Creating Quality Content for Your Business: The 7 Elements
Creating quality content for your business, blog or website will make your brand stand out from the crowd!
If you already know what your customers expect and have discovered how you can meet their needs using your products/services, then you need to learn the best way to communicate your organizational goals.
With the recent hype in digital marketing, content writing for websites, search engine ranking, and business copywriting services have become overall part of our day-to-day business functions.
No individual, brand or organization can go a day without sending direct or indirect communications to its global audience and business partners.
These messages can be sent through follow-up emails, mobile messaging, blog posting, content profiling infographics, and video conferencing.
Creating quality content and adopting effective promotional strategies for your business can accelerate your marketing journey and increase returns on investment.
When creating quality content, think in terms of producing more effective content that is organized, attractive, engaging and easily read to your audience and search engines.
Below are the 7 key elements that will help you in creating quality content for your business, or company.
Creating Quality Content for Your Business: The 7 Elements
#1. Know Your Audience and How to Reach Them
Your today customers are evolving!
The first step to creating quality content is to define your target audience.
Have you done your market research offline and online before creating your content?
What do you know about your audience, their age brackets, gender, income levels, educational backgrounds, and locations?
What are their biggest needs, pain points, desires, challenges, and problems of your current or target audience?
Is your content simply presented in the language and usability of your audience so it can solve their problems?
You cannot create quality content on a niche you’re not familiar with. So what are your answers to the above questions?
If your content marketing effects and resources would be effective, you need to create a detailed picture of who your audiences are, what they want, and how to connect directly with them.
If you’re a startup entrepreneur, or a business manager thinking about expanding your existing businesses, this Course will teach you everything you need to find out what your market needs.
Read: How to Develop a Winning Business Plan in 5 Easy Steps
If you’re running online business, you can use digital analytics, surveys, and several online tools out there to get information regarding your audience.
Also, research and find out who are your competitions, what they are doing and not doing.
The best way to differentiate yourself from your competitors is to provide the best value to your customers!
You have to follow-through by creating quality content and useful resources, ones that meet and exceed their exceptions.
Read: 6 Steps on How to Start Online Business and Make Money out of It
#2. Start Creating Original Quality Contents
One of the best ways to generate original ideas for your projects is to discover a problem to solve.
You can start by conducting exclusive research about the topic; and then discussing it with other members of your team – Brainstorming.
After the analysis and considerations, figure out how to improve your particular users experience and provide solutions via your content.
Spend a significant amount of time researching your subject and so for the content creation.
After the research make sure you write down your thoughts, ideas and action plans.
Your original content should be relevant to its industry; and useful to the target audience.
Irrespective of your interest, the three fundamental purpose of any content is to inform, educate, and entertain.
While writing your content, have a clear outline of the points to be covered in your topic, and start with exciting introduction your audience will easily understand.
Remember to structure your content well enough. And state what the content is for and what the user would get out of it!
You need to break down complicated topics and/or ideas, making them easily digestible.
For example: Every cause has an effect, and every effect could be either an advantage or disadvantage.
Tell a story using examples and possible case scenarios to make your write-ups more effective.
Don’t forget to wrap-up each writings with a conclusion, suggestion and/or recommendation that points the way out for your readers.
#3. Make it Short and Direct Communication
People learn differently, and have limited time too.
There is nothing better than going straight to the main point so that readers wouldn’t get loss or get distracted on the way.
Sources revealed that your Content Marketing Strategy should not be too salesy!
Instead, your attention should focus on creating quality content that easily connects, and builds relationships with your audience.
According to Neil Patel, 61% of online shoppers have made a purchase based on a blogger’s recommendation.
This is because when a potential customer is excited and satisfied by reading or watching your original contents, he/she may initiate good conversations with you and with other people within the community.
These conversations can lead to sales conversion and trust.
There are different ways you can communicate to your audience:
Through videos, text-only documents, blog posts, Ads piece, audios, pictures, short reports, books, diagrams, symbols, etc.
Note that two or three of these information media can be combined together in order to achieve your customers’ specific environments.
Most people understand visual content like an infographic, podcasts, and webinars.
If you are writing long articles, use images and other visual examples to give your readers ‘visual breaks’.
Creating quality content also means giving your content a strong headline that say a lot in few words.
Headings are the first thing people will read and use to decide whether to open your content or not.
According to Copyblogger, 80% of people will see your headlines, but only 20% of them will read the rest of your content.
Your headings or titles should be able to sparks interest, provoke thoughts, and invites readers to ‘click’ and/or open your content.
Creating Quality Content for Your Business: The 7 Elements
#4. Hope You Know It? Content is King!
In January 1996, Bill Gates wrote an essay titled “Content is King”.
Since then, this phrase has become one of the widest used Internet memes.
As a business, having a blog is one of the most cost-effective ways to attract new traffic and engage with existing customers.
If you are writing for the web, how can you come up with a content idea that is original and people will respond to?
If you write original content (and NOT duplicating contents), search engines will also help your website get more exposure.
Use your content as a way to introduce your customers to your products or services – showcasing how they can get the most out of your offers.
The ideal word count for writing a blog should be 1000+ words content. But, in creating quality content, targeting more word content does not really mean better content.
Use short sentences, paragraphs and subheadings to keep a clear step-by-step direction and guides your readers through your articles.
55% of web visitors spend actively fewer than 15 seconds on a page.
So ensure the proper use of headings, bold, sub-headers and links to other related contents to improve readability.
Bullet points, number lists are much easier to read and scan through than using the traditional block essay format.
Nevertheless, if your content is found relevant by your readers, and able to provide the solutions they seek, they will completely read your article or even bookmark it for a later visit.
Also, consider whether the content will render fast and well across most user tech devices and screen sizes; especially in terms of smartphones, tablets and personal computers.
Ensure good website designs and layouts. Today, 60% of mobile web users use their phone as their primary means of accessing contents online.
#5. Be Accurate! And Show Credibility
When designing, producing or writing content, be accurate and avoid all sorts of errors, such as wrong names, grammatical errors, omissions, etc.
Thousands of people are going to view or read your content.
Spellings, mistakes can have huge negative impact on personal reputation or a company’s image.
Always review your works over again, looking for what to change or correct.
Remember to involve some trusted colleagues and industry experts to help improve your work, especially when you are writing for a book.
Further, create trust by giving credits to your sources of information, or the author of your content.
People will definitely believe your story when it is endorsed by, linked to, or came from well known personalities and authoritative brands.
Don’t be limited. You need to give your customers the best and often “go the extra mile” by helping prospects move in the right direction.
This might also include connecting them to the right suppliers or linking them out of your websites.
Be personal also!
People usually connect with the human side of a brand and will like funny faces.
It takes a community to do a business. Customers will share with their friends and usually do business with people they like.
If possible, show the real person behind the words. And when you do this, you are building trust with your audience.
Linking to other websites will also increase your inbound links and ranking on search engines.
Related: 12 Reasons Why You Should Read Every Day | Abbakin
#6. Create Actionable and Engaging Content
Don’t make your quality content boring!
Quality content must contain a clear call to action (CTA): with obvious reasons why people should contact you, use your products, or share your contents with others.
Creating actionable content will make it more engaging and can spark conversations, positive feedbacks or questions on how to apply the information or use the product.
This may include asking the reader for comment, read more, sign up for a newsletter, purchase a product, call you by phone, download your freebies, etc.
Be creative; be a resource and provide some takeaways!
With good writing skills, you could also leave your audience with logical questions, and a sense of curiosity to hunt for more.
Giving them something to do while reading, or as soon as they are done reading; this can provide the answers they seek, address their needs, and improve their lives.
Include freebies that will entice them to stick around, and call back.
Find something that can educate them, become inspired from, become better and continue to inform their friends about your brand.
For example, see what Abbakin is giving out for free so you too can consider based on your industry:
· free business consulting,
· free online business courses,
· useful guides, videos
· free business eBooks,
· trade discounts,
· free seminars,
· free startup checklists, etc.
Read: 9 Growth Hacking Strategies to Get Your Business on Top of the Industry
#7. Market Your Content well
If you fail to market your business, visual contents, blog posts, podcasts et al, you will not succeed in online marketing no matter the quality of your content.
Having or creating quality content does not mean it will generate leads for your business.
People must get to know about it for you to sell.
After crating quality content, you need to think about marketing your products.
How?
The best way to start is to develop a Content Marketing Plan, set up your Marketing Budget and then build a Marketing Team that will deliver your message and help achieve your company’s objective.
Examples of top company’s objectives for social marketing include:
- better customer engagement,
- increase revenue generation,
- better customer experience,
- increased industry leadership, and
- operational efficiency.
Today, social media have changed the way people lives, and your company cannot afford to ignore the power of social media.
Your customers’ feedback, social shares and comments determine whether your content solved a problem, answered a question, provided entertainment or expert insights.
These are the metrics that track and measure your published contents.
The days of ‘build it and they will come’ have passed. Share your contents across users’ popular media and engage with them.
The best way to engage your readers is by replying their comments. This will show that you care and will build more trust and create relationship.
Increasing audience participation and engagement means more sales and improved return on your investment (ROI).
Here is the formula:
Content + Marketing = Qualified Leads + Engagement = Sales.
If you have limited capital, you can start promoting and marketing your contents online using social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, You-Tube, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and even Snapchat for free!
Choose your preferred platform e.g. Twitter or Facebook for a start to get exposure and to attract new readers to visit your website.
Target your Ads, promote your content and get it in front of the ‘right’ readers. And this will increase you lead generation greatly.
Email Marketing is another cheap and effective way for promoting your business services, products and websites.
If you have the budget, consider investing on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), PPC Advertising, Mobile Marketing and employing other traditional media advertising.
Read: 8 Reasons Why Your Business Need Mobile Marketing Strategies
BONUS POINTS
#8. Consider Outsourcing Partners
Outsourcing can deliver clear advantage to your business as long as you choose the right outsourcing partners.
Creating high quality and unique content is one of the most important parts of any online marketing strategy.
Content writing is an art and a skill that takes us time to develop.
Not everybody is good at working on the editorial calendar, creating new content types, and managing the way people communicate on the Internet!
Rather than paying for the infrastructures and full-time employees, businesses ranging from struggling startups to established firms can outsource part of their workloads.
If you do not have the times due to daily work schedules, contracting your content writing and content marketing tasks to a company or a team of experienced freelance copywriters or bloggers can be the best way to go.
But ensure you hire someone who understands your industry and who can optimize your contents for search engines, as well as write copies that sell and get shared on the social networks.
This will take the burden of content creation completely off your shoulders, and allow you to concentrate on your core business operations.
Related: How to Hire Social Media Experts That Will Grow Your Business
#9. Guest Blogging
If your business is seeking to gain more site visitors, attract high-quality backlinks, boost SEO rankings; and build authority with your audience, then you need to focus on creating high-quality contents.
The objectives for creating your content will guide you to the right solution.
Another easy way to creating quality content is to invite guest bloggers to contribute to your posts.
One important thing to consider when involving guest writers is to do a search about their profiles.
If you’re unsure about guest blogging guidelines, use Google and search for leaders in your content topics.
Quality content is what separates the winners from the losers online…
– Forbes.
We hope this 7 elements of creating quality content could help. To better understand how Google defines a “high quality” website. Read: Google Quality Guidelines here.
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Comments (2)
I really loved the stuff. I’ll put it into practice.
We glad you do Andre