Content marketing is one of the most popular and effective ways to promote businesses online. However, not everyone gets it right, with one in three marketers admitting their content is only “somewhat” or “not so” effective. Does your business fall into this category? How do you even determine whether your content is effective or not, anyway?
Before you start analysing the performance of your content (such as its search rankings and conversion rates), you need to evaluate your content from a quality perspective. Check to see whether it has these six key ingredients required for success.
6 Key Ingredients for Effective Content
1. Freshness and Originality
There is a countless amount of content available on the internet, and more gets published daily. This is why it’s essential for you to bring something new or continually relevant to the table, that should demonstrate your uniqueness and add authority to your brand. When you combine originality, relevance, and quality in your content creation strategy, you make your content more appealing to search engines and your audience.
How to maintain content freshness:
- Compare your content against similar topics to find possible gaps and new angles to approach it.
- Speak from experience and bring your unique point of view and expertise.
- Experiment with new content ideas and formats when it makes sense.
- Use visuals to strengthen and complement your content.
- Avoid plagiarism, which can negatively impact the visibility of your content.
2. Search Optimisation
Content marketing and SEO naturally complement each other. They fuel each other and are vital for effective marketing. When your content is optimised for search, it gets seen by more of your target audience. This helps you convey the value you offer to more people, and it gives you more opportunities to earn customers and brand supporters.
How to optimise content for SEO:
- Research keywords relevant to your business and incorporate them into your content strategy.
- Promote your content on social media to boost visibility and earn positive search signals.
- Reach out to other publishers, members of your audience, and even your competitors to ask them to link back to your content.
3. Intention
Every piece of content you create should be made with intention. Many marketers make the common mistake of publishing content just for the sake of having content, so you need to avoid this by having a strategy and goals to keep track of. That way, all your content delivers unique value and works together to help you meet objectives.
How to create content with intention:
- Before getting started on content, identify your content’s purpose, such as generating leads, driving revenue, brand building, or increasing customer retention.
- Set goals for your content and track the results to help you and your team adapt your strategies.
- Understand the buyer’s journey of your audience and optimise content according to their needs.
- Organise content in a calendar or similar document to more easily stick to your goals.
4. Brand Alignment
Checking for consistency and brand alignment is another crucial ingredient in making effective content. Every company has a vision of its success story, so you want your content to differentiate your brand from others in a cohesive way.
The goal is to ensure that you deliver a consistent message across all your content channels, such as social media, website, and email. This also makes your brand more recognisable, which helps keep it top-of-mind for your market.
How to ensure brand alignment in your content:
- Create content guidelines that clearly define and strengthen your brand identity.
- Create customer personas that let you maintain a consistent voice.
- Refer back to your brand story and mission statement when creating content.
- Remember that your team represents your brand, so train your team to internalise your brand’s identity.
5. Timeliness and Accuracy
Timely content helps you enhance brand awareness and relevance by tapping trending topics or events. This increases your brand’s ability to attract your target market and expand your reach to new audiences. At the same time, releasing accurate content builds trust with your users, which encourages them to take further action and possibly come back in the future.
How to keep your content timely and accurate:
- Stay up-to-date on industry and market updates so that you can create content that’s trending with your audience.
- Consider using the newsjacking tactic, where you piggyback on topical interest by creating content around a major newsworthy event with a relevant brand tie-in.
- Make sure to do proper research and fact-check from multiple sources to maintain accuracy.
- When you use research and data to back up your content, cite your sources so you can build a trustworthy brand.
5. User Focus
Lastly, a key ingredient to effective content is how it responds to the needs of your audience. Some marketers only see content for its potential as a mere marketing tool rather than what truly matters: to deliver value to the audience. Your content should effectively bridge the gap between what your brand offers and what your customers need.
How to keep users at the focus of your content:
- Always create content with your audience in mind.
- Use the same language they do, and highlight how your brand improves their lives.
- Make sure to structure your content in a way that makes it easy for people to scan, digest, and get value from it.
- Use A/B testing to figure out what works for your users and what doesn’t.
- Anticipate the needs and behaviour of your audience, then provide easy solutions to address them (ex. linking to other sources of information relevant to your topic).
- Personalise when it’s possible and makes sense to do so.
Leverage Your Marketing Strategy for Effective Content
Ready to combine all these ingredients and start creating effective content that converts?
We’re a content marketing agency that can help you tick all the right boxes for effective content that delights your audience and brings you closer to your goals. Talk to us today to get started.