Content is the magic ingredient to your digital marketing success. Since your website and social media are at the heart of your online presence, the content you share through those channels is crucial. However, if you don’t have a content strategy, you won’t be able to create the type of content that will attract the right audience or boost your SEO. Here are seven steps to creating great web content to fuel your online marketing.
1. Focus On Your UVP
Your unique value proposition is what sets you apart from the competition. Your content should highlight your UVP by ensuring visitors know right away what you do and how you do it differently. Good content explains what people already know about the products and services they need. However, great content explains why you do it better while solving your audience’s problems. By positioning your UVP prominently throughout all your content, you not only improve your content but also increase brand awareness.
1. Focus On Your UVP
Your unique value proposition is what sets you apart from the competition. Your content should highlight your UVP by ensuring visitors know right away what you do and how you do it differently. Good content explains what people already know about the products and services they need. However, great content explains why you do it better while solving your audience’s problems. By positioning your UVP prominently throughout all your content, you not only improve your content but also increase brand awareness.
2. Audit Your Content
Keeping an eye on your existing content allows you to find new opportunities to add missing information. It also provides insights into content that has become stale based on industry standards. Great web content is always up-to-date and provides evergreen content that maintains its relevance. Instead of repeating yourself ad nauseum, your audits ensure you are providing fresh content, not overlapping to the point where content simply repeats the same ideas again and again. You also get a better picture of how much content you need to rework, replace, or create for your content schedule.
3. Target Personas, Not Just An Audience
While knowing your audience is important, creating personas is where you really make an impact. An audience is too general; it needs to be broken down so you can give people what they need. You pinpoint interests, needs, and goals with buyer behavior for each persona, and base topics on the pain points for each group.
4. Follow the Customer Journey
Create content based on the leg of each person’s customer journey. Instead of generalizing content, provide specific answers to the varying questions people commonly have as they make their way through your sales funnel. If your content provides everything from increasing awareness to conversion (how to use your product or services), you help close the loop and carry people along to the next steps.
5. Use Educational Content
Discovery is often at the heart of your visitor’s intent. Using content to educate your audience about the industry shows your industry expertise. Answering common questions and explaining industry trends helps them become your customers. Don’t forget to tell them about your culture, using sections like About Us and even Careers. Include longer pieces such as downloadable whitepapers, case studies and eBooks. Feature your key team members. Share your thought leadership ideas. Include an FAQ. In other words, your content is not just your blog. It’s all the information you provide, including videos, and the business side for career hunters.
6. Be Scannable
Use sub-headings to improve keywords while also making your content scannable. It helps with SEO, and it also allows your audience to see what your content has to say, making them more likely to want to read it.
7. Be Compelling
If you aren’t a writer, consider hiring a company to take on your writing. You need to have compelling content that reflects your brand while making people want to read more. Information needs to be relevant, educational, and, even better, entertaining so the quality of your content stands out.
