These days, more and more businesses and brands are investing a lot of effort, time, and money in content marketing. Despite doubling their efforts to maximize the returns on their digital investment, they still have a hard time deciphering why their content is not generating the results that they expect.
The problem might be the fact that they failed to observe, analyze, and emulate the characteristics of a great content. To help you avoid sharing the same fate, we’ve listed 9 useful tips to create a great content your target audience will definitely thank you for.
Know Thy Audience
First and foremost, you have to put your target audience into consideration. While creating content for a broad audience is definitely okay, it won’t provide the kind of intimacy that your target readers are looking for—the kind of intimacy that makes for a great content. Knowing your readers helps you reach out effectively, speak to them like you’re old friends catching up.
Determine your audience, work around their demographics. Look for tips on using contextually relevant buzzwords to help you. If your content is geared towards Baby Boomers, using the latest buzzwords in content marketing is probably a bad idea. If your content is geared towards yuppies, drab buzzwords might put them off. Strike the right balance to get the sweet spot where you can deliver intimacy to the right audience without shunning everyone out.
Develop and Deliver Killer Headlines
Only after knowing your audience can you only develop and deliver headlines that would definitely grab their attention and make them follow through. Knowing your readers’ quirks and preferences will allow you to pick and choose the right words and the right angles that would pique their interest, making it a great content marketing strategy.
Without killer headlines, nobody will even bother reading the bulk the content you painstakingly created. Nobody will know about the great content that’s waiting for them right after your headline. Always keep killer headlines at the top of your list of priorities when you’re on a mission to create great content. It’s one of the key ingredients that make great content.
Clinch with Interesting Introductions
While killer headlines generate interest, interesting introductions reel the readers in. It makes your audience continue consuming the content you had in store for them, making it an essential part of your content marketing strategy. Introductions make the audience stay, sit back, and enjoy your content.
You can start with a question, where the promise of an answer will be weaved in the midst of the whole content. You can also start with an alarming statistic which may compel your audience to continue reading to get informed or be equipped with necessary tips and tricks. Starting with a relevant quote is a great idea as well, for it sets the stage for your content.
There are a lot of ways to deliver an introduction. You have to make sure your introduction is interesting enough to clinch your audience’s attention. Achieving this means you’re halfway through delivering a content that works.
Mind your Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuations
Headlines won’t be killer, introductions won’t be interesting, and content won’t be great if they’re mired with glaring errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuations. An error-free content will always be a requirement before you can deliver great content. Failing to put this in consideration will make it hard for your audience to take you seriously, especially if you’re aiming for a content that works.
A spotless content isn’t only necessary to keep your audience from getting turned off, it’s also a requirement to make your piece readable and maintain the content’s flow. Stopping now and then out of confusion induced by spelling errors, misplaced punctuations, or glaring grammatical errors is a definite way to keep your content bland and mediocre.
While nobody is perfect, it’s necessary to go the extra mile to keep your content free from errors. That may mean requiring the help of proofreaders to spot mistakes you didn’t notice. When in doubt, ask other people to help you keep your content spotless, readable, and great.
Content Should be Useful, Timely, Entertaining, and Original
A content could either be useful, entertaining, or original. You should be able to combine all three in perfect equilibrium to come up with something great, like a viral content. Your content should be up-to-date and informative without being bland and sounding like it’s the same dime a dozen content repackaged in an obvious manner.
With these kind of factors to consider, creating great content is incredibly, and understandably, difficult. That’s why it’s necessary to keep a tab on immediate competitors and look for angles and information that’s been recycled over so your content can avoid ending up with the same fate. Finding an opening will allow your content to assume a different perspective or focus on a different, but still relevant, piece of information you can use to deliver fresh content.
If there’s no opening, you can try a different approach. You can draw inspiration from the power of stories. Storytelling is a potent technique to keep your latest content useful, entertaining, and original. Narratives are a great way to easily get the readers to tag along while getting useful tidbits of information along the way.
Remember, entertainment is subjective, so always put yourself in your target audience’s shoes whenever you’re formulating a great content marketing strategy.
Aim for Astute Accuracy
Always be responsible when it comes to delivering content. Key information like facts and figures should come from trusted sources like news outlets, research organizations, and educational institutions. Accurate information isn’t only necessary for quality content, it also keeps you from providing misleading information that may harm your readers and from risking lawsuits, especially when your piece becomes a viral.
Coming up with entertaining content is easy, especially when there’s no need for proper information to limit your creative grounds. To be able to deliver great content with information constraints is proof of your creative abilities. Whether it’s to maintain the quality of your content, avoid legal troubles, or proof of creative prowess, accurate information will always be necessary in content marketing.
Seek the Aid of Compelling Visuals
A picture is truly worth a thousand words, especially when it comes to great content. It makes your content easily digestible and inherently intuitive. Images serve as a great guide to provide important information in a succinct fashion. The sudden popularity of infographics, which pervaded almost every sites that deliver great content and a catalyst in creating viral content, alludes to this fact.
Relevant images, especially the ones with high resolution, amplifies the impact of your content. It also effectively stops the monotony readers experience when they wade through lengthy texts. It offers colorful engagement that makes your content appealing, which makes for a great content marketing strategy. Just remember to properly cite photos to avoid legal problems.
Unleash the Power of Stylistic Readability
Style and substance go together—ever one over the other—especially when it comes to content marketing. If proper grammar, spelling, and use of punctations serve as your content’s substance, then your font choices, emphasis, and spacing will serve as your content’s style. Proper selection of fonts, font sizes, font colors and knowing when to underline, bold, italicize, and use white space are important to make your content physically easy and entertaining to read.
Knowing the demographics of your audience will make it easy to determine the which stylistic choices you should apply. Large text sizes appeal to older audiences. White font on black background may not be suitable for an upbeat audience. Failing to italicize, bold, or underline certain words might make readers miss central themes and key ideas. Failing to provide white spaces in between paragraphs will overwhelm readers. All these considerations are needed when coming up with a great content marketing strategy.
Don’t Forget Your Call-to-Action
Last, but not the least, is placing your call-to-action. Without it, your content won’t have a clear purpose. Call-to actions are not entirely made up of blatant directions to a brand’s product or services, to a group, or to newsletter signups. Sometimes, call-to-actions compel people to improve themselves, share important information, or to help out. Remember, great content marketing always have a great purpose it wants to act on and achieve.
The subtlety of your call-to-action depends entirely on your content’s purpose, the audience of your content, and your overall content marketing strategy. When your audience reads your content, candidness play a key role in making sure what they’re reading is a great one. So always gauge your content’s purpose and its audience when delivering your call-to-action.
Great content requires an unyielding dedication, diligence, and persistence. However, it will pay off all your sweat equity a hundred times over once your content struck gold: when it becomes a viral content. This possibility is reason enough to continue looking for the perfect balance and adhering to the tips listed here for consistent content quality.
Remember, it only takes one great content to put yourself on the digital map and turn your brand into an overnight content marketing success.