If you treat the creation of content as a soulless task, you’ll end up with soulless results. And if you truly understand how important content is to the success of your website (and broader business), you’ll do all that you can to avoid that fate.
38% of people will stop engaging with a website if they find the content or layout unattractive. 75% of consumers admit to making judgements on a company’s credibility based on the company’s website. Visitors are looking for valuable, meaningful content that is presented in a beautiful and easy to digest way, and if you can provide it to them, they’re more likely to become a customer.
How do you make such content? Let’s find out.
How do I make my content stand out?
Making your content stand out is one thing, making it stand out to the right people is another. Anyone can create something eye-catching or engaging, but a business needs to ensure that their target customers are the ones most likely to find their content and respond to it.
Making your content stand out is therefore a matter of gaining a deep understanding of your target market: who they are, what they need and how you can help. This is a process covered in detail within the Content Development Direction and Focus stage of the Growth Partners DigitalArchitect, a comprehensive program designed to provide your organisation with the building blocks that make an effective digital strategy.
A simple way to make content that stands out to the right people is to find out what your target market is Googling. Once you know their problems, you can create content that offers solutions.
How do you create unique content?
To be truly meaningful, content needs to be unique. Your website visitors won’t be looking for content that has been recycled from elsewhere. They’ll be looking for bespoke advice applicable to their situation, written by an expert in the field.
There is another reason to ensure that your website content is 100% unique: search engine optimisation. Google and other search engines only want to serve up the most trustworthy and authoritative websites to their users. If a search engine thinks that you are simply recycling content from other sites, it will understandably believe that you are neither trustworthy nor authoritative, and your ranking will suffer.
Use a tool like Copyscape to check that your content is unique, and, once posted, that it hasn’t been stolen by another site.
How do you create better content?
No matter how good your content is, it can always be better. Improving your content is made far easier if you bring structure to the process.
When the time comes to create, try following these steps:
- Define your objective: What do you want the content to achieve? This will often be defined by the stage of the sales funnel that the audience will be at, whether research, discovery, awareness, consideration or conversion.
- Understand your audience: Who are you making the content for? Create personas that represent your target market.
- Conduct keyword research: What questions are your target audience asking?
- Brainstorm ideas: Use the insights gained from your keyword research to come up with content ideas.
- Decide on your format: How will you deliver your content? Blogs, case studies, whitepapers, ebooks, infographics and videos are just a handful of the format options.
- Update your content regularly: Keep your content evergreen by updating it regularly, a practice that can be great for SEO.
What is customer content?
Customer content, otherwise known as user-generated content (UGC), is an increasingly popular content generation method, particularly on social media.
UGC sees your customers turning into content creators, answering questions and trading information amongst themselves. Think of a person who posts a photo of a freshly delivered item on Instagram, and tags the company who sent it. By incentivising customers to create UGC, you can seriously extend your reach, and for minimal investment.
UGC is obviously a more effective tactic for some businesses than it is for others – B2B companies may struggle to obtain the necessary engagement, for example. But if nothing else, the concept serves to demonstrate that there are many creative ways to produce meaningful content.
What type of content would be valuable to your customers?
Ask yourself: why would a new customer visit your website? Think of someone who currently doesn’t know that you or your product/service exists. How will you attract them, how will you hold their attention, and how will you convert them?
Valuable, meaningful content is the answer to all these questions. The form that this content takes will depend on who is reading it, which makes the task of understanding your audience all the more important.
At Growth Partners our DigitalArchitect seeks to gain that understanding, before offering up a comprehensive strategy that will see you creating content that is more valuable and meaningful than ever before.
If you’re ready to better align your content with the wants and needs of your customers, we’re ready to help. Book a free 15-minute consultation with Growth Partners Director Steve Bambury today.
