Creating quality content is essential for showing credibility and educating your audiences. Whether it's a blog post, social media update, video, or infographic, your content can make or break your marketing efforts. However, many marketers struggle with the challenge of content creation. From identifying the right audience to maintaining consistency and quality, there are many hurdles to overcome.
In this blog post, we will explore how to navigate these challenges and create high-quality content that resonates with your target audience.
Why creating quality content is important
At the heart of a robust marketing strategy lies the creation of quality content. This essential element not only draws and retains the attention of your target audience but also propels website traffic, facilitating the transition of leads into loyal customers. Without quality content that can cut through the noise, marketing strategies will likely fall apart in front of your eyes, undermining efforts to achieve broader business objectives.
Committing to producing superior content paves the way for a brand to stand out amidst the competition, building credibility and authority within its industry and those industries or verticals it aims to engage with. Furthermore, quality content is a magnet for potential customers, attracting them through its relevance and value. At a time when consumers are bombarded with information from various sources, the significance of creating content that is not only informative but also engaging and relevant cannot be overstated.
By dedicating the necessary time and resources to this endeavour, businesses can enhance their visibility, foster positive perceptions of their brand, and ultimately, drive their marketing success forward.
Nail your audience
Without a clear understanding of who you are communicating with, the risk of producing content that misses the mark is significantly heightened. When nailing an audience, many create "buyer personas" or "ideal customer profiles," which act as pen portraits and detail an audience type, such as IT managers within UK retail businesses. These "personas" include insights such as average age, behavioural patterns, goals, challenges, and content consumption preferences.
It's advisable to build persona portraits for all of your key primary and secondary targets. The greater understanding you have of who it is you're trying to engage with, the more relevant your messaging and campaigns can become, which, in turn, drives greater engagement and will ultimately provide a stronger ROI all round.
By prioritising audience identification early in the content creation process, you lay a solid foundation for the production of marketing content that not only captures attention but also sustains it, fostering a meaningful and enduring connection. This approach ensures your content strategy moves in an informed, focused, and poised direction for success.
Don't forget to be creative
You can create the most informative content in the world, but if it's not visually engaging, it'll fail to impress. From experience, this is where MSPs and VARs fall short.
Additionally, as much as visual creativity is important, we need to consider the creative use of messaging, delivering a story that makes sense and people can relate to. Not just some corporate waffle, which your target audience has seen time and time again.
A creative approach encourages the blending of ideas, the fusion of which can result in content that is not only original but also relatable to your target demographic, which has to be a primary objective for any content creation.
Using good quality imagery, compelling narratives, and thought-provoking questions can transform standard content into a dynamic interaction between brand and consumer.
Embracing creativity, therefore, is not merely about aesthetics or entertainment; it's a strategic move towards building a distinctive online presence that aligns with your audience's expectations and your brand's core values. By weaving creativity into the fabric of your content strategy, you unlock the potential to captivate your audience, making every piece of content not just seen, but felt and remembered.
Ensuring consistency and quality
Maintaining both the steadiness and excellence of content is a constant challenge for marketers, who are under pressure to get content out of the door on a regular basis, whilst still performing countless additional tasks in their everyday roles.
To overcome these challenges, it's always good to start with a content calendar and then build a blueprint for what good content creation and distribution looks like. By doing this, you create a (hopefully) scalable process that you can rinse and repeat on a regular basis. If you've got it to work properly, in effect, you can simply swap out a subject matter and hit the ground running.
Lastly, lean into the strengths of different team members. Don't try to burden yourself with all of the responsibility. If you're not a subject expert, seek guidance and input from one. That's the only sure-fire way to ensure that your content adds value, and isn't just a regurgitated version that a dozen or more other MSPs have churned out over recent weeks.
When you're in a good cadence with content production, don't feel like you need to be reinventing the wheel every time. If a good amount of time has passed (perhaps 3-6 months), and you've shared additional content since, think about how you can reuse or repurpose what you've previously invested time and effort into. At the end of the day, your audiences (i.e., LinkedIn company page) will have grown during this time, and the likelihood of new followers having seen the original content is slim - but it might still provide them with a lot of good insights.
Adopting a data-driven approach
The majority of partners have a wealth of data available to them, which can be used to inform the creation and optimisation of marketing content, from analytical data such as average time on paper, social engagement (likes, shares, comments) and deeper behavioural analysis through the likes of HotJar and Microsoft Clarity.
By accessing this data, you can see the themes and topics that people are interested in, which can inform how you update and optimise existing blogs and web pages (for example), as well as the content you could create to build out your wider repository of information.
It's often beneficial to A/B test content creation to identify the best angles, themes, and content formats to focus on.