Content Creation
The best content is authentic, engaging, conveys your tone of voice and branding and is published consistently.
Engaging with and expanding your audience
Content creation is all about giving your audience a reason to keep engaging with your brand. It's the essential in-bound marketing technique that keeps people coming back for more. And if you're doing it right, it's about growing and engaging with your audience. Tea Break Consulting can help you with any part of this process.
Setting content goals
Different companies and organisations will have different goals for their content. Look at your overall business goals and identify what your content should be achieving first and foremost. Keep these goals in mind for every piece you create. But do bear in mind that you don't want a strong sales message in your content. That will only turn off your audience and lessen engagement with your brand. Here are some goals examples:
- Sales/lead generation
- Industry thought leader
- Consumer education
- Community creation
- Visitation generation
Identifying your tone
The first step before creating any content is to identify the tone of voice your communications should express. Depending on your product or service and your audience, you could choose multiple adjectives to help you set and keep to your tone. What personality best expresses your brand? Here are some examples of tone you could choose for your content:
- Tourism and travel services: informed, youthful, hip, humorous, helpful, opinionated
- Tech reviews: knowledgeable, snarky, brutally honest, thought-provoking
- Financial services: trustworthy, wise, mature, to-the-point
- Sporting goods sales: energetic, dedicated, inspiring, enthusiastic
The best kinds of content
Your content should be determined by your product or service, your USPs (unique selling points), your business goals, your tone of voice, and your audience engagement. For blog content, and social media posts, put yourself in the mindset of your audience. What would you want to be reading about and what would inspire you to come back for more? Also consider these best practices:
- Post about what you know, in your unique tone of voice
- Don't make it all about sales
- Be authentically you
- Communicate insider details about your business/sector
- Engage with your audience by keeping on top of social media comments
- Don't be afraid to be opinionated if that's in keeping with your brand
- Share related content from others (especially thought leaders or influencers in your industry that you think will be engaging to your audience). Give credit, link back to or tag the originator of the content.
- Post. your positive testimonials - showing people how other people love your product or service will help them to consider becoming a customer.
Developing a content schedule
Develop a realistic content calendar and post regularly. Do you have enough content ideas to create a blog once a week or once a month? Research competitor content for ideas and frequency. Then, make sure to use your great content across multiple channels. Here's the ideal content creation flow:
- Blog published on your website with link to sign up to your newsletter
- Short intro with relevant hashtags and link to blog published on multiple social media channels (make sure image/video posted is optimised for each channel)
- Branded newsletter featuring blog image/video with intro paragraph and link to blog emailed to newsletter subscribers
Do the research
Even with everything outlined above, your content could miss the mark if you don't pay attention to the data.
AUDIENCE ANALYSIS
The most successful marketing is based on creating more of what your audiences are already engaging with. It's highly worthwhile conducting an in-depth analysis of your social media stats to see what kind of content resonates with your audiences across different platforms. This kind of analysis should be conducted at least monthly so that you can adjust your content to meet the changing needs of your consumers.
Your web analytics will give you even more data on social outcomes including bounce and conversion rates.
KEYWORD RESEARCH
Keyword research will help you develop appropriate content people are already searching for. Just tweaking those search terms in your content could mean the difference between a stagnant post and something going viral. It's not about changing your content necessarily, but using the correct terminology to generate the greatest clicks-through.
COMPETITOR ANALYSIS
You may think your business is unique. But there are almost certainly similarly focused businesses out there you could learn from. Sure, you want to disrupt the industry, but conducting competitor analysis will help you determine what content is most likely to resonate with your audience. What's succeeding for others in your field and what's tanking? Competitor analysis can also help you discover (among many other things):
- Additional content ideas
- What to avoid
- When and how frequently to post
- Useful hashtags
Tea Break Consulting is here to help
If you don't have time to fully commit to developing regular, engaging content in-house, I'm here to help. Getting all of those details perfect, including keyword research and competitor analysis, so content is optimised for the best possible engagement on each platform is not easy if you don't have the experience or expertise.
Need academic or technical content to be reimagined for greater engagement and reach? Here are some examples of blogs I've written from academic reports in a collaboration with the University of Kent.
