How to Create Great Content for your Content Marketing Strategy

March 19th 2018 | By Sarah McInerney

In our last post we discussed the benefits of content marketing and why it MUST form part of your digital marketing strategy.

Content marketing drives higher conversion rates. It makes it easier to communicate with customers and enhances trust. Brand awareness is boosted, search engine positions improve and crucially, your marketing becomes targeted.

The content part of content marketing can involve anything from articles and blogs through to infographics, social posts, guides, e-books, e-newsletters, guides, case studies and white papers.

So that’s all good. We know the benefits of content marketing. But how to create that all-important compelling, authoritative content that gets read and widely shared? And, crucially, leads to trust being instilled in your brand and, eventually, a transaction taking place. Precisely what we’re looking at in this post.

How to create that all-important compelling, authoritative content that gets read and widely shared?

Understanding the customer journey

To learn how to do content marketing, you need to think about the journey you take when you have an issue or something sparks your interest. This is probably best explained with an example. It starts with the initial query stage.

Initial query stage

You’re thinking about buying a holiday home in Spain. It excites you, but you have a mountain of questions, because there is so much you need to learn. So you turn to Google and search for, ‘tips on buying a property in Spain’. This search leads you to a blog titled, ‘Top Ten Tips on Buying a Property in Spain’, and an infographic captioned, ‘Buying a Property in Spain, the Process Explained’.

More information stage

You study the information and, digesting all the information you find, you start to trust the publisher of the content. There’s a link to a landing page inviting you to download even more detailed information, ‘Ten Things you MUST Consider When Buying a Property in Spain’. On reading this, you are fairly certain you can trust the person who has put the information guide together. You provide your email address and you receive useful information in your inbox further explaining the buying process and all the legal and financial considerations.

Decision stage

You move on to the decision stage. You are ready to start choosing the people to help you buy your Spanish bolthole. You need a property agent, advice on finance and a good Spanish lawyer. The guide you recently read was published by a Spanish lawyer. You’re now satisfied, thanks to everything you’ve read, that they are trustworthy. They are offering a free initial consultation, and their case studies and video testimonials (more content) are glowing references of their quality work. So you click on their free consultation offer and there begins your relationship.

So you can see how content marketing works and the type of material you need to be outputting in order to silo your leads. And the great news is that your efforts don’t end there.

Providing you output content that solves problems and attends to commonly asked questions, you will find that it is readily shared. Social media is rapidly catching up with search engines as a top way to get content out to the masses.

To learn how to do content marketing, you need to think about the journey you take when you have an issue or something sparks your interest.

9 things content needs to be to work as an effective strategy

So, what does content need to be or do to really work as an effective strategy?

It needs to solve a common problem
It should address frequently asked questions
It HAS to be carefully populated with the right keywords
It must demonstrate expertise and authority
It has to be helpful and informative
The content should be engaging and specific to your audience
It should keep people coming back for more by posing additional queries and promising to address them in future content
It should be delivered in a range of engaging formats including written, graphic and video
It’ll need to be well presented, well written and well put together

Next steps?

If you’re ready to embark on your content marketing strategy but feel you could use some help in crafting your words, visuals and video, why not talk to Figment? It’s what we do.