard worked content will be shared amongst fellow like-minded individuals. For this to work effectively and for people to want to keep coming back again and again, the content must be consistently relevant and useful, otherwise you’ll lose credibility and your opportunity to win trust.
Define what quality means
Identify what content to focus on for each of your personas. What is it you’re trying to achieve – brand awareness, leads, followers, high engagement rates or all of these? Try to develop content that can be used in your prospects business or day to day activities.
Create a calendar
If you’re unsure where to start and feel overwhelmed by the task in front of you, try building a content calendar. You’ll be able to plan well in advance, work out who can write the content for you and target key times of the year for your business and for relevant seasonal events. There will of course be times that you’ll need to be reactive with your content so that you stay topical, but you’ll find that a lot of your pieces can be prepared and banked away before they’re needed, and you can build up a library of quality collateral. If you need support with this, we can help you.
Vary your content
You don’t necessarily need every piece of copy to have a hefty word count. Short little pieces that can be viewed quickly can be just as impactful as more lengthy creations. Ideally, you’ll produce a variety of content both in terms of format, length and style. As long as you get the attention of your market, engage your audience and drive repeat visits, you’re on the right track.
Of course, creating higher quality content can mean spending more money as normally it takes longer to put together and you’ll need to pay for decent writers. Often businesses that produce quality, create less but with careful planning and budgeting, there’s no reason you can’t have both and you can always harness the talents of freelancers when you need them.
Our top tips to remember for creating quality content:
Here at Secret Source we've helped many businesses to perfect their content strategies. If you would like us to review your current content plan with no obligation or have a discussion on how to start one, we'd love to talk to you. Contact us today by emailing enquiries@secretsourcemarketing.com, phone us on 01522 700266 or leave your details below.