The biggest mistake of all you can make in content marketing is letting your quality slide. People aren’t interested in run-of-the-mill crap. The internet is a brown stinky mountain of that kind of crap. Why would they seek out your page when there are thousands, what am I saying, billions just like it?
In case that wasn’t clear, that was a rhetorical question. They wouldn’t. That’s why quality should always be foremost in your mind, whatever you’re doing. Today we’re going to talk about some tips, tricks and strategies to make certain that it is there and stays there.
The first thing that’s important is that you can’t just have your content creation as an also ran. The reason is simple: Your marketing team alone cannot know the ins and outs of every aspect of your business. It’s both not what they’re specialized or what they’re focused on. They’re specialization is communication and their focus is outwards.
For them to be effective, what they’re doing needs to be included in with the rest of the company and what’s going on. That means getting everybody involved in the content creation. Now, this does not mean that everybody has to write, create podcasts or make movies. This should probably still be the responsibility of the marketing team, largely because that’s what they’re supposed to be good at.
What I mean instead is that the rest of the firm is involved in helping them find topics and give them insights into the different aspects of the company. The reason is simple – most of the ordinary insights have been had. The internet knows all about the basics. The low-hanging fruit has long since been picked.
The way you’re going to pull in visitors is by giving them something that hasn’t been published everywhere. And for that you need to talk to the experts. You’ve got those. At least I hope you do. They’re working in all the different departments of your company.
Giving your marketing team access to their thoughts and ideas is going to create far more interesting content than the marketing team alone could ever create. Not to mention that people like to be asked about what they’re good at. It makes them think you care. And so, you’ll be able to create content and better team cohesion. Two birds with one stone, anyone?
A lot of ink has been spilt on how many posts you should write up per week, with some maintaining it should be two, while others maintain it should be far more – some people even suggest you should write something every day!
Don’t listen to them. The only thing that matters is that you post consistently, without big gaps. Outside of that, you should post at the rate that allows you to create great content.
Not posting all the time has several advantages. Obviously, it allows you to devote more time to the blog posts, which allows you to do more research and more editing. That’s great. It isn’t just that, however. Sometimes simply giving an article a few days to sit will give you an entirely new insight and thereby allow you to make a piece significantly better.
Personally, I believe that you should at all times have a month worth of content ready to go up. If you do that every piece you write will be available for editing for another month, allowing you to tweak, change and improve it to your hearts content (and sometimes 10 minutes on a text you haven’t looked at for a while can make it ten times better).
What’s more, it significantly reduces the stress of content creation, which gives you space to be creative, playful and adventurous. And that alone will already serve to make your material better.
A lot of people out there don’t seem to think that content marketing deserves any serious money thrown at it. As if they can do it on the cheap. Would you run your advertising on the cheap? Would you put up cheap banners? Of course not! And neither should you create cheap content for your website.
In fact, it goes double for your website. You see, your banners and your ads disappear. They will do so quite quickly, in fact. Content, on the other hand, can stick around for months, even years, with the most insightful articles often getting referenced half a decade after they’ve been written and over that time will draw in 10s of thousands of visitors. What advertisement campaign you’ve had has ever done that?
Nothing has the legs of good content. And yet so many people won’t pay good money to produce it. In my eyes that’s a very strange way to go about marketing your company.
So stop getting some third-rate writer to create your content! Instead, find somebody good and use them long term. Not only will you know exactly what they’re capable of, but as their understanding grows and they talk more with the people that work for your company, their content is going to get better and better.
Now, don’t get me wrong, obviously you should push your material. Constantly and consistently, in fact. But that’s not where the focus should lie. Because if you push bad content hard, it isn’t going to get you very far, while if you push great content consistently, then it will get you far indeed.
Great content has the ability to get you loyal followers, who will naturally create backlinks to your material– which is something mediocre content, however hard you push it, will never do.
Yes, the strategy I’m outlining here is a long-term one. It will not pay immediate dividends. You need to get a reputation and that can take a while – especially considering how much competition is already out there.
But then, I hope you weren’t getting in the content creation game for the short run. Reputational marketing never works well in the short run. For that reason, it’s generally a good idea to not only have content marketing, especially not to begin with. That is a strategy you can try when you’ve got thousands of people coming in to see what you’re doing. Then they will act as the loudspeakers.
Good content needs cohesion. It can’t jump around like a drunken kangaroo with mace in its eyes. For that to happen you need two things. A coherent and long-ranging plan that stretches several months into the future and a team that isn’t constantly changing.
Both of these things are more easily achieved if you sit down and create a long term plan. The team will know what they’re up against and will be able to take charge and the content will feel like it’s moving steadily form one point to another.
What’s more, if you’ve got a good plan, then you’ll have good oversight and insight into what you’re doing. This will allow you to make certain that your newer content links up to your older content, which in turn constantly allows you to bring back what you’ve already created for second, third, and fourth spins. In this way your better pieces of content don’t wilt and die in the corner, but get re-introduced and reused.
People don’t just go online to read facts. They go online to be entertained. And your material will only do that if it has got personality. Honestly, for this you need a good writer and the confidence to let them work their magic and their content writing hacks.
It’s true, letting your page have a personality means taking a risk. That’s because having personality means being daring. People might not like it, they might not jell with what you’re trying to do, and your jokes might fall flat.
At the same time, not having any personality is taking an even bigger risk. Because people will almost certainly not enjoy that. Nobody likes dry text. Nobody likes a company that feels like. They. Are. Talking. To. A. Roooooboawt.
We don’t establish relationships with abstract concepts. We establish relationships with people. And if you can make certain that your websites has personality, then people are far more likely to see your company as a person. And that will make them like you, connect with you and feel bad about betraying you for another brand.
All you have to do for that is create a personality. Suddenly the risk seems worth it, don’t you think?
It is your face the world. How do you want people to see that face? Do you want it to be well crafted, interesting, engaging, authoritative and beautiful? Or are you okay with it being a pimply teenage face that suffers from halitosis?
If you don’t spend the energy and the effort to make certain your content is well crafted, cohesive and well devised, you’re going to be going for the latter. And the thing about reputations is – as every high school kid knows, once you get stuck with a reputation it can be very hard indeed to dislodge it.
So, form the correct reputation while you still can. You’ll think yourself for it in the long run.