If you want to grow your business, one of the primary areas to concentrate on, no matter the industry you’re in, is marketing. While there are numerous things you can do to market your wares well, one that is a definite must is content creation.
Content marketing, which covers things like blog posts, e-newsletters, eBooks, videos and social media posts, is an affordable option that works for all business types. Creating content helps organizations to locate potential new customers, increase sales and get more referrals and repeat purchases.
If you’re like a lot of business owners, managers or marketers, you may find creating content that gets a good return on investment is rather tricky. Sometimes it may be that what you come up with doesn’t hit the mark with your target market and generate expected results.
If you’re in this boat, or are yet to focus on content marketing, you’ll save resources and reduce stress if you follow tips to creating content that really works. Read on for some ways you can grow your business through solid content marketing in the coming months.
Know What You’re Trying to Achieve
Before you start creating any content, it’s vital to know what you’re trying to achieve with the work. You must know your goals in advance, so you can design content that caters accordingly. For instance, you may be want to bolster the amount of leads you get, boost the emotional connection you make with customers, increase customer referrals, get more repeat business from current clients or market a new service or product to a new target demographic.
By understanding your objectives before you begin work on content, you’ll increase your chances of actually achieving those results. This will also reduce time, energy and money spent on unnecessary or unproductive work.
Get Clear on Exactly Who You’re Targeting
Similarly, you also need to be clear about exactly who it is you’re targeting with each piece of content you create. You may have different markets you’re looking to connect with for different pieces or have one niche customer group that all of your work is designed especially for.
By understanding your ideal customer, you will be able to carefully tailor what you create to catch their interest, based on things like their location, age, hobbies, family setup and more. This applies whether you’re creating content for individuals or businesses and other organizations. For corporates, for instance, you can spend time on account-based marketing practices, whereby you target your campaigns to suit specific accounts you want to win business from.
When you create content to intrigue, educate, inspire, motivate, entertain and connect with ideal clients, you’ll find it much easier to know which is the best style and tone to use in the work, the kind of format to follow and where you should put the content (e.g. advertise and otherwise share it) to reach your primary audience.
Mix Up Your Content
It’s important, too, to mix up your content, rather than simply producing the same thing again and again. Experiment with different forms to add variety and give you more things to test and measure. For example, create blog posts, articles, eBooks, white papers, reports, infographics, cartoons, image collages and other graphics; run courses, webinars and workshops; lead and/or take part in forum discussions; post a variety of updates on different social media pages; and create advertisements, for both online and offline uses.
Keep in mind that you need to vary the length of content you put together, too. Have a mixture of short-form and long-form content. In today’s market, shorter pieces, such as Twitter posts and brief videos, are especially popular since so many consumers are pressed for time and inundated with content flying at them all day, every day. These short pieces are also helpful in that they funnel prospects and current customers through to the longer content you create. These longer pieces, in turn, can help to increase engagement and assist with customer education.
Ensure Everything You Create Provides Value
To get the best results out of your content, ensure each piece you create provides value to those who read, watch or listen to it. Effective content is that which has personality, is easy to understand and is in some way inspiring, educational and/or funny.
Avoid using complicated data or business speak (particularly technical language, if your audience wouldn’t be familiar with it), and find ways to provide analogies or specific examples and stories to make things both clearer and more interesting for your customers. Always try to create content that makes people feel something, too. Pieces that are memorable and shared often make people cry, laugh, feel excited or experience another strong emotion.
