Items to Consider When Creating Content
Following on from my recent article on how to get the best from your marketing content, I thought it would be useful to provide a guide on what you need to consider when creating marketing content. Here are some key steps to consider when creating marketing content.
Content is the backbone of any successful marketing campaign and needs to be consistent across all your marketing channels. Whether you’re working on social media posts, email newsletters, blog articles, or video ads, high-quality content attracts, engages, and converts your audience. But coming up with fresh, impactful ideas can be challenging. So how can you generate content that will drive your marketing campaign to success? Here’s a guide to help you develop compelling, audience-focused content.
1. Understand Your Audience
Before you start creating content, it’s crucial to understand who you’re creating it for. Developing a deep understanding of your target audience helps ensure that your content resonates with them and meets their needs.
Key steps to profile your audience:
Create audience personas: These fictional characters represent your ideal customers. They can help you identify pain points, preferences, and behaviours.
Analyse customer data: Use analytics tools to examine the demographics, interests, and behaviours of your current audience.
Conduct surveys and interviews: Ask your existing customers or prospects directly about their needs, challenges, and content preferences.
2. Set Clear Campaign Goals
What do you want your marketing campaign to achieve? The answer to this question will influence the style of your content. Campaign goals will determine the tone, format, and type of content you produce.
Common marketing campaign goals include:
Brand awareness: Creating content that introduces your brand to new audiences and/or raises its profile with your current audience.
Lead generation: Developing content that encourages users to provide their contact information (e.g., eBooks, webinars). Ensure you give a clear call to action.
Engagement: Producing content that sparks interaction and conversation on social media or your website.
Conversions: Creating content designed to drive actions such as sales, sign-ups, or downloads. Ensure there is a clear call to action.
3. Leverage Content Pillars
Content pillars are broad topics or themes that represent the core areas of your business. These pillars provide a framework for your content strategy and help maintain consistency.
How to use content pillars:
Identify your core topics: Based on your business, what are the main topics that resonate with your audience? For example, a health and wellness brand might focus on fitness, nutrition, and mental health.
Create subtopics: Break each pillar down into smaller, specific ideas. For instance, under “fitness,” you could create subtopics like “HIIT workouts,” “yoga for beginners,” or “fitness tracking apps.”
Map content to each pillar: Create a variety of content (blog posts, social media updates, videos) around each subtopic. This helps ensure your campaign covers a diverse range of interests within your niche.
4. Use a Variety of Content Formats/Channels
Different people engage with marketing content in different ways and through different channels. To maximize the effectiveness of your marketing campaign, create content for all the relevant channels such as email, LinkedIn, Instagram, website etc.
Popular content formats include:
Blog posts and articles: Ideal for in-depth, educational content.
Infographics: Great for summarizing complex information or statistics.
Videos: Engaging and shareable, video content can help with both awareness and conversions.
Podcasts: Perfect for building a loyal, long-term audience.
Social media posts: Quick, snackable content that can be interactive and visually appealing.
Email newsletters: A personal way to nurture relationships and drive action.
5. Incorporate Storytelling
People connect with stories more than they do with dry facts or statistics. Storytelling adds an emotional element to your content, making it more memorable and impactful. Always try and add value to the reader, ask the question will this content help the reader?
Ways to tell a compelling story:
Customer success stories: Show how your product or service has helped solve real-world problems for customers.
Behind-the-scenes content: Offer a glimpse of your company culture, production process, or product development.
Brand journey: Share your company’s origin story, mission, and vision to connect with audiences on a deeper level.
Use relatable characters: Make your audience see themselves in your story—whether that’s a happy customer or a problem they can relate to.
Personalise stories: Make them relevant to the individual, use stories about you to make them human.
6. Repurpose Content
Creating content from scratch for every campaign can be time-consuming. Repurposing content from previous campaigns or high-performing pieces is an efficient way to generate fresh content.
Ways to repurpose content:
Turn blog posts into videos or podcasts: Repurpose long-form articles by summarizing key points in a video or podcast.
Create social media snippets: Extract quotes, stats, or visual highlights from existing content to share on platforms like Instagram or Twitter.
Make infographics: Convert complex articles into easy-to-digest infographics for sharing.
Re-share old content: Sometimes, simply updating older content with new data or insights can give it new life.
Use content from another author: If content is relevant to your audience you can use the theme and add your views as long as you make reference to the original author.
7. Incorporate SEO and Keywords
Your content won’t be effective if no one sees it. Optimizing your content for search engines is crucial to increasing visibility and attracting organic traffic.
SEO best practices:
Keyword research: Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to find relevant keywords that align with your campaign goals.
On-page SEO: Include target keywords in your title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and within your content naturally.
Content structure: Make your content easy to read by using bullet points, short paragraphs, and clear headings.
Internal linking: Link to other pieces of content on your website to improve navigation and keep visitors engaged longer.
8. Monitor and Adjust Your Strategy
Once you start publishing your content, it’s important to track how it’s performing and make adjustments as needed. Use analytics tools to measure engagement, traffic, conversions, and other metrics.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) to track:
Traffic and reach: How many people are seeing your content?
Engagement rate: Are people liking, commenting, or sharing your content?
Conversion rate: How many people are taking the desired action (e.g., purchasing, signing up)?
Bounce rate: Are users leaving your site quickly, or are they staying and engaging?
If certain content types or topics perform better than others, double down on them. If something isn’t working, reassess and try a different approach.
Conclusion
Generating content for marketing campaigns requires creativity, strategy, and an understanding of your audience. By defining your goals, creating a variety of engaging content formats, and using data to optimize your efforts, you can craft a marketing campaign that resonates with your target audience and drives measurable results.
Remember, the key to success is creating content that speaks to the needs and interests of your audience while aligning with your business objectives. Stay flexible and continuously evaluate your content’s performance to keep improving and innovating over time. Happy content creation!