7 Things You Should Know Before Creating Content

1) What is your objective?

It's important to know what you want to achieve and should be the first point on your list. Knowing this at the start will ensure that all your actions are working towards your goal.

There can be many objectives with content generation, the following are a few examples

• Increase brand awareness
• Generate leads
• Convert users
• Attract past customers
• Improve search ranking
• Improve authority

These objectives are not the only ways to measure content marketing success - your objectives and conversions should be reflected in your content marketing efforts, whatever they may be. At the end of the day, what’s important is that you use these objectives to help you understand just how effective your content marketing strategy is.

2)Who are you targeting?

Making your content highly relevant to your audience will be vital to your success.

Your content needs to engage and satisfy your audience and provide a positive reaction, whether that's a conversion or a good feeling when associated with your brand.

It's also believed in the search engine optimisation community that search engines now monitor users behaviour with your content. How long do they spend on the page, are they clicking through to other pages or are they clicking away because it didn’t meet their expectations.

This is why the development of a persona analysis will allow you to understand your target market a lot better.

Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different needs, goals, motivations, and behaviours of your prospects or customer groups that could potentially use your site, brand, product or service.

Knowing this information allows your business to be able to personalise your messaging and user experience to improve your rate of influence and ultimately conversion of your content.

3)How do they like to consume content?

People like to consume information in many different ways. Some are visual, and may prefer to watch a video or look at an infographic, some like to listen, and some like to read.

• According to Cisco, 82% of web traffic will be video by 2021
• Forbes claims that websites with blogs typically have 434% more indexed pages than those that don’t
• According to ReadyTalk, between 20% and 40% of those who attend webinars become qualified leads
• 40% of people will respond better to visual information than plain text (Source: Zabisco)
• Interactive content is becoming more and more popular - Buzzfeed, a well known quiz curation site, boasts that 96% of users who start a quiz finish them

Choosing which type of content will best serve the topic of your message and the way that your audience likes to consume information will go a long way to ensure that your content is positively received.

4) Is your website optimised for search engine crawlers?

No matter what content you produce, whether it’s the best in the world, if search engines can’t find it, they won't be able to rank it.

It’s crucial for you to find out if your site is being indexed in Google. To do this you can look in Google Search Console, which will tell you how many URLs it has crawled compared to what's written in your XML sitemap.

An agency can help you perform a technical audit or health check to overcome any indexation or crawling issues your site may have.

5) What do you want viewers to do after consuming your content?

Having a great piece of content is great, but why stop there. Rather than letting users click away from your content after they read it, why not drive them somewhere else purposeful. Once you know what you want them to do or where to go, be sure to add a strong and prominent call to action. This action will ultimately be inline with the objectives you set from the start, whether it be a conversion, a sign up etc.

6) Who will be interested in sharing your content?

This part is important for leveraging your content, in terms of both awareness and authority. The more people share your content the more people will have access to it. However, there is a little more to it. You need to select the right influential people to help spread the word and share your content (commonly known as influencer marketing) to be able to get the best reach. Generally these influencers will be the people that your target audience follows on social channels and/or subscribe to their blog.

7) How will you measure Success?

It's important that everyone working on content marketing understands the core KPIs for measuring the effectiveness and success of your content. Whether or not they’re directly involved with your content analytics, it’s critical that content creators understand how their work impacts company goals.

Metrics should include the following:

• Do these metrics support my goals?
• Will they provide insight into how I can improve my campaign?

Ensure to continually evaluate your list of metrics - quarterly, bi-annually, or annually to make sure you’re capturing the data that will best address your key objectives . Measuring the results of your content marketing activities lets you continually learn what your audience likes and use that information to improve future content.