Creating Amazing Marketing Content: 6 Top Tips

Creating amazing marketing content

 

Anyone can sit down and write a ‘standard’ blog post, they could even whip up a ‘great’ piece of content marketing if they’re lucky… but creating ‘amazing’ content, that takes time, dedication, and effort. It requires an in-depth understanding of your audience, goals, and your own personal talent. However, that’s not to say you can’t do it! Read on for six top tips on how you can create remarkable content.

Before you begin, take a long hard look at what you actually want to achieve with your Content Marketing. Develop goals in order to guide your content creation process, and refer to these goals throughout the project to ensure that you stay on track.

 

Tip 1 – Audience Identification

 

You can’t create outstanding content marketing without first understanding who’s going to be reading it.

A quick Google search will give you a wealth of tips about “being where your audience are”, and whilst that’s all very well, there’s a lot more to audience research.

 

Audience Segmentation

Segment your audience into four separate categories:

The customers – those who will purchase from you.

The sharers – those who will share your content, as well as content related to your brand.

The bloggers – those with the capacity to link to your work.

The influencers – those with genuine reach and influence on all of the above groups. These are the ‘industry stars’, the respected experts, outspoken voices and popular publications within your sector.

By separating the people you are targeting into different categories, you’ll be able to target specific content types to certain groups for maximum impact.

Identifying customers is easy (simply check your own records), but if you’re unsure of how to find the other groups, you can use tools like Buzzsumo, to analyse the people who are sharing relevant content related to your brand. Simply input topics or key phrases related to your industry and record who’s sharing the top-performing content.

Audience Profiling

Use social tools like Facebook Insights, Pinterest Analytics, and LinkedIn Groups (especially for B2B audiences) to gain valuable insights into your audience’s likes, dislikes and other interests. These are rich resources of information, so ensure you spend time exploring these channels further!

 

Tip 2 – Seeding & Content Marketing Outreach

 

Once you’ve uncovered who you’ll be targeting, you can begin interacting with, and ‘building relationships’ with relevant people.

It’s never too early to start outreaching to your audience. You can build interest and awareness amongst your existing fans by teasing content via email newsletters and social media. But how can you improve your chances of successful outreach to those who aren’t already connected with your brand?

Become an active member of relevant communities

There are a number of ways to connect with your audience, including engaging with communities.

If you’re planning to create an amazing piece of content, you should use the following opportunities to connect with your audience, both online and off.

– Online: Relevant blogs/forums, social groups

– Offline: Relevant meetups, conferences and lectures

All these places are filled with avid fans of your industry. Engaging with these people, and establishing your presence in the community, gives you a better chance when it comes to successfully getting content picked up at a later date.

However, this can take months of planning and effort, and you’re probably wondering whether there’s something you can do immediately to help increase your chances. Well, you’re in luck.

Ask your target audience what it is they want to see.

Before you begin any work, contact those key influencers and publishers you’ve collected together and discover exactly what it is they’re looking for content-wise.

Larger publications might even have an editorial calendar that they can send to you, detailing exactly what topics they’ll be covering over the next year.

You don’t need a calendar to tell you what is and isn’t a good idea though; sometimes the best thing to do is simply ask the journalist/blogger/publisher what kind of content they’d be looking for. This works especially well later on down the line, when you’re trying to validate an idea (it can also be applied to your early outreach activity).

Clarifying what content key influencers are interested in, will give you a strong indication of the kinds of topics, formats, and platforms you should be covering and using.

 

Tip 3 – Ideation

 

This tip is all about developing ideas for amazing content marketing.

Finding Inspiration

It can be hard to come up with awesome ideas without first researching what has worked before. Carry out industry research to discover what has, and hasn’t, worked in the past:

– Search Buzzsumo using keywords related to your industry and discover top content.

– Search Subreddits relevant to your business for top up-voted content.

– Use social monitoring tools, like Mention, to stay on top of industry updates.

– Use Followerwonk to analyse your key influencers and view word clouds of their followers’ bios, giving you an even better idea of your audience’s interests.

Once you’ve found all of this inspirational content, and identified top themes and topics that you should be following, ensure you record it all.

Collect together all your findings in one handy Excel spreadsheet, so you can easily refer back to them later on and use your information to further influence future content plans.

Another great way to come up with ideas is to find a problem to solve…

Solving Issues With Content Marketing

You don’t suddenly have to try and solve every problem at once, simply identify small issues within your industry, and develop content that solves these dilemmas.

This doesn’t have to consist of simple ‘How To’ articles either (although those are always helpful), there are plenty of different ways to solve your users’ issues.

Remember those forums and communities you joined as part of your audience research? Go back through them and find out what your audience are saying about your brand, your industry, and products or services related to your business! #Winning.

You can also take to social media, searching hashtags of popular topics within your sector to uncover exactly what your audience think about your brand, and identify any major issues.

Alternatively, you could use a platform like Quora, on which people pose questions for experts to answer, to discover more about what people are looking for. Search for your key influencers’ on Quora to see whether they’ve helped answer any questions related to your industry, then use their answer to inspire ideas for your content.

It’s important to remember that at the current moment in time, any idea has the potential to be a great one. Even if it’s something that’s been done already, you can always adapt and differentiate your content by tailoring it towards your specific audience, or expanding upon certain information. It’s important to focus on ideas, not formats. Formats can change – ideas are the silver bullet.

 

Tip 4 – Goal Alignment and Validation

 

This is where we weed out the bad ideas and select the cream of the crop to ensure that you’re creating relevant, shareable content.

Validating Ideas

If you can’t validate your idea then you cannot proceed

There are a number of questions you should ask yourself in order to validate your content, these include, but are in no way limited to:

– Do these ideas fulfil my audience’s needs?

– Will my audience be interested in this type of content?

– Is this content marketing easily shareable?

– Will it help my brand achieve their goals?

Are the ideas ‘on brand’, do they fit with my brand’s values?

Allow another work colleague, one who’s not directly connected to the account, to review your best ideas, and ask them for their honest opinion. It’s easy to get a little too attached to your own work sometimes, so having an impartial opinion will allow you to validate your ideas without bias.

If you can answer “yes” most of the questions above, you’re ready to move on to the next step.

Goal Alignment

You should have already clearly outlined goals for your content before you’ve begun the ideation process, detailing what you want to achieve with your content marketing.

Compare these goals to the ideas you’ve come up with. Do they complement each other?

At the end of the day, you’re creating content to meet your goals, so ensuring they’re aligned is paramount.

Once you’ve narrowed down your ideas and selected your very best, it’s worthwhile creating an editorial calendar to help showcase how your content will develop over time. This will help you and your team stay on track throughout the project, and give you a clear idea of what you should be doing at all times.

Once your ideas have been validated and aligned to your goals, you can begin the creation process.

 

Tip 5 – Creation

 

When it comes to creating amazing content, you’re only limited by two things: your imagination and your budget.

It’s time to take the wealth of ideas you’ve developed, and create something awesome. Don’t feel limited by your skillset; it doesn’t matter if you’re not a fantastic illustrator or videographer, you can always find help (like the team at GDR) who would be happy to help.

Decide which format(s) will work best with each idea, and utilise the relevant talent. Below I’ve included a brief summary of some of the major content types, but once again, this is only a guideline. If you’ve got an idea for a piece that works well with your audience, and you’ve got the budget to carry it out, then the sky is your limit.

Written Content

This type of marketing content includes, but is not limited to; Blog posts; Guest features; Interviews; Surveys/Quizzes; Newsletters; FAQs; Whitepapers.

When it comes to writing a blog post or similar content, there are a number of steps you can take to ensure it has the desired impact. Step one is making sure your headline gets noticed.

 

Creating Headlines That Count

You should think of your headline as the bait on the end of your fishing rod. Whilst you need the rest of the rod to pull the fish in, it’s the bait that makes them bite.

The key elements you need to remember are: Keep it short and shareable; Target it towards the audience you’re talking to; Entice the users with stats, facts, figures or findings.

 

Headlines

Whilst it’s all well and good knowing what makes brilliant headlines, it’s also important to understand why headlines sometimes fail; and if you’re going to learn, you might as well learn from the worst.

Still, the headline is only the start. Once you cracked that, it’s time to focus on the body text.

 

Writing The Ideal Article

There’re plenty of ways to craft the perfect blog post, and many of these skills can be applied to other forms of content as well.

As an overview, try to weave a story through your content, take the reader on a journey from a-z, and ensure you provide whatever you promised in your title. To improve readability, use a mix of text and images, and break the article into chunks using subheadings.

 

Visual And Interactive Content

Visual and interactive content can include, but is in no way limited to: Illustrations; Memes; Apps; Charts; Infographics; Videos; Maps; Microsites.

I know what you’re thinking: “Infographics are so 2017!” But be that as it may, they are still a great way to portray ideas in a digestible and (most importantly) shareable fashion.

Utilising visual or interactive mediums is a fantastic way to enhance your content and improve the chances of it having a real impact. But before you steam ahead and blow your entire budget on a fancy video, remember to factor in your audience.

Are they the kind of people to want to share your visual work? Do they frequent the sites relevant to this kind of content? Is your content, in this format, easy for users to pick up and share?

 

Tip 6 – Proofing & Publication

 

You’re close to the final hurdle now. You’ve watched your ideas grow and develop into awesome content, and you’re ready to share it with an active and interested audience. However, before you succumb to the excitement and hit publish, take a second to pause and review.

Proof Your Work

Have an external source, whether it be a trained colleague, or a paid service, proof your work; checking for any spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors. It’s well worth having an expert do this properly (instead of simply relying on your partner to quickly spot-check your content the night before the deadline), as they’ll be able to offer constructive comments on how to maximise the readability of your content, ensuring the best possible product is delivered to your audience.

 

Publishing Your Content Marketing

With the final piece proofed and ready to be set live upon the world, it’s time to determine how the article will be published.

 

External sources

If you’re creating a guest feature, then you should have a guest blog lined up and ready to receive the post, having carried out the outreach before the promotion process.

Even if you haven’t secured a guest spot, there are plenty of external sites that allow users to publish content, each with their own variations on content types.

User-generated content websites, like Buzzfeed are ideal for easily-digestible, entertaining content, such as lists, quizzes and polls.

However, long-form content is better suited on platforms like LinkedIn.

Don’t just feel limited by one site though, your content can always be repurposed and redeveloped to suit different sites. However, when publishing to external sources, ensure that the platform is not only relevant to your users, but also frequented by the people you’re targeting as well.

 

Internal Content Marketing Publishing

If you’re publishing on your own blog, there are several questions you should ask yourself:

– Which format will you use?

– This should have already been decided in the creation process, but you may want to double-down and repurpose the content into multiple formats to suit different platforms.

– Will you put it live all at once, or will you drip feed it to your users?

– Decide whether your content will work best as one entire piece, or whether you could increase interactions by breaking it down into smaller chunks.

– When will it go live?

If you already have a publishing schedule (which you most definitely should), ensure your content is primed and ready to go on each of the corresponding dates. If not, evaluate your social media feeds using easily available tools to see when your users are most active, and use this data to influence your publication dates.

 

Content Marketing – Now It’s Up To You

Now you know where and how you’ll be publishing your content, it’s time to unleash your creation. Promoting the content, and engaging the influencers you’ve collected will be covered properly in a later blog post, but for now, don’t forget to seed the content via social, and continue to engage with the influencers and communities you’ve connected with.

 

How can GDR help?

 

Now you know where and how you’ll be publishing your content, it’s time to unleash your creation. Promoting the content, and engaging the influencers you’ve collected will be covered properly in a later blog post, but for now, don’t forget to seed the content via social, and continue to engage with the influencers and communities you’ve connected with. Need help with your content marketing then why not get in contact with one of our experienced, local team today.

 

We’d love to help!