Are you boring the heck out of your visitors or simply missing the mark? Most company marketing efforts are frustratingly unfruitful. No one likes to churn out mediocre offers languishing in a sea of forgettable content. Some businesses give up creating content altogether, but without content, you’ll miss out on crucial customer connections, leads, and sales. Do you want to finally win the content game and get more audience engagement, leads, and conversions? Explore the many benefits of content creation. Follow these helpful content creation tips, and you’re on your way to reaching your top marketing goals.
In the latest content guide, you’ll learn the following:
- Why creating content is essential to your business success
- How to create an effective content marketing strategy
- How to create and use different types of content
- How to utilize content creation tips to make the most of your content offerings
- And so much more
Let’s begin!
Content Creation Tips: Contents
Section 1
Why digital content is vital to driving traffic to your business
Section 2
Content Creator Tips: The 5-step Content Creation Framework
Section 3
Tips On Content Creation: Examples And Types
Section 4
Content Creation Tips Basics
Section 5
Top Content Creation Tips
Content Creator Tips: Contents
Section 1
Why Digital Content Is Vital To Driving Traffic To Your Business
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Every savvy marketer knows that content is the heart of your business.
Content is the key to unlocking better customer connections, improving ROI, and driving traffic to your website.
In addition, valuable content increases your online presence and adds to your business’s credibility.
The demand for content is so crucial that 54% of companies plan to expand their marketing budgets this year.
Armed with this knowledge, a strong focus on producing top content in your industry is essential for becoming an industry thought leader.
Content marketing best practices include measuring content for ROI, repurposing and re-optimizing outdated, under-performing content, employing your customer’s voice, making content using the hub and spoke marketing model, and incorporating some AI-generated content.
Indeed, making original content has evolved to include new tools and technologies. We’ll cover those later.
But for now, let’s discuss the framework for creating content that engages and delights your customers.
Section 2
Content Creator Tips: The 5-Step Content Creation Framework
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According to Justin Champion, Principal Content Professor for HubSpot Academy, your main goal for marketing success is to build trust with your audience. Nurturing your audience’s trust keeps them returning to your site.
Therefore marketers need to know how to create excellent content that educates and engages. Like a carefully planned party or change in career, content creation involves significant effort: researching, preparing, storytelling, editing, distributing, repurposing, etc.
Creating niche content that generates leads and sales is no small task. Each piece of content serves its purpose in keeping your business relevant.
That is why a well-planned content marketing strategy is necessary to guide your content creation from the beginning stages to publication.
It must be flexible, ordered, and replicable to make your marketing endeavor productive and successful.
These are the five steps to creating an effective content strategy:
1. Generate Content Ideas
When developing content ideas, conducting thorough industry research, including visiting your competitor blogs, industry statistics, and survey results, is always a good idea.
Moreover, taking note of your customer’s common questions and checking Quora, google, and popular forums for common industry concerns, can help you produce the kind of actionable, high-quality content your audience seeks most.
While you’re gathering content ideas, make sure to concentrate on creating each content piece with the buying process in mind. Elements of the content creation process include the awareness, consideration, and decision stages.
Awareness Stage
In this stage, your visitors are encountering a specific opportunity or problem.
They’re researching solutions to understand the nature of their problem fully. Therefore, they need informative content to address their worries and questions.
Kinds of content to help them address these issues are how-to webinars, blog posts, and ebooks.
Consideration Stage
In the consideration stage, your visitor, beyond doubt, understands their problem or opportunity.
They’re motivated to understand all aspects and tactics for resolution, so produce content that promotes thought leadership and positions you as an industry authority.
FAQ articles, Demo videos, and case studies are all types of content to help build brand trust and connections with potential customers.
Decision Stage
In this stage, your visitor has decided on the right approach to their solution.
They’re collecting a lengthy list of products and sellers.
They need to shorten this list and make an ultimate choice. That choice could be you. Your content must include educational articles about your services and products, free trials, and consultations.
The more information you have on your buyers, the simpler it will be to create content that will streamline their journey down your marketing funnel, making it seem effortless.
But first, you must begin defining the content needed to finish the buyer’s journey.
Then you can develop and distribute all your content over a year, keeping your output sustainable.
2. Organize A Timeline
When creating a timeline, aim for a flexible, user-friendly plan. For instance, when content planning over a quarter, have at least three lead-generation projects ordered by buyer’s journey stages.
Without exception, remember your inbound marketing goals.
What is the primary concern for this quarter? Is it increasing blog traffic, improving conversion rates for marketing offers, or growing leads?
Then, work out which original content you’ll need when you’re ready for promotion and distribution. Doing this will allow you to discern the required materials to complete the task.
In addition, you can review your business goals to determine if hiring outside freelancers is necessary.
3. Produce A Workflow
A critical part of your content strategy is workflow.
It’s a series of steps that takes your content efforts from imagination to launch.
Moreover, your company’s workflow needs to clarify the responsibilities of each marketing team member.
Because content creation includes several aspects, breaking the steps into small, easy-to-complete tasks is best. That way, you’ll always have a clear-cut process no matter how large your business becomes.
Here’s a sample mock workflow model for quickly creating a marketing ebook:
- Finish your outline.
- Create the first draft.
- Revise your draft.
- Produce your second draft.
- Finalize the ebook’s design and formatting.
- Accept the final draft.
- Publish and Promote your ebook.
Professional Content Creation Tip:
Consider how you created content pieces before using a step-by-step content strategy.
Think about what worked and what obstacles you encountered, and the changes you can make to avoid similar problems in the future.
Now produce a workflow based on your thoughts about what you’ve learned. Remember, you can adapt your workflow steps as your content changes.
4. Edit and Check Content
When you write content, you need a proven method so your content aligns with your brand voice, is grammatically and factually accurate, and is well-written.
Apart from having gifted marketing editors and writers, there are a few additional steps for business owners to apply to elevate their inbound content quality.
- Clarify expectations.
The team member reviewing the content should know if they’re searching for reliable research, grammatical errors, story gaps, etc.
- Determine roles.
Everyone should know their assigned responsibilities. Carefully indicating who will take on each task will help end confusion.
- Dictate a timeline.
As many people are involved in the content process, timelines and due dates help to hold team members accountable for their efforts.
If someone misses a deadline, everyone experiences the impact. Share a rough guideline with your team to keep them on task.
- Implement a style guide.
While you have different writers with various voices, styles, and skill levels, ensuring your content is readable, supports your brand, and is original is essential.
In addition, a style guide helps editors and content reviewers maintain consistency as they edit the work of various writers.
- Analyze edits
Let team reviewers add suggestions and comments by carefully analyzing changes instead of directly editing content.
With this method, content creators are aware of changes and can better avoid errors in the future.
- Monitor progress
Use project management or document software like Microsoft 365 or Adobe Acrobat Pro to monitor progress.
The papers should include deadlines, timelines, and roles your company has established for the reviewing process.
Because several people might be working on one project, checking the review process supports team clarity and helps maintain group consistency.
- Modify for search
Since you put considerable effort into your content, your audience must find it.
Therefore, optimize your content after production by spot editing.
For example, edits might involve exchanging certain words or phrases with targeted keywords or consulting an SEO specialist to modify critical sections.
5. Compile And Collect Content
When you’ve completed your work, you’ll need a place to store and access your content, like Dropbox, Google Drive, or a content management system (CMS).
Ordering your content creation and distribution so that it’s understandable is vital for reusing, repurposing, promoting, curation, or locating content in the future.
An efficient way to group your B2B and B2C content is to design a well-defined naming system. A standard system might include the following:
- Form of Content
- Buying Process Stage
- Marketing Campaign
- Month
- Year
For example, you could name your latest SEO ebook file, guide-awareness-learningkeywordresearch – 2018.
While you can develop a different naming convention for hosting files, the objective is to locate your content quickly.
Remember, your content strategy should evolve. Your content should adjust to your company’s goals as they vary each quarter and year.
Besides, the face of content marketing is constantly shifting and changing with the latest trends and technology.
Therefore, it’s critical to remain current on industry changes and best practices so you can add them to your framework.
Section 3
Tips On Content Creation: Examples And Types
Image by talha khalil from Pixabay
Maish Nichani, the founder of PebbleRoad, claims that to understand how to expertly apply the best content creation tips to your content strategy and meet your business goals, you should know what content types you’ll include in your framework.
There are several variations on the content you can use to promote your business.
But sadly, Nichani says, many brands get stuck using only one or two content types, unaware they can reach a wider audience by adopting new forms.
If your business is a single-skilled specialist, it’s time to level up and broaden your content horizons.
With the large amount of branded content most businesses produce, it’s easy to see why different content offerings appeal to new audiences and often result in more leads and sales.
What are the various online marketing content types?
Here are some typical content types you might encounter on the web:
- Guides
- Blog posts
- Ebooks
- Emails
- Social media content
- Case studies
- Webinars
- Video content
There are many different ways to achieve content marketing success. Every content type serves a purpose and has a specific form and audience that responds to them.
For example, let’s examine ebooks:
- They aim to educate people on how a product or service can enhance their lives or solve a specific problem.
- They’re digital, contain text and images, and are readable on tablets and other electronic devices.
- Both the B2B and B2C communities appreciate and download them regularly.
Moreover, Nichani points out we can best understand content types by their purpose, structure, and group acceptance.
- Purpose
Marketers use varying content forms to achieve specific business goals.
For example, CRM software giant Salesforce educates its customers on how to lower business costs and save time, informs them on industry innovations, and teaches them how to use its software to improve their business effectively.
It does this through content types such as blog posts, videos, webinars, and reports.
- Structure
A content’s structure provides two purposes: A) It helps your visitors know what to expect, and B) It allows companies to reuse parts of elements of the structure in fresh ways—for instance, an infographic from a blog post you reuse in a case study.
- Group acceptance
Marketing content types help build communities around a specific topic. Specifically, Mashable is a news website whose engaging, quirky posts and video content appeal to a tech-savvy and science-oriented audience.
Different Content Types And How To Use Them
Every content type can help increase lead generation, drive traffic, boost brand awareness, and more.
Guides
Guides are educational long-form blog posts that cover a topic extensively.
They’ve increased in popularity and recently gotten longer, averaging over 1,400 words per post.
In addition, statistics show that long-form content also gets better results.
You can create guides to cover your company’s main topic.
After, you can add links to content with associated subtopics to your central guides.
This practice will aid your visitors in discovering the valuable information they seek, increase your business’s (SEO) search engine ranking, and establish your site’s current authority.
Blog Posts
Blog posts remain one of the most sought-after forms of content.
Regularly publishing them can set you up as an authority and support your visitors.
In addition, they can increase high-quality traffic to your site when combined with a solid SEO strategy that includes the following:
- You’re applying relevant industry keywords and phrases based on domain authority to your blog content so your site ranks in search engines and drives organic traffic.
- Your company is establishing backlinks to increase traffic and enhance your organization’s and website’s authority.
- You build a robust internal link structure within your articles to keep visitors and customers on your site and boost their opportunities to become leads.
Initially, businesses used blogging for top-of-the-funnel lead-generation marketing efforts, but now they use it for additional funnel parts.
It’s especially true when a brand uses content to promote a new product or service.
Ebooks
Rather than publish an extensive blog post guide, many marketers produce Ebooks.
Ebooks are an excellent option if your content fits one or more of the following examples:
- It contains quantitative or qualitative research and other rare advice that you can offer for a visitor’s address or payment.
- The content is exhaustive, and endless scrolling would create a frustrating user experience.
Offering Ebooks allows you to nurture future leads through gated content and reinforces your position as a proven authority.
Emails
Email marketing, like blog content, also yields exceptional results because it’s adaptable. For instance, it’s useful for the following purposes:
- You can produce newsletters for sharing your latest content with awareness stage subscribers.
- Your company can distribute content written for the middle-of-the-funnel consideration stage to build trust by aligning their products or features with the potential buyer’s needs. Webinars are a perfect example of this content type to share with your audience.
- Your sales team can send emails encouraging conversions to transform potential buyers into customers.
Whether you aim to grow e-commerce or SaaS sales or support your ideal customer during an extended sales cycle, email is an essential platform for focusing your marketing efforts.
Social Media Content
Instagram, Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook have billions of users searching for your products or services. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll want to check out the following suggestions:
- Your company must discover the social media platforms where you get the most leads and conversions.
- You must know each platform’s peak/ideal scheduling and posting times.
- Your brand’s social media management team should track your and your competitor’s accounts to discover which social content types get the most engagement. Content such as instructional videos, infographics, or slide shows with helpful industry tips are excellent places to start your search.
It’s also vital to design and link your social media posts around a specific goal and with the buyer’s journey in mind.
Case Studies
When gaining your customers’ and potential buyers’ trust, case studies like emails and customer testimonials solidify your credibility as an industry expert.
Their central objective is to share how you’ve helped your past and current customers achieve their goals.
This content type is explicit to your company and its products and services. Therefore, you must customize it for middle to bottom-of-the-funnel qualified to marketing-qualified leads.
The more the subjects in your case study’s needs match those of your potential customers, the greater your chance of capturing a new customer.
Webinars
Webinars are another excellent content type for increasing return on investment (ROI). Although they’re mainly informational, they cater to individuals mid to bottom of your marketing funnel, which means they’re most likely to help promote conversions.
For example, several Saas companies utilize webinar content for the reasons below:
- They offer a motive to try new software.
- The company will provide professional tips or hacks on the tasks their software streamlines.
- They promote their software’s benefits and use cases.
Why not try a comparable strategy for your business?
Video Content
Video is one of the most flexible because brands can use it in various places like social media, emails, blog posts, and other content offerings.
Its functions include sales, educating leads and customers, and product demos.
If your company chooses to add this content, the excellent news is that 85% of consumers between 18 and 34 say they decided to buy a product or service after a video.
From generating new sales to increasing time on a page, video’s encouraging results are hard to ignore.
While only some of the content types mentioned above are right for your business model, it pays to investigate which ones will bring you the results you need to acquire success in your industry.
Section 4
Basic Content Creation Tips
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To be an influential content creator, you must gain various skills that will help you produce the type of content your audience enjoys.
Before we get into more advanced content creation, we must cover some required fundamentals.
Enroll in Digital Marketing Courses
Digital marketing courses can help you better understand the customer buying process, which types of content to create, and how to create a unique content strategy tailored to your brand’s success.
Among the numerous courses out there willing to teach you content marketing, here are some of the best:
- Content Marketing (HubSpot Academy)
- . Content Marketing Fundamentals Course with Ashley Segura (Semrush Academy)
- Content Marketing and Blogging Tutorials (Ahrefs)
Learn Copywriting
Why is copywriting important to content marketing? Well, you need a thorough understanding of persuading your visitors to purchase now by using persuasive words.
Marketers also use copywriting for SEO.
It’s especially vital for local and on-page SEO.
If you wish people to see your products and services, you must understand which keywords to use in your website copy.
You must produce content that engages and serves your customers and improves your search engine ranking.
It’s not easy, but learning this skill will improve your overall customer experience and eventually lead to more subscriptions and sales.
Have A Thorough Understanding Of Content Strategy
A complete content strategy aids you in defining your marketing goals and setting priorities.
With it, you can plan your work around your goals and ensure that your team members are achieving actual results.
Master Content Management
If you create content for your Saas, marketing brand, or affiliate marketing business, you’ll need a place to store, organize, edit, and access that content.
That’s where a content management system comes in handy.
What is a content management system?
It’s computer software used to maintain the creation and editing of your digital content.
The chief advantage of a content management system is that it helps simplify the technical parts of the publishing process.
In addition, it lessens the cost of website maintenance and allows your teams to identify business growth trends and order critical data.
Managing your data lets you acquire insights about your products and services and secure a customer base.
Section 5
Top Content Creation Tips
Image by ar130405 from Pixabay
If you’ve ever wondered how to produce engaging content that gets more clicks, leads, and sales, here’s a non-exhaustive list to get you started:
1. Perform A Content Audit
If you’re a content veteran, you have an organized record in Google Docks or stored in a Content Management Tool like Dropbox or Zoho.
Content audits are the perfect way to identify which content your audience likes and which your audience ignores.
It also shows you how to best optimize your content by detecting the weak areas in your website’s search engine presence.
2. Research And Segment Buyer Personas
Understanding your customers is crucial to generating a good marketing plan. Buyer personas, fictitious versions of your ideal customers, help you better determine your customer’s wants and desires.
Moreover, generating leads involves adjusting your marketing to appeal to your industry niche audience.
The invention of buyer personas allows you to do this.
3. Research Your Competition’s Content
When tailoring your marketing strategy, you must learn to build connections with your audience.
Therefore, your written content and assorted other content types must work to capture your audience’s attention.
Also, competitive research allows you and your team to see why people buy from your competitors rather than you or vice versa.
With extra effort, this can aid you in refining your marketing programs by revealing marketing gaps.
4. Use a Content Calendar
A content calendar is a charted, written schedule of the content your business chooses to plan and promote.
There are several advantages to making an editorial calendar, like creating and allowing your team members to collaborate easily and generate more captivating content.
To create a calendar for your business, try Microsoft Exel or Apple Pages.
5. Create Captivating Headlines
If you want increased traffic to your site and more eyes on your online content, you’d better entice people to read it.
And how do you do this?
With a captivating headline, of course!
Your headline must grab readers’ attention in minutes, tell them where they’re going, and bring them back on topic when they lose interest.
6. Recycle Your Content
Bloggers and marketers, who says a blog post’s content must remain in that form forever?
Take the content of a popular post and make interactive content, think quiz or a quick infographic, or include its subtopics in a step-by-step checklist.
There’s a host of content possibilities out there.
The more creative you are in recycling your content, the greater your reach with different audience members.
7. Make Sure Your Content Is SEO Optimized
A crucial part of attracting your ideal audience to your site is SEO (search engine optimization).
SEO is optimizing your content to ensure potential customers can find it online.
Search engine robots rank highly optimized content higher on a search engine’s page than content without optimization.
Therefore, it pays to find a comprehensive course to teach you the basics and, eventually, more advanced methods for SEO applications and best practices.
8. Content Promotion
Once you’ve created your content, you’ll need to find ways to share it with others interested in your industry niche.
Content promotion enhances customer awareness, produces leads, and improves conversions.
Now, you can deliver content in various ways, like social media platforms, backlinks, influencer marketing, email marketing, paid to advertise, and referrals.
9. Research Which Platforms Are Right For Your Industry
Not all social media platforms or job platforms are suitable for your industry.
For example, Pinterest may be more popular with creative-based businesses like fashion, beauty, weddings, crafts, and child education.
While it doesn’t mean you should rule out Pinterest if you fall under a different category, there might better avenues to drive traffic to your site.
Therefore, it’s vital to research which websites your audience visits often so you know where and when and how you should be marketing your products and services.
To determine if your business should be on a specific platform, answer the following questions:
- Are you already receiving traffic from the venue?
- Do any of your competitors use it?
- Are people engaging with and pinning your content regularly?
- Do people often search for your specific products and services?
10. Remain Relevant
No one likes old, outdated content.
However, it helps to understand how to research trending industry topics to remain relevant.
It depends on discovering the best way to draw in your audience and relate to their needs.
Additionally, it encourages trust to grow purposeful communication and connection, which is vital to marketing and product development.
11. Establish A Brand Voice
What you speak and how you speak sets the tone for your brand and is pivotal in shaping your business identity.
Your unique brand voice helps your company stand out from others.
12. Be Consistent
The sister of brand voice, brand consistency matters because it results in brand recognition.
Leads and customers that can readily identify your brand have a greater chance of purchasing and committing to it.
Maintaining a regular strategy promotes credibility, brand trust, customer experience, and brand reputation.
Technopedia mentions that research proves consistent brands are worth up to 20% more.
13. Use Marketing Automation and Analysis Tools
Whenever you create a new marketing campaign to launch your latest product or software, you’ll need a way to save time and monitor your progress.
Marketing automation software like Later for social media helps speed up publishing and distributing your business content.
In addition, tools for analysis, such as Salesforce, streamline your customer communications and journey down your marketing funnel.
14. Track KPIs
KPI refers to key performance indicators, which measure the performance quantity over a period for a specific marketing goal.
The leading purpose of tracking KPIs is to monitor your company’s progress toward defined goals and future objectives.
Software like Domo and Monday provide dashboard Exel templates for this purpose.
15. Never Miss An Opportunity To Network
Let’s face it; you need other people to help your business grow.
Whether finding a famous social media influencer to help you with your content curation or attending industry conferences to pitch your new software to target investors, networking is essential to your brand’s longevity, authority, and financial success.
Networking assists your company in the following ways:
- Your ideal customers will notice your company, what it stands for, your mission, and who you help.
- Potential customers and complementary businesses see your company as an industry authority.
- It adds to your network of support.
- It boosts your business growth.
How Much Do Content Creators Make
So exactly how much money will you see as a content creator?
Well, that depends on your industry niche and how skilled you are at connecting with your audience. According to a related Linkedin report, content creator job postings have tripled since 2021. A recent ZipRecruiter survey shows that the average salary range is $36,000 to $58,000. The most successful creators earn as much as $74,500. So it’s pretty lucrative to learn content creation.
Starting Your Journey As a Content Creator
While only some of these content creation tips are right for your business, it’s good to know you can promote and elevate your brand in many ways.
With a solid content strategy, a tailored combination of content types, customer relationship management, and data tools like Google Analytics, you can easily monitor your progress and correct the weak areas holding you back.
So here’s to all of your future content creator wins.
Are you looking to hire a professional b2b freelance writer for your content creation? Check out my services.
About Marisa D. Aceves
Marisa D. Aceves is a Professional B2B freelance writer for Saas businesses and digital marketing companies. She is the author of Abstract Reception, where she writes about digital marketing and marketing technology. Her work is featured on Artspan, Artsy Shark, and more.