Six Ways To Create Quality Content To Drive More Business

BY ISABEL GUTIERREZ

Alexa Williams @Unsplash

Content, content, content.

Your content is the most cost-effective and valuable marketing asset for your business. Great content can funnel more traffic to your website, strengthen your brand’s reputation, and encourage more web visitors to convert and actually buy your product or service.

However, creating great content also requires time and effort. And as we all know, running a business is time consuming. Particularly if you are a solopreneur. On top of keeping up-to-date with all the admin, providing an exceptional service, adding new products and actually doing the job, you have all the marketing and social activity to plan and execute. Your role expands from company director to PA, accountant, designer, marketer and blogger. Sounds familiar?

So, maintaining your content fresh and your audience engaged can really turn into a chore.

But what if there was a way to simplify content creation to free yourself from the hassle of having to plan and manually share it every other day?

Here are six great ways to help you produce valuable content without bargaining your soul on the way:

1. Repurpose your content

   If you struggle to come up with new content, repurposing existing content is a little-known secret that all smart marketers use to keep driving traffic to their site.

   What if your best content could go to work for you, again and again, without your having to create anything new?

   A very good way to do this is by checking your Instagram Insights and looking at the posts that had the best performance. You can then see what subject your audience engaged with and turn it into a longer blog post. This works the other way round too. You can use the content of a blog you have created and split it across a few social media posts, covering the different topics, you spoke about. This way allows you to create a ‘series of posts’ covering a topic.

2. Establish a functionality or objective for your content

   All content you produce has a marketing aim or goal. This can be raising your brand awareness, informing about a product or service, educating or engaging with your customers or simple promoting and advertising, for example. Decide how much content you need to create to cover your marketing goals and each functionality and be very clear on what results you want to achieve.

3. Set your themes

   Once you have your different goals covered, you can create subcategories within each function, which represent a theme. I suggest you aim to have between three and four themes per function. Let’s say you are holiday operator, to cover your customer education / engagement function, you can create content around the following three themes:

   • What to pack if you are visiting X?

   • Stretching your holiday budget: ways to get more for less when abroad

   • Your health when abroad: what jabs you need, medical insurance, etc

   You can then easily write about each one of these topics and distribute your content across all your different marketing platforms: newsletters, blogs, social media, etc.

4. Create a content planner

   There are lots of digital platforms you can buy to do this, however, you can also keep it very simple and create a neat schedule sheet in Excel or Numbers.

   You goal here is to decide what content you are going to publish and how you are going to share it: what platform and date.

   What shall you include in your planner?

   • Objectives for the week

   • The themes within each objective

   • The format you will be publishing the content: blog, newsletter, social

   • Platform and date for distribution

   Your planner is also essential for consistency, relevance and reaching the right audience through the right channel.

5. Distribute your content effectively

   When you have laid out all the different topics you are covering, which support your different marketing functions and decided on the best channels to share your content, you are ready to start its distribution.

   The most effective way to do this is by selecting the best tools for each channel. To manage and schedule your social, you have great tools, such as Later, Buffer, Hootsuite, etc They are free for under a certain number of posts and a super easy and organised way to plan all your social feeds for the month ahead in just a couple of hours.

   For your newsletters, there are two good marketing platforms: MailChaimp and Campaign Monitor. Both options are straightforward to use and again, allow you to schedule your emails and save automated responses too.

6. Commit yourself to be consistent

   Ideally you want to create a calendar for a 12-month period. This allows you to forecast and plan ahead the most relevant topics for the audience you are targeting at a particular point. However, if this feels like a huge mountain to climb, do not despair, you can start by at least planning the month ahead. Then, you can use this as a basis to prepare three to six months in advance. There are no rules for how much you produce; what is important is that you commit yourself to make it valuable and consistent. Quality over quantity.

And remember, your website is home to all the content you are creating. Ensure it has all the necessary functionality implemented, enabling you to easily share it and most importantly, your customers find it.