How to make every piece of content, your masterpiece!

If you attended our digital day 2017, you’ll know all about this content talk hosted by Katie Moore, our content manager. In case you missed it, we’re here with a recap of what we covered during that session and a helpful reminder for those of you that attended the event.

One key takeaway

If you take away one thing from Katie’s talk, it is simply to make every piece of content your masterpiece. That means focus on high quality, relevancy and always have the online user experience in mind. After all, this is what Google is really taking into consideration with its algorithm as we head further into 2017 and so you can’t be avoiding it if you want to improve your overall SEO.

Not only that but globally, every 60 seconds we are producing over 1,500 blog posts – that’s a huge amount of content that you’re competing against online. To overcome this we need to ultimately ensure our content stands out and is hyper-relevant to our audiences in order to gain traction. How do we do that? Read on to hear some of Katie’s top tips to maximise your content efforts and ensure that whatever you go on to create from here is really working hard for you and your brand.

CASE STUDY: a travel campaign to shout about

One campaign that performed well was our Top 10 Most Instagrammed Places animated infographic for CEWE Photoworld. For this campaign we identified the top searches around travel and ensured the campaign was photography-focussed to match the brand positioning and audience interests. From there, we created the campaign for blue Monday in January and as you can see from the results it gained a lot of traction online.

Tip 1: Put your audience at the centre of your marketing efforts

No longer can a brand work in isolation without any thought to their audience. Now is the time for brands to really get to grips with who their audiences are and this starts with audience segmentation to identify from three to five personas to target with different marketing messages and experiment with various content types until they find something that resonates well.

Through in-depth social media analysis, google analytics, first hand data, industry data and other tools, we can begin to segment our audiences, through identifying trends and patterns of different types of consumers including their demographics, interests and buying behaviours. You must remember that segments have different purchase behaviours and therefore need to be targeted through different messages and content types at varying times in their purchase journey.

By the end of your segmentation you’ll have a number of different audiences who you will be able to communicate with differently and at different times when they are buying your product or service.

Tip 2: Understand your audience’s pain points within your industry

We all go to Google for help, questions and advice. With 6.5 billion searches performed every single day, you as a brand need to be tapping into this. The easiest type of content to produce that really adds value is to go for content that answers these questions, in whichever content type will appeal to your audience segment you are targeting this piece of content with.

So how do we find your audience’s pain points, questions and queries they are searching for online? Well, that all starts with keyword research whereby we find a mix of the short and long-term keywords and categorise. From there we identify the conversational analysis from that category of keywords to understand the intent behind these searches.

Match these queries back to your audience segments and then we can then start to suggest content that will add value directly to them. And remember, the content type doesn’t have to be just a blog post – it could be a video, infographic, FAQ, quiz – the list goes on, so think outside of the box.

Tip 3: Ensure every piece of content adds value

This is one of the most important tips! As we said earlier, there is a huge amount of content being posted, so don’t just post for the sake of it. Yes fresh content is good, but high quality, relevant content is even better.

Keep in mind that your content must have purpose, whether that is to provide entertainment, information or be useful – whatever it is, make sure it is adding value in some way. Think about this, if you wouldn’t do anything with that content, then why would your audience?

Before you go on to create new content, ensure your existing content is up to scratch with a content audit. This will highlight the pages which are doing well, pages that could be performing better and need to be optimised, those that should be consolidated and others that would be better to delete and perhaps start from scratch. Of course we do many of these audits here at iThinkMedia, so if you need any assistance, get in touch with our team of experts.

Tip 4: Make sure ideas are right for your brand and audience

Here’s the secret… ideas are super easy to come by, the hard part is matching those ideas back to your objectives, brand and audience. Start with a brainstorm including all the different people from various teams within the business. Take an interest in hearing out the introverts amongst you – although they might not be the loudest, their ideas can often be a lot more thought out and considered.

If the brainstorm amounts to nothing, don’t give up. Set up a pinterest board and within your team, pin ideas and inspiration onto the board until something starts to click. Look at other competitors’ content and see if you could build upon their ideas. Or alternatively, use tools such as BuzzSumo to identify the most popular, shared content within the industry and then see if you could build upon that – for example if the most popular piece of content is an infographic, think if it might work better as a video.

Tip 5: Don’t forget to SEO-optimise your content

After you’ve gone to all the effort of creating the content, you need to ensure you are optimising your content for SEO purposes – don’t fall at the final hurdle!

Some things you could do:

• Optimise your title tags and meta data

It’s a competitive landscape so you’ll want to make your meta data as enticing as possible for users to choose to read your article over any one else’s.

• Include internal links and recommended reads

Improve your user experience by allowing customers to pass through the website with ease. Ensure where you link to and what you recommend to read is relevant though otherwise it may hinder the overall experience on your website.

• Do include “call to actions”

Without call to actions, how are your audience meant to know what you want them to do? Put in buttons and actions for them to do whether it’s to book a test drive, call you, comment or share the post. And remember, only include one action or objective per post.

• Make sure your post is visually enticing to read

Help to keep users engaged in your content through breaking long bits of copy up with bullet points, photographs, big headers and videos.

View the full talk here on our SlideShare: