The content preparation and production, as well as publication and promotion, should be gotten correct from the word go.
The best practices should be employed in producing content and promoting it. If you want your business to get the right content that can take it further in the growth space, you should learn how to produce content and promote it.
Also, if you want to manage a blog or engage in blog writing and content promotions, again you want to know much about content marketing strategy.
Whether you are producing content yourself or you are seeking the help of content writing services, it's important you understand the content marketing strategy.
This way, you can know where mistakes are occurring. You may realize that you have very great content out there, however, it's not being found by audiences. This may mean that there could be something wrong with it.
But since the foundation of having excellent content is creating quality content that is shareable, informative, engaging, fun, interesting, and entertaining, you should think of writing experts. Depending on what kind of content you want to create whether a blog post, press release, editorial copy, email campaign post, long-form articles, SEO articles, or an eBook, it has to be of the best quality and highly readable.
So what content strategies do you need?
1. Preparation
Superficially, writing blog content may appear like just sitting down and jotting down the content, however, there is a lot of preparation needed before you can produce the content.
Content production is just a part of the process and preparation comes first. You need to find out what makes content great - not all content you find there are good for reading. Great content provides value to your audience, it's entertaining, fun, and informative to the reader.
If you're going to produce great content you need to understand what your audience wants, what makes the content shareable, what drives the customer behaviour you want, for example, a sale, a content share, or an email opt-in.
additionally, great content should satisfy the objectives of your business by increasing customer relationships and building more conversions while also being able to retain the customers.
In the preparation phase of your content marketing strategy, you should understand the different content types so that you identify the one that suits your brand.
When you know which content is ideal for your brand, you can pass across your brand message effectively and the audience is able to consume it. When you know what kind of content you want, you can look for other features like the format of the articles, the length of the articles, the writing style and tone of the articles, and other elements that help redefine your content's ability to be consumed by audiences.
Think about the topic you are want to address and how you can best communicate it to your audience. The common content types you find online are such as case studies, call to action posts, checklist or cheatsheet posts, cautionary tale posts, giveaway or competition posts, guides, interactive posts, how-to posts, inspirational posts, crowdsourcing posts, listicles, interviews, launch posts, news reports, and many others.
Read the Blog: The Definitive Guide to Content Marketing In 2020
Consider who produces your content because not everyone is a great writer. In answering the question, who writes your content? The answer is different for different brands.
You may have brands that can create their own content while others lack that expertise or skill and will want to outsource. In creating content, you can do every piece for your website or you can feature articles done by guest contributors.
Hiring ghostwriters can help you produce content that you can publish as your own content. You can choose one of these techniques of creating content or apply a couple of them - in tandem.
When determining who writers your content, you are also determining who best communicates your brand message to your audiences and how best the content can be created.
There are various ways you can find writers for your content - you can go to the content marketplaces where you place your topics and the writers can bid or pick them for writing. There are content creation agencies or content marketing agencies that do writing. You may even find individuals who have their websites and they specialize in content curation.
Before you can create the content, you want to determine the voice of the author. It helps you maintain consistency across your content creation journey.
You may use 1st person, 2nd person, or 3 person narratives. Also, you should define the categories of your topics to help create content relevant to targeted audiences. Another part of the preparation is researching keywords.
While not all content may focus on keywords, there is that content that you have to use suitable keywords to help rank your business. Keywords also define the topic you are going to write about and allow you to know the purpose of the content. A keyword is like the thesis of your content.
It also helps in search engine optimization - the content can be discovered organically by readers as well as by engine crawlers. There are tools that can help with keyword research, for example, KWFinder.
Even if you are going to hire a content writer you should understand your content marketing goal and have a strategy that helps deliver content able to add value to the reader.
2. Production
After preparing for your content, the next strategy is production. In this stage, you simply produce the great content you want.
The fundamentals for writing great content including writing what people want to read, writing what people can share with others, and writing content that Google wants to display. Look at the current articles found online and see how you can create better pieces than those. Ensure you give the audiences a piece they haven't come across before online.
An outstanding content has a compelling headline, it has a beautiful image and it has an intro part that introduces the topic and what's being written about.
Using background information or statistics helps support the topic. It gives meat to the bones - ensuring that the content doesn't feel dry. An easily digestible, clear to follow and well-organized content can easily draw the attention of the readers often making them want to share.
A well-round conclusion is also important to help summarize your content or piece of article. In some cases, you may want to use a call to action that inspires the readers to find out more about your brand. Again, you want to deliver substantial word count that thoroughly covers the topic at hand without overwhelming the reader or making the reader get lost somewhere in between.
When curating content, you should ensure proper spelling, excellent grammar, good sentence structure, and proper punctuation.
You can use tools like Title Case and Grammarly to help you polish your content. Including images in your content helps draw the attention of the readers and visually demonstrate particular points you want to make.
When using images, look for high-quality ones and ensure that they are meet copyright and licensing requirements. In placing the image, you can put it at the top of the blog post.
Another important aspect of the content generation is placing links. You can have internal links and external links.
Ensure you proofread your content thoroughly to catch any mistakes that may underrate your business.
If you find that you are too busy to meet your content creation needs, don't overwhelm yourself. There are quality writers out there that you can outsource to produce content for you.
Hiring content writing experts help you free up time to work on core business aspects. It also helps you tap into the talents of the writers. There are great writers than can quickly resonate with your brand's message with your audience and help pull in a lot of traffic.
Something to remember here is that you have to vet the writers properly because different writers are experienced in writing different kinds of content. You may have creative writers who create content able to entertain the readers. Technical writers, on the other hand, have a strong ground in building content that is technical or explains technical subjects such as tutorials and reports or something like infographics.
3. Publication
After you have created your content, you want to publish it. In publishing content, you should develop a schedule with posting frequency.
How many articles do you want to publish per month? After how many weeks should you post new content? These are some of the questions you should ask yourself.
When publishing your posts, do it around that time you have the highest traffic. Of course, you have analytics tools to help you determine when traffic is at the peak, and it's around that you can publish new content to your blog.
If you are able to deliver or publish the content when you have the highest traffic, many audiences can read it and probably share it.
4. Promotion
When you have published your content, it makes sense if you promote it too. Your content may serve different purposes - could be for social following or for compelling the reader to share.
You may also have content that helps you get more subscriptions to your emailing list or lure people to sign up for that upcoming webinar. Looking at these elements helps you find the direction to take when promoting it. Ensure you give value to the audiences and ask for a sale.
There are different channels you can use to promote your content including Facebook ads, syndicate on Medium, using scheduled services like Meet Edgar or SmarterQueue to push out promotions on your social channels.
You can post on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other channels. An email list can be useful in sending out content to your already opted-in audiences.
Conclusion
Content is the king if you are going to succeed in online business. However, creating content and marketing it isn't an easy thing.
You need to have a strategy that rhymes with your content marketing goals. Since there are various types of content you can create or you may need, it is important to identify the right writers who can produce quality pieces.
Realize that a writer may be good in blog posts, but they are poor in doing ads or social media content. Hiring a creative content writer allows you to get pieces that communicative, informative, readable, consumable, and shareable.
Ensure you promote your content appropriately in the right channels using the right tools and best practices.
