If you're not taking the time to create helpful and informative content for your target audience, you may as well not publish content at all. Think about your Facebook newsfeed and the types of content that you see published here. If you're like me, this is one of the first places that you turn to each morning for updates and information, and I'm sure that your eyes glaze over the pointless and perhaps annoying status updates just like mine do. But there's a lesson to be learned here: if you really want to capture your audience, you need to offer them something that is going to add value. Something that stands out from the rest.

To aid you in creating helpful and informative content, HubSpot recently shared a checklist from Youtility for writing useful content. Since I think everyone can benefit from this list, I wanted to share some of the highlights with you below:

What information does your customer need?

1. Turn to analytics tools such as Google Keyword, Google Trends, and Google Correlate to find out what your target audience is searching for.
2. Utilize social media monitoring tools to monitor conversations in your industry.
3. Take advantage of your social media channels to ask your customers directly about the types of topics that they want to hear about.

Map out a plan to deliver useful marketing to your customers.

1. Know how your target audience likes to get necessary information. Would they prefer an email newsletter or is a tweet with a link to a blog post a more effective way to reach them?
2. Take one basic need that your customers want addressed and create multiple executions out of it.

Promote your content.

1. Use social media to share useful content with your target audience. Information about your company becomes second priority.
2. Encourage your employees to share your useful nuggets with their social media networks.

Make sharing useful content an ongoing strategy with your company, not just a temporary project.

1. Content creation that helps your target audience should be a never-ending commitment for your content marketing efforts.
2. Always be brainstorming for new content ideas that your target audience wants to hear about.

To set yourself apart from the competition, you can either share some incredibly amazing content (challenging to do on a regular basis) or information that your target audience is going to find useful and meaningful. When in doubt, take the latter option.

(Image via Forsyth County)