Those who aren’t familiar with the content creation process think that content creation is simply thinking up ideas, writing them down, and clicking ‘publish.’ But if your job day in day out is to spin ideas and analytics insights into high-performing content, you know that this is no easy feat. A lot more has to happen behind the scenes to make sure the strategically crafted content reaches the right audience, engage in meaningful conversations with them, and ultimately, move them to action. You need an effective content creation strategy that converts visitors to sales. Here are 8 tips that’ll help you do just that.
Like any other tactical how-to guide, you’d first need to take a practical view of what your creative process needs to accomplish. You need to answer these essential questions to activate your content creation process and capabilities:
The answer to these questions will result in a more streamlined and efficient content creation model. This way, you can shape your content creator pool and align creativity with strategy.
Once you’ve got the groundwork covered, you can shift your focus on actually creating content with these tactics.
Build communities around content creation and content sharing. This allows you to expand your reach with fewer resources. When you expand your brand’s reach with a community of contributors, Lauren Pope (content marketing manager of G2) says you’ll get to tap into those content creators’ platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and the classic word-of-mouth marketing.
Expanding your reach is always great for your metrics and brand awareness. It also fosters a sense of community with your audience. Masooma Memon, Saas content marketer, explains that whether your content is for social, your blog, or a webinar, it has to focus on making your audience feel like they’re part of a community. People naturally love that inclusive community feel. They feel valued.
Content creation starts with pillar content or your main piece of content. It is substantive and informative content about a specific theme or topic. Content pillars help you narrow down and clarify your niche while helping you grow your audience faster. Since you create content your target audience wants, you are building trust and they will spend longer time on your site’s pages as well as engage with your posts more.
This type of content can be a news article, a blog post, reports, an e-book, a video, podcast, images, graphic art, and anything else you create. Since it is a large piece of content, pillar content can be repurposed into micro content that fuels other platforms and channels.
Apply ways to create interactive content with better UX. How you interact with content is just as important as what content you’re interacting with. Marketing expert Adam Enfroy advises that “in order to drive ROI with content, you need to focus on content experience.” This means making users stay on your website longer and love what you write about. It also means that users find exactly what they need from your content and in the end, enter your sales funnel. Ideally, sites that go beyond text content and include courses, videos, podcasts, webinars, calls-to-action, then you not only improve the content experience, but you also drive leads.
Video and webinar content has been a lot more important now and will continue to grow. Why? Because video is a quick and effective way to communicate any message and educate your audience. Video marketing gives your clients the information they want or learn quickly.
Patrick Whatman, content marketing lead at Spendesk, says that since more attention is given to webinars and live videos, it’s important to have innovative new approaches to doing this. It has to be more interactive because people become less interested in sitting through slides. Give the audience opportunities to ask questions and interact. Redouble SEO strategies
Today there are AI-powered content tools that create summaries, captions, and even full blog posts based on machine learning algorithms. AI content is optimized for consumption and distribution and enhances customer experience because the content created is timely and relevant.
Although some aren’t completely sold-out with this intimidating trend, AI-powered copy allows content marketers to accomplish more. Marketers can track consumer behavior, preference, and more importantly, how audiences interact with content. In other words, AI-powered copy creates hyper-personalized and targeted content. They’ll still need editing, though.
High-quality SEO will continue to be critical for content creation. Brands will continue to figure out how to stand out from the saturated market by capturing niche and long-tail keywords, and using these to create more engaging content. Doubling down on SEO will mean spending more time improving your SEO strategy and capitalizing on keyword research. You’d need to find long-tail opportunities for a more personalized content experience.
A successful SEO strategy involves consistently creating high-quality content, publishing high-value directory content, generating backlinks with free offers, getting listed on app integrations, building authoritative content from webinars, and keeping your content optimized.
Whatever creative process you have in content creation, remember that a great piece of content requires craftsmanship. Steve Jobs said it himself, “There’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product.” Keep strengthening your creative muscles and use your powers of persuasion with stellar writing in creating content that is strategic, aligned with your content marketing goals and brand identity.