How to create valuable content
What makes content valuable?
Is the term valuable subjective?
As traditional marketing becomes less and less effective, businesses today have to rethink how they make sales and marketing. Content Marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content to reach your target audience. However, you can’t just create any content, you want content that your audience values, finds helpful and interesting.
Valuable content is the core of all successful marketing today. Businesses can get lost within the pages of search engines with content that is outdated and unhelpful. To boost your ratings and visibility, you want valuable content. It is tailored for your audience’s preferences while promoting actions that can boost traffic, conversions, brand loyalty and much more. Whoever will be engaging with your content is the main person you should have in mind when creating.
Focus on who matters most, the consumer. Consumers search the internet for further details about products and services, engaging with content that answers their questions.
Your business is the answer to their question. Does your content lead them back to you?
According to Pew Research Center survey, 81% of adults go online daily, while 31% say they are “almost constantly” online.
This gives you and your business ample opportunity to reach your audience with readable content that’s relevant, actionable and can be shared across platforms.
Valuable content can be broken down into words, knowledge and information. This understanding determines who your audience is, what they like, and how you can create what they like.
The who – identify target audience
Define the user. Target Needs of Audience.
Do you know who your target audience is? Knowing your audience makes it easier to address common questions, issues, or concerns with your content. Create a strategy that is clear on solving your audience’s challenges. You have to identify your audience, find out where they are and make an active attempt to reach them. What exclusive insights, data, or tips can your business create and provide to solve their problems?
- Content that answers questions
- Addresses their pain points
- Keep them updated on their industry
- Engages with interesting stores and relatable anecdotes
Consider which platforms would be the most effective in reaching your audience. You can’t rely on search engines to do all the work for you. Understanding SEO tactics will ensure that you are using key words and phrases that your audience is looking for. Search engines like Google don’t just deliver relevant information, they want the correct information for its users. With the goals of providing a better user experience, Google’s algorithm acronym E-A-T is an effective strategy that makes it easier to nurture your brand by building its expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. Google aims to protect searchers from low-quality that is unfavorable. Enhance your content by integrating the necessary basics of expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness for higher rankings and visibility.
- Use what you know
- Show your work
- Use Research
- Maintain up-to-date author bios on your site.
Once you understand who your audience is, what sparks their interests and what they are searching for, it becomes easier to create relevant, engaging content that helps grow your audience and business.
The what – know what they like
What kind of content?
Command the attention of your audience with perceptive content. Pull them in by answering questions through your content, provide a unique and helpful experience each time they interact with your brand. Stay creative and consistent with your campaigns. A consistent presence and voice across multiple platforms and content is a great way to build trust. You can’t expect commitment to your brand, if you aren’t. Consistency is key when enforcing your company’s industry position, implementing strategy, and creating relevant content. Different types of content can help you connect with different customers in a variety of ways.
- Blogs
- Ebooks
- Video
- How-to-guides
- Infographics
Remember, it’s about them, not you.
You want your high-quality content to show expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness. Use your experience in your industry to create copy that has supportive pieces and research that expand on your topic. Show you know your stuff while building credibility. If you focus on educating your audience, they will keep coming back for your content. Your products or services have become valuable enough to invest not only their time, but also their dollars.
Then, add value to your audience
Create what they like
It’s no secret that people want honest and relevant content. When creating content your goal should be to push your businesses thoughts and leadership while staying true to your brand’s voice. Discovering your brand’s voice sets the tone you use to speak and connect with your audience. It can be informative, fun, or authoritative, but whatever it is, it needs to be authentic. Thankfully, you don’t need to be an expert to do it. A strong voice makes it easier to tell a story to your audience through content. People remember stories 22x more than facts and figures alone. But, what does storytelling have to do with content?
Storytelling is a way of turning bland, forgettable blog posts and web pages into captivating content pieces. The art of sharing a message in the form of a story. Through our own personal narratives, we use stories to make sense of the world which in turn molds our thinking and behavior. Storytelling through content builds trust between a brand and their audience in a variety of ways:
- Bind content together that might otherwise seem scattered
- Adds a human element your content, and thus brand
- Creates brand loyalty that makes people more willing to promote your product or brand by word-of-mouth marketing,
Through your content, consumers have the opportunity to develop a better understanding of your business, generating conversations and a relationship outside of B2C. In fact, storytelling can help boost conversion rates by 30%. There are a variety of ways that you can tell a story, but every story’s elements are the same:
Storytelling can help boost conversion rates by 30%
-Rad Ai
- Audience – stories have a particular audience in mind
- Purpose – inform, educate, entertain, etc.
- Content – must be meaningful
- Voice – told from a perspective(s) & uses the tellers voice to enrich story
- Technology – used to extend the story
- Connections – good stories connect with the participants
- Economy – stories tell enough to get point across, no more.
Your documented content strategy will help to maintain the same story and voice during your creation process. Now that you know what to write about and who you are writing for; use the following elements as a guide for content creation on what needs to happen to keep consumers interested. You should define content value based on how much you get out of it, not how much time and money you put into it.
Reachable
Knowing your audience makes it easier to create various content for different platforms for them to “reach you”. Use relevant topics, keywords, and solutions to enhance your SEO and E-A-T for higher rankings in their search engines.
Readable
Not to be confused with SEO, a content’s readability is just as it sounds. Did you stay on topic? Does it have a logical flow? While creating, keep in mind that people skim content until they find valuable info. Maintain your reader’s attention with shorter paragraphs and placing important info towards the top.
Relevant & Personable
Prior campaign results and engagement often reveal what key words, creative and text copy your audience prefers. This data provides a valuable snapshot of how the content should be adjusted or modified to meet the needs of the audience. Utilize various types of content to accurately tell a story your audience can understand and relate to.
Actionable
Valuable content has a clear call-to-action. This can range from an invitation to comment or a prompt to sign-up for a newsletter. Direct your audience with content that has a reason to take action after seeing it.
Shareable
While the ideal goal is to turn everyone who engages with your content into a customer, that’s not always the case. However, the next best thing is to have them share your content on their personal network. Creating relevant helpful content that’s easy to share across platforms increases traffic and brand recognition. Integrate social media widgets or buttons for easier sharing.
Do it again…
Analyze results, test & retest
The best content starts with a plan of action and measurable goals. Goals allow you to track your progress, while the results from campaigns give valuable insight on your content’s success. Technology offers businesses with platforms that can do more than just spew data, but also the ability to create, test, and automate marketing content with access to on-demand data.
GlassHive makes it easy to share and analyze your content marketing. With pre-made marketing, GlassHive users have access to a full library of marketing material that’s proven to work. These resources make it easier and faster to start and stay consistent with your content creation process. The all-in-one dashboard displays all of the analytics needed to evaluate and enhance your marketing.
You have the control to track the kind of content and stories that are driving traffic and engagement to your website. Create content that is helpful, interesting, and addresses your audience’s needs. You can successfully connect content with business and brand goals while positioning yourself as your audience’s solution.
Ready to build relevancy and grow your business? Join GlassHive’s email list for additional access on ways to enhance your content and marketing.