Content creation is an integral part of any effective marketing plan. Great content helps potential customers understand your business and discover products they'll love.
Creating stunning content helps your website reach a larger audience and can drive organic traffic to your website. Once you understand the content creation process, you can create pieces that delight your readers and help your business reach its goals. Whether you want to be a thought leader in your industry or just want to drive organic traffic to your website, creating engaging content is essential.
If you're not creating content on a consistent basis, you're missing out on a critical sales pathway. This guide will help guide you on your journey to create great content and teach you everything you need to know to drive traffic and increase conversions using content creation.
Why Content Creation Is Vital To Business
When you develop high quality content, you provide useful information to potential customers in your industry. Effective content draws these consumers to your website, encouraging them to engage and become lifelong customers. Managing a blog on your startup or business site lets customers know about any exciting new projects you're developing and introduces them to the ones you have that will fit their needs.
Content creation is essential to reaching today's target audience. Experts estimate that more than 77 percent of Internet users read blog articles regularly. In addition, 43 percent of users say they skim blog articles to find the information they need. That means the content you produce should be high quality, concise, and easy to read in order to be effective.
On average, the Google search engine processes more than 100 billion searches every month. Having a blog with amazing content makes it easier for these people to find your company through their Internet searches. Blogging increase your exposure and reach, enabling you to find potential customers and turn them into lifelong subscribers.
You won't be the only one doing it. Research shows that 76 percent of B2B marketers include blog writing as part of their content strategy. To be competitive in your industry, you need to produce great content to set your company ahead of the competition. In addition, companies that combine content marketing and sales strategies demonstrate 38 percent higher sales win rates than those that don't.
Consistently producing great content can help your company reach its goals. A great piece of content doesn't just create itself. It takes time and effort to create or optimize stunning content that converts to sales and encourages customer loyalty. We'll walk you through how you can implement content creation and reach your company goals faster.
Develop A Content Strategy
The first step in content creation is to lay out a road map of the kind of content you need to produce to draw customers to your website. You need to decide you’re your main marketing goal is. For most companies, marketing strategy centers on search engine optimization (SEO), lead generation, and thought leadership. In general, lead generation is the most common goal of content marketers, but you can decide what best suits your company. You can create everything from podcasts and long-form blogs to webinars and lists for email marketing. Depending on the pieces of content you choose to create, you can use tools like Canva, Hubspot, Moz, and Wordpress to get the job done.
Now that you have a clear goal in mind, you'll want to create a content marketing strategy — and conduct a content audit on existing content — that focuses on achieving that goal. You'll want to brainstorm with your inbound marketing team and other digital marketing strategists to create the best plan. Your content plan should include roles for everyone from the sales team and marketing team to the executives.
This document will lay the groundwork for your entire content creation process. It should include three essential elements: buyer persona, keyword research, and a streamlined editorial flow.
Understand Buyer Persona
Before you even think about writing a blog post, you need to identify who your potential buyer is. A buyer persona helps to encapsulate exactly whom it is that will purchase your products. You'll want to gather information on demographics and well as their motivations, behaviors, and budgets. In addition, information such as their hobbies, values , and pain points can help paint a picture of your ideal customer.
Understanding the buyer persona makes it easier for you to create successful content. You can easily develop information that meets their needs and expectations, gaining their trust and converting them into loyal customers.
Begin General Topic and Keyword Research
Now that you know who your ideal customer is, you need to know what kinds of information these customers are looking for. Hone in on what these consumers may be searching for and discover which broad topics may be of interest to them.
Start by checking out your company's analytics to find out what types of information drive the most engagement with your current website visitors. Check out competitor sites and see what information they share with customers that may be useful on your own website. Once you uncover the general topics of interest, you can create articles using keywords that will drive engagement.
Establish an Editorial Workflow
Creating good written and visual content usually involves a few different employees and several moving parts. To keep everything organized and prevent miscommunications, it's important to establish a streamlined workflow.
Your editorial workflow should clearly establish which employees are responsible for what tasks. There should be clear deadlines on drafting content and guidelines for producing new content. This is the stage where you should clearly lay out your expectations on quality, content types, and how the content should move from one step to the next. Make sure to include all members of the content team in the editorial plan and clearly outline their roles and duties.
How to Create Amazing Content
Digital content creation is easier when you have a plan in place. Once you have an idea of your content ideas and editorial flow, you'll want to put all the pieces together in a streamlined plan. This means creating an editorial calendar that will help you organize your keyword research while you create, edit, publish, and promote new content.
Make An Editorial Calendar
The editorial calendar is the central hub for your content creation. You can use tools such as Asana and Trello to create and editorial board that tracks articles from their creation through editing and publishing. As a rule of thumb, editorial calendars should cover a one to two month period, enabling your team to adjust marketing content as consumers' needs change.
Your editorial calendar should be customized to fit your team. It should include basic information such as what type of content is being created, important due dates, and updates on its current status. You can also include additional useful information such as content type, call to action, author, and where drafts are stored.
Emphasize Keyword Research
Any article that is published on your website should be carefully thought out. You don't want to post information that won't be useful to your customers. To identify what information will be useful to potential buyers, you should perform rigorous keyword research. You can use tools such as ahrefs to increase organic traffic by honing in on the search terms your consumers are using. From this information, you can draft topic ideas.
Once you know which types of things your customers are looking for, try to schedule them in a coherent manner. Don't post one-off subjects that don't help you reach your initial marketing goal. Try to post articles that build off one another and provide additional useful information for consumers. Cluster similar topics together in a series of posts to improve understanding and offer a rich source of information for your customers.
Identify the Best Content Types
Not all content is the same. Writing content for informational guides, case studies, or whitepapers is vastly different than creating content for social media platforms and email campaigns. In some cases, infographics may improve understanding while in others it's best to impart information in a longer content format such as an essay. Keep in mind that web content should be adjusted to the buying process. Simple topics and infographics help potential customers understand what you have to offer in just a few seconds. More in depth articles can help previous customers or customers of competitors decide to use your services at more advanced stages. Tweak your content to fit the audience and their needs.
Hire Amazing Writers
You've done the legwork on creating a successful content marketing plan, now you need to put it into action. For many business owners, creating good content and writing articles involves time and skills they don't have. That's where professional writers come in.
You can work with an in-house writer or hire a high quality writer on a freelance basis to produce the website content you need. This enables you to free up time so you can focus on other things such as building your team and creating incredible products.
Hiring a professional writer doesn't just save you time, it helps improve the quality of your content. Professional content creators back up their claims with research and present content in a way that's fun to read. They help engage customers and draw them in with writing skills that the everyday person doesn't always have. Writing is hard, so leaving it to the professionals helps improve the effectiveness of your marketing content.
Promote Content
It's not enough to just write great content, you need to put a great deal of effort into promoting it as well. Promotion of content helps to increase awareness of what your blog has to offer. You can promote it using email newsletters or social media channels such as Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter. You can also post your articles on sites like Medium and direct consumers back to your website. Other popular promoting channels include paid advertising and traditional sales channels to reach larger audiences.
Content Creation Tools To Improve Your Blog
There are hundreds of tools you can use to improve your content marketing program. These tools are designed to make each step of the process easier so you can start creating content and improving conversions.
Writing Tools
Grammarly
Editing tool Grammarly offers a convenient Google plugin that helps you catch any grammatical errors. They offer both free and paid plans so you can find what best fits your writers' needs. This tool is a favorite of many bloggers including the New York Times bestselling author Jerry Jenkins.
Google Docs
Google Docs is the preferred platform for many marketing teams because it allows multiple users to collaborate on the piece. The platform allows editors to easily make suggestions, ask questions, and edit the documents. Every change is tracked so the writer and other users can see how the piece has evolved. You can also control permissions by allowing certain team members to edit or just view the document.
Editorial Tools
Asana
Asana is an excellent platform for tracking the content creation process. You can create customized boards to track a piece from writing and editing through the publishing and promoting stages. You can easily assign due dates to different team members so everyone is always on the same page. Draft a calendar, create a timeline, and track progress all in one easy interface.
Trello
Trello is another collaborative tool that enables marketing teams to work together to produce website content. The layout of boards, lists, and cards makes it easy to track each article and see who is working on what. You can use it for everything from onboarding new writers to tracking website design changes.
Reach Your Marketing Goals With Content Creation
Creating content can be a long, hard process. From drafting the editorial calendar to finding the right team members to get the job done, this marketing process can take time and energy. Let us do some of the legwork for you and hire amazing writers that will create content that delights your customers.
Find the tools and content creation process that works best for you. Make sure to create different types of content depending on your buyer persona and tailor your posts to their interests. Publish regularly and promote your articles to reach a wider audience and drive engagement. It can be hard work, but content creation is absolutely worth the investment.