Over the years the need for creating great quality content has increased. Increasingly, more brands are investing in content marketing but a lot fail to achieve their objectives. To make the most of the time and money invested in creating content to attract potential customers, you need to ensure that each piece of content you produce meets certain criteria.

1. Speak to the right audience

Before creating any content, make sure you know exactly who you are producing the content for. It is imperative to have a good understanding of who your audience is, why they need your product or service, their challenges, their hesitations when buying from you and even their questions about you.

To help you get started, take the time to develop personas for each segment of your audience. Having deeper insights about your audience will help you create content that resonates with them on a personal level. There are a number of tools that will help you build your personas such as Google Analytics, Hitwise, TGI and other useful marketing tools. Among the different sources of information is also the social insight (Facebook Audience Insights).

2. Optimise for search and conversions

While it is important that your content is written for your readers, it is also important that is optimised for search. This will ensure that the right signs are given to Google to rank your page for a certain query.

Your content should always include a call to action (CTA) to encourage your readers to visit other relevant resources on your site. This helps in creating a positive user experience and assisting people through their journey.

3. Provide value

Every piece of content you create needs to provide value to your customers. This can be done through solving a problem, including links to additional resources, and for example adding videos where necessary.

4. Educate and trigger emotions

People often search for solutions to problems online. Keyword research will show you what your customers are searching for online and what their considerations are. Utilising such data will help you create content that offers solutions to their problems or questions.

5. Pick the most appropriate format

Not all data is consumed in the same way. Regardless of what your content is about, you always need to think how to best convey your message. For example, instead of creating a text heavy post full of figures, why not put this information in a form of an infographic to present it in a more visual and digestible way? User intent can inform what the most appropriate content format is, in order to deliver information to the users.

6. Distribution

There is no point trying to sell dog food to cat owners. The same principle applies to digital content distribution. If you aren’t using channels where your audience can be found or are not getting the content in front of the right eyeballs, then there is a high chance that your efforts will be wasted.

All Response Media Viewpoint

At All Response, we are always refining our methods to maximise the performance of our clients’ content campaigns. We do this by gaining a full understanding of their target audience, content trends and the best ways of delivering content with tools and audience insights, a fundamental part of our planning.