Creating quality content is crucial to any business’ marketing campaign, persuading its target audience to purchase its products while establishing the brand’s uniqueness and expertise in the industry.
Therefore, it is imperative that businesses pursue content creation in a strategic fashion without merely echoing the competition’s, in order to ensure that the marketing campaign runs smoothly and delivers results.
Common Mistakes in Content Creation
Before delving into the new methods that you can apply, you have to take into consideration the common mistakes businesses commit when enacting their content creation strategy. With this knowledge, you will be able to avoid these pitfalls that cost valuable resources.
Lack of Focus
Some businesses simply do not even have a clear content creation strategy. Practicing a variety of advanced methods without set goals will only be a waste of time and effort. Your content will be scatter-shot hitting multiple targets but without making any real concentrated impact.
Erratic Publication
It is hard to keep the momentum going from the excitement of the beginning phases of content creation in the long run without a publication calendar. Starting without a steady stream of content will then lead to less and less content in the future, which is inevitably followed by a shrinking interest from your audience.
Business-centric Content
It is important to talk about your own business and its products/services, but you cannot solely rely on content focused on just that particular subject. Your readership will tire of reading about how good your company and your offerings are without other topics that concern their own interests.
Lack of Metrics
Applying all the tips and tricks you’ve read online or listened to from talks and seminars to make great content is all well and good. However, without the proper way of measuring its results, you will have no idea how exactly your content is helping (or hurting) your marketing campaign.
New Content Creation Ideas
Now that you know what usually causes problems in content creation, you can then focus on implementing new methods that will further develop your strategy and take your marketing campaign to the next level.
This method is built on the old idea of disassembling a working system to find out how it works, and then reassembling it or creating a brand new one. Essentially, social reverse engineering is looking for you and your competition’s content that has made an impact on social media, and building relationships with the people who originally shared such content, especially those with their own blogs and/or websites.
You can look up how well your competitor’s content does on Facebook using the Facebook Recommendations tool for convenience. Just remember to log out of your own account first so your results aren’t skewed.
By reaching out to these people, you can ask for their opinion about the content, such as what they like about it and what can be improved. Once you’ve established good rapport with them, you can then ask for more opportunities to share your content through their own networks. You will then reach a whole new audience, and you can repeat the process with these new prospects to continually build more relationships and increase your brand’s visibility.
Comments as Idea Generators
Comments on blogs and social media platforms aren’t just a way to interact with your audience. They can be used to stir discussions related to the original topic which can then be collated, edited, and elaborated upon in a whole new article.
Famous Bloggers has used this technique to great effect, building a great relationship with their reader base while improving their content creation process. Just make sure to give credit where it’s due, so that the commenters do not feel like you are merely “stealing” their ideas. You can even have them write up a great post if you feel that they are up to the task.
Checking Your Website’s Search Data
If your website has a search feature installed, you need to mine it for important information. Look for search terms that are frequently used. That means your visitors are interested in those particular subjects. Capitalize on that by creating content related to those search terms.
Taking Inspiration from Quora
Quora is an online community that lets members discuss a variety of topics ranging from film studies to cooking recipes to SEO tools. Questions are asked and members provide their own answers, which other members can then comment on, vote, and share if the answers are deemed worthy. You can utilize this community to get inspiration for new content by looking for unanswered questions. Follow these topics so you can come back and answer them, complete with your link.
Utilizing Various Tools
There are a great number of tools you can leverage to come up with the right kind of content for your target audience, including:
1. Google Analytics– Find out the top keywords your visitors use to find your website and who your organic search referrers are. You will want to come up with more content-related keywords to bring in more traffic, taking special note of your long tail keywords that do well, as these are less competitive while being more targeted.
You can also check your webpages’ bounce rate. If specific pages with high bounce rates fall in line with your visitors’ topical searches, it might simply be a problem of not offering the exact information they’re looking for. Create new content that has the same subject matter, but also expand on other related areas.
2. Google Alerts– This tool send alerts to your Gmail account about content-related search queries you enter. Good search queries that you can use are simple questions (the 5Ws and H), as well as mentions of you and your competition’s brand. You can then create content that directly answers general questions and concerns about your company. You can also provide content that your company is lacking but other businesses are capitalizing on.
3. SEO Gadget Content Strategy Tool– SEO Gadget developed a tool that shows popular content from multiple major websites (e.g. Google News, Twitter, Digg), as well as bloggers and editors, for link building prospects through Excel and Google Docs. Just add whatever search query onto the Excel document, and the tool will display trending topics in a clear and concise format.
5. Social Mention– See what people are talking about in social media through this tool that lists the mentions for your search queries in a format similar to a search engine results page. You can also sort results by date or by source, and from as far as last month to the last hour. It even shows the search queries’ top keywords, hashtags and users, as well as their influence and sentiments on the subject.
6. Übersuggest– Knowing what people actually plug in to search engines is a great way of creating the exact kind of content they need. Übersuggest lets you do just that by providing the keyword suggestions based on real search terms.You can then create a database of keywords as a foundation for your future content.
There are plenty of other techniques that you can apply to improve your content creation strategy, but they can be broken down to fundamental ideas. You have to understand how your target audience thinks through researching your own content and participating in related communities and social media platforms, as well as making use of the many tools available online.
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