This blog will outline five steps that will help you improve your content creation and build a process you can rely upon in the future.
Content marketing, What's the point?
At its core, the inbound marketing methodology is about creating content that engages your target audience. Great content can attract prospects to your website, and if it's fantastic, they won’t just read it, they’ll engage further with your business. Content assets such as blogs, eBooks, whitepapers, infographics and case studies can capture the attention of visitors and encourage them to convert to your site. Often, however, the searcher is just looking for information about a problem they’re currently experiencing. It’ll take preparation and strategic thinking to capitalise on this initial interaction and nurture them through the sales funnel to become a happy customers.
You need to construct high-quality content using a content marketing plan that gradually encourages prospects to engage with your business. But content creation and content marketing are by no means simple. Many businesses fail to incorporate the following into their content creation programmes:
- Consistency
- Alignment
- Unified process
This blog will outline five steps that will help you improve your content creation and build a process you can rely upon in the future.
Step 1. Create a content culture, starting from the ground up
Make an effort to get everyone in your business involved in the content creation process. Having high-quality content from multiple perspectives creates a library of information that prospects can turn to for industry insights and opinions. To promote all facets of your brand, source ideas and viewpoints from every department. However, it can be tricky to motivate your whole company to get involved. To overcome this problem, you should act as a content-creating trailblazer and inspire others to contribute.
It’s also critical to emphasise the potential benefits of an ongoing company-wide content strategy. To champion your cause and get more stakeholders behind it, you can bring up past performance results to show colleagues how content directly contributes to revenue, as well as how relevant content can expand the company’s reach and reputation. Every employee in the business should be given the opportunity to contribute to the process and share their wealth of expertise. Multiple pieces of specialised content will enable your business to establish itself as an authority in the space, appeal to interested parties, and potentially secure new opportunities and speaking engagements.
Step 2. Buyer personas and content auditing
Buyer personas are one of the most — if not the most —an important part of your marketing strategy! Without these fictional representations of your ideal customers, you would not have a solid idea of who to market to, or what content to create for your audience. Take your time constructing personas, and commit to refining them on an ongoing basis! If your business has not developed any buyer personas, now is an excellent time. Buyer personas form the cornerstone of all your marketing activity; they are projections of your ideal customers, based on the information you have acquired via surveys, marketing data, interviews and other methods.
This data helps establish who is interested in your products and services, and identify their problems and pain points. Detailed, comprehensive buyer personas help create targeted, high-quality content that resonates with your ideal prospects, encouraging them to do business with you. Once you have detailed buyer personas, you need to establish and evaluate the content you already have. This includes everything from web pages to downloadable assets and blog posts — you might be surprised by how much you’ve got in your content bank! A content audit helps identify what you have and what you don’t have, so you can distinguish any content gaps relating to your buyer persona's pain points and problems. It also gives you the opportunity to reject, rehash and repurpose existing content. You can then divide this content according to your buyer personas, sorting by awareness, consideration and decision stages, to create a marketing content strategy that nurtures and retains prospects and clients over time.
Step 3. Content workshop
Regularly discuss the blog and eBook topics with employees from different departments to identify new opportunities, build a library of new ideas, and demonstrate your expertise across a wide range of industry areas. If you feel that you still need more content, discuss further ideas with your marketing department. It is worth considering restructuring and repurposing existing content to fill any potential gaps. And don’t shy away from opportunities for external content, such as having others(guests or business partners) blog on your site. This can improve your link authority — providing guest posts are from reputable and credible sources — and it will help build your website as a source of high-quality information.
Your content brainstorming process should involve as many people in the business as possible. If you are continuously creating content alone for your entire business, everything begins to sound the same, you may be running out of ideas, and your prospects may be exhibiting different problems. But by having everyone in your business contribute to the brainstorming process, you can develop a vast and diverse range of quality content ideas from different perspectives. And with everyone participating in the content creation and content brainstorming process, you can leverage their individual expertise to build a library of content assets that align with the goals and need states of your buyer personas.
Step 4. Design a content process
A simple content process plan makes content creation easier, as there is a benchmark to follow. With it, everyone is working within the same parameters and the review process becomes more streamlined. Establish guidelines for your content process, which includes the path from the primary idea to the synopsis, to the first written draft, to an expert review, the layout, the final review and then publication. Having a clear, streamlined content creation process will enable your business to continuously pump out high-quality material. It will also reduce the strain on your marketing department significantly, as content assets are reviewed promptly and redistributed to the appropriate individual. Align your content to pillar pages and topic clusters. The way search engines rank content is changing. Currently, we are seeing algorithms being adapted to favour topics rather than keywords. For this reason, content creators and SEO experts are pivoting to a ‘topic cluster’ approach. What is a topic cluster? A topic cluster serves as the central hub of content for a particular topic, with related pages branching off of it, and then linking back to form what we call a ‘pillar page’. A pillar page is a high-level overview — or summary — of a specific topic that’s around 2,000 to 5,000 words long. The pillar page links to a network of in-depth articles related to the main topic it covers. This network of related articles is known as ‘cluster content. By developing pillar pages and cluster content, you are creating valuable libraries of in-depth content that not only ranks with search engines but offers potential customers the information and guidance they are searching for.
Step 5. Iterate, improve, experiment
Experimentation is key to finding out what works and what doesn’t. If there's an opportunity to explore something new, try it and measure your performance as you go — you never know how effective it may be. Experiment with new channels, platforms and formats of content. Learn from your mistakes and constantly measure your content’s performance in terms of:
• Landing page submissions
• New contact rate
• Pageviews and traffic
• Unique visitors
• Inbound links
• Social shares
• Conversion rates
• Engagement
• Comments
Compare these statistics to previous benchmark data to gauge if your content marketing activity is benefiting your business and where it can be optimised.
CLOSING THOUGHTS
There you have it: five steps to optimise your content creation process and create a content marketing plan that works — with the key ingredient being consistency. As you continue to construct high-quality content, you will improve your presence online and establish yourself as an erudite authority who provides vital and insightful information to your prospects. However, if you find you have a number of content ideas but lack the time and resources to create it yourself, consider outsourcing your content creation and planning to a digital marketing consultancy with experience in your market
