Content Creation

“Content, Content, Content”

You've probably heard the Real Estate Agent's mantra "Location! Location! Location!", well our mantra is "Content, Content, Content".

There are so many websites online - including those of your competitors - and such a lot of “noise”, it can seem overwhelming. And yet you can’t afford to go unnoticed and unloved.

No one really wants a website as they can be a pain to build and maintain, but as a hub for your online activity, they are indispensable.

Creating relevant, concise and valuable content for your website is definitely going to be to your advantage. Content includes all the text, graphics, video, and audio your audience will encounter.

There are definite opportunities for you to prosper in the online environment by making clever use of your compelling content. But, first things first:

Research your audience, and identify what real problems they have that you can provide workable solutions for.
Create a persona of your ideal customer - it’s a useful tool for understanding who your audience is, and will help you, for example, to write copy that speaks to your audience in their language. They’ll love you for that.
You need to have a content strategy that provides a framework for everything that’s going on to your website. Your content strategy needs to govern all the text, graphics, video, and audio your visitors will interact with.

Then, you can look at things like:

Email marketing, lead magnets and calls to action on your website. Give your visitors some valuable content to take away with them in exchange for their email address.
Look for opportunities to market your content to foster relationships with your audience. Telling your story on social media gets people talking about you, and sharing your information.
Update your content regularly.
Measure the effectiveness of your content.
Invest in targeted paid advertising.

Why is compelling content creation so important?

Relevant, concise and valuable content provides a positive experience for visitors to your website - a very good thing for you as you seek to convert these visitors into loyal customers. The best way to accomplish this with content is never to go for a “hard sell” approach - rather, seek to inform and educate people about you and earn their trust. Credibility is king.

The four different types of content

There are four key categories of content creation, attraction, authority, affinity, and action.

Attraction

Attraction content brings potential customers to your website. Content that typically fits under this section includes blogs that have been written and shared by you, newsletters, and resources.

The idea is to provide valuable information - something you know your target market is likely searching for - free of charge.

Affinity

Affinity content is content that will make your potential customers like you more than your competitors. You should aim to connect with the viewer's emotions by providing personable and relatable content. Video is a great way to do this as it uses both sight and sound to evoke a response. With affinity content you'll become an organisation your personas want to do business with.

Authority

Like the name suggests, authority content is content that demonstrates your authority on a certain topic. It is most likely to build trust with visitors to your site. You'll need informative, credible content that offers a solution to a problem. This may be a video demonstrating how to fix a common user error or a page answering frequently asked questions.

Action

Action content asks its viewer to take a certain action - this is how you convert visitors to customers. Call to actions (CTA) can be attached to pretty much any content you write, the trick is making the content convincing enough to persuade the viewer to take the action you want them to take.

An example of a CTA would be "buy now" or "download today".

Make things easy for visitors to your website

People visiting your website will be asking themselves questions like whether they’re in the right place, and, whether you have what they’re seeking. They’ll be looking to see if you have something even better than what they were originally searching for. And, they’ll be expecting clear instructions about what to do next on your website (make a purchase for example).

You need to keep these questions in mind when mapping out your content creation strategy and answer them on every page of your website.

Your efforts to be user-friendly won’t go unnoticed

An entire industry has arisen around optimising websites for internet searches and you need to consider optimisation when you’re working on your content strategy. Good SEO should be embedded in all your online marketing.

Basically, Google (by far the most-used search engine) will allocate a score to your pages. Your website will be rewarded for its compelling content that provides visitors to your website with a memorable experience, by ranking your website more highly in organic search results.

A few key points about SEO:

SEO is best achieved by having user-friendly content on your website.
Make sure your website is responsive on mobile devices.
SEO relies upon you creating clear paths to your relevant content. Decide on a set of keywords that you can map your content to, and allocate one page per keyword.
Measure your SEO results with analytics, and optimise further.

Design and content

If you’re looking at working with a website designer, ask them as soon as you can how important they think content is on a website. If they answer something like, “oh, we can just add that all in once the site’s finished”, alarm bells should start ringing.

You really need to work with people who understand the strategic value of content and are experienced at crafting superb copy your audience will love.

A couple of quick but important points to bear in mind:

Content drives design, and the layout of your website needs to support its content.
People will visit your website for its content rather than its design.
No one will love your website if it’s marred by badly written, poorly researched content, no matter how easy it is on the eye. The answer is: create valuable content!

Content goes everywhere

We've talked a lot about content on your website but this isn't the only place your content should go. You should be publishing your content in as many places as possible so as many people see it as possible.

Some other places you can disperse content includes:

Newsletter
Social media post
Podcast
Email
Blog
Video platforms such as Vimeo and YouTube
Paid ad

If you write an article, publish it to your blog then share it on social media. You could also mention the article and include an excerpt in your newsletter or in an email. Share your content as much as possible to make sure it reaches as much of your target audience as possible.

Don't hesitate to reuse the same ideas either - if you write a great piece of content, record a video of yourself talking about it or demonstrating what you wrote.

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