When it comes to your content marketing, what is more important, quality or quantity?
It doesn't take a genius to tell you that your content should be of a high quality. You want people to read it, share it and talk about you. So yeah, you need to produce decent content to be able to do that.
But with that said, Google has kind of made it impossible for you not to churn out content all the time. Otherwise, how else are you going to reach the top of the search pages? So sometimes the content does suffer - in the hope you'll keep staying relevant.
So what do you do?
Well In an ideal world, you'd create high quality content all the time! But unfortunately there often isn't the time, resource or even creativity to do this.
What you can do, is try your best to regularly produce awesome content.
If you need help with this then I've put together a 5-step plan, to help you create high quality content - more frequently.
1. Map out a plan
Whether you've got a team of people behind you, or you're riding solo - you should always start with a plan. Think about looking at your marketing strategy every three months and creating a plan that you can follow each week. On your plan you should aim to map out your blog posts, social feeds and big pieces of content - like infographics, videos or e-books.
Although social is quite spontaneous, you can still research valuable content from around the web beforehand, and schedule it to be posted each day. That way even if you forget to look at your social feed, you'll still have at least one post going out each day. Use a social media management tool to help you do this - some good tools even have feeds direct to relevant content that you could post.
You should make sure you have your blog post topics set out, before you write them. Struggling to come up with anything more to write about? Check out HubSpot's blog topic generator to help you come up with ideas.
For your big pieces, you should aim to publish at least one a month. Big pieces of content take more time to think about and produce, so that's why planning them out is vital to their success. It may seem like a lot of hard work but you'll see a better return, as people love to share quality content such as infographics or videos.
2.Understand your audience
You can't create quality content if you don't know who you are creating it for. Your audience could be hiding anywhere, so you need to lure them out with some awesome content that has been made just for them. If you're in the early stages of business, think about creating a customer persona as it will help you relate back to it whenever you create your content.
Do some market research to find out your customers age, demographic, family, income, education, occupation, favourite social sites, personal opinions - pretty much everything there is to know about them. Good quality content needs to be tailored towards the right people. Make sure you speak in their language. And don't litter your content full of jargon as this will only alienate people and make them switch off.
Once you truly understand who your audience is, can you then start to effectively capture their attention
3.Think outside the box
So now you're at the point where you need to create your content. This is where it starts to get tricky. There's a lot of competition out there, and since 9 out of 10 organisations are generating content regularly, you need to make sure yours is so good, that it stands apart from the rest.
How do I do this?
Above all, your content needs to engage with your audience. You should give them a reason to give you feedback and share it on their social feeds. Let's go back to the topics of your content. You don't have to post about your products all the time in order to attract readers. In fact, it will probably help you if you broaden your horizons and blog about bigger topics that will cover your product in a small way.
People will come to you if you are an expert in your field - and that's what you need to achieve with your content. Say for example you sell sofas. You don't always have to write about the specific features of your sofas. You could write about the world's wackiest homes, or get an interview with a top home furnishings decorator. By widening your writing topics, you'll become the expert in what you do.
Similar rules apply to your social content. Social media is all about having a personality, yet many businesses are concerned that they need to have a professional tone dominate their feeds. Take a look at brands like Charmin, Tesco Mobile or Innocent. They all have fun with their social, and this has helped them not only gain thousands of followers, but get plenty of recognition for creating a real buzz on social.
4.Tell the story
One of the most effective ways to create valuable content is by telling a story. It turns out, people no longer want to be sold products, they want to be sold stories. To capture the attention of the audience - and to tell a great story - you need to start with the pain points. Think about the reasons why your customers need your product and use that as a way to begin your story. This is a great way to strike an emotional chord with your audience.
For example, 'how to' blog posts are the most popular - because they offer advice on how to solve a problem they have.
Once you've captured their attention, you can then begin to show them how you solve their problems, with your product. You can tell great stories in many different ways - via blog posts, e-books or infographics. But what is one of the best ways to effectively tell your story? It's by creating a video. There truly is no quicker way to get your message across, than in a 60 second explainer video.
Finally one last point to mention is that your story needs to be simple and to the point. Don't let yourself get bogged down by outlining every single thing that your company does. The main goal is to get your customer to respond to the call to action. Whether it's sign up for your emails, buy your stuff, enter your competition - you need to to tell your story fast and get them to act on your CTA.
5.Hire an expert
So if you've looked at the above points and you still don't have the time, resource or brain power to create quality content then you really need to get help from an expert. The quality of your content is important, but then so is the amount that you're doing. Once you start creating quality content, you'll attract an audience who will come back for more. And if you've got nothing more to show them - you'll only lose them.
As a Content Marketing Agency we can help you create content that your audience wants to receive. Whether it's videos, blog posts, social, infographics or e-books, we make sure that all of our content is well planned, well researched, extremely creative and above all - highly shareable. So give us a call today and let us help!
Psssst...... one more thing....
We are giving away £15k ($25k) worth of content marketing but you only have TWO days left to enter! If you want free blog posts, infographics, videos and e-books then enter here. Good luck!
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