Content creation is a marketing cornerstone for B2Bs, B2Cs, and personal brands. It does not matter what niche and industry they are in or the channel they use.
According to a recent marketing statistics from Smart Insight, 68% of your potential customers use a search engine (especially Google) before purchasing a product. And 42.7% of internet users between 16 and 64 years have ad-blockers to avoid digital ads.
The statistics show that 4 out of 10 potential internet customers are not bringing you business if you’re not using organic channels effectively! But content creation can help your brand become visible on search engines, social media, and everywhere else on the internet.
Find out more about content creation, how it can help your business, and the key types of content you require.
What is Content Creation?
Content creation involves researching, generating topic ideas, crafting the ideas into high-value products, and promoting them to your target audience. The content can take the form of written, visual, or audio formats based on the topic, the audience, and the customer requirements you’re addressing.
You make the information accessible to the audience through various content formats, including a blog, infographic, social media post, or video.
What is a Content Creator?
The content creator comes up with ideas and creates content that will connect your entity or brand to prospective and current customers. A content creator produces content for anyone looking to establish an online presence, including individuals, small businesses, organizations, and corporations.
What is the Purpose of Content Creation?
Content creation offers your audience useful and free information. The information is a critical strategy component to attract new customers and retain existing ones through quality engagement. Content creation also helps you generate major value for your brand.
Why Content is Important for Your Business
As more people block ads, organic channels are now delivering better long-term results than paid online ads. Creating content for your business’s YouTube channel, podcast, or blog may sound like a lot of work. However, the content is a powerful way to reach online customers and build relationships with them.
The following are the major benefits of content for a business.
Fuels SEO
Content creation helps increase your organic search engine rankings using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is critical to getting more people looking at your site.
Close to 28.5% of online users click the first result on a Google search page. Landing a featured snippet for a question or keyword relevant to your brand means you appear in the coveted first position.
Search engines are the go-to resource for anyone with a concern or question. Optimizing your content to appear in relevant searches will help bring in new leads to your site and business. However, a powerful SEO strategy requires strong content.
SEO involves keyword placement, backlinks, and visitors to your site, and content enables the creation of web pages that fuel these components. Content offers a place to place your keywords, a page visitors can read, and information other websites can link to.
Content creation and SEO always go together. Placing the audience first will help you create content that offers clear value. Engaging your target audience heavily with your content increases the chances of the SEO strategy winning.
Educates Your Target Audience
Education is the first step potential clients take when deciding if a service or product is right for their needs. Clients want to understand all the options available to them before making a selection. Content that educates the target audience can help.
Education content can take many forms, including product pages, the home page, blog posts, and the about page on your site. Other content that provides clients with resources to make informed buying decisions includes reviews and tutorials. Your education content should teach the audience more about your offerings and business.
Educating the target audience through your content should focus on the concerns or questions. Consider the problems your audience wants answers to and how your offerings relieve the issues. Education content also focuses on your solutions and how it makes user lives easier.
Drives Social Media Strategies
Social media platforms offer the best ways of connecting with target audiences. A social media outlet is excellent for building genuine relationships with your client base. Further, you get a direct pathway for initializing conversations, getting feedback, and pushing new leads to your business site.
However, you require strong content creation.
Content on social media takes conversations deeper. While you can only say a few words in a Facebook post or Tweet, excellent content encourages the target audience to follow for more. Doing this will establish a deeper connection while driving more visitors to your site, where you’re collecting their information and taking them through the sales funnel.
A great social media strategy leverages content to provide value to the target audience. Content develops strong connections, but remember your target client base wants information they will participate in. Simply posting links to your posting will not deliver the high amounts of engagement you hope for.
Helps You Build Backlinks
Backlinks, links from an external website pointing to your content, are another critical component of bringing new traffic to a website. A backlink encourages web visitors to view another helpful article or product and learn more about you.
However, you only get backlinks when your content contains information, opinions, or ideas worth sharing. Simply rephrasing information, your audience will find anywhere on the internet or creating poor content will hurt the chances of getting backlinks. The result is a harder time bringing in new attention and establishing your online authority.
Backlinks are also critical for your SEO strategy. Google and other search engines view backlinks and see your content as something worth recommending. The more backlinks your content generates, the more authority search engines assume the page holds.
Read also: 6 Reasons Every Website Needs Backlinks.
Make your topics unique enough to encourage backlinks. While there’s similar content online, you want to put a unique touch to each content piece. A unique perspective ensures the information stands out and attracts more attention.
6 Key Content Types to Drive Traffic to Your Website
Here are six kinds of content to help your business turn the initial curiosity about your product or service into conversations.
1- Blog Posts
Blog posts are the most popular content formats today. They help with SEO and are easy to consume because they are usually between 500 and 2,000 words.
The number of words in blog posts makes them foundational components of any content strategy. You can use them to spread brand awareness, establish thought leadership, and blog posts are excellent for lead generation.
2- Social Media Posts
Social media offers your business a low-cost digital marketing tool, and you have multiple options available. These include casual and fun choices like Instagram and Facebook to the professional, formal LinkedIn platform. Social media also allows engaging in a versatile, attractive manner.
Businesses and brands leverage social media platform trends to create campaigns or gain traction. You can also use the platforms to disseminate content, such as infographics and graphics. Social media backlinks can drive traffic to your business’s landing page, boosting rankings on search engines.
3- Infographics
Infographics present information and data using visuals for easy consumption. The information in infographics is easy to understand and retain for most people.
Another visual content form that’s less popular than infographics is GIFographics. The latter uses animated infographics to convey lots of information in a limited time and space.
4- Email Newsletters
Newsletters are a long-term content format where you send regular emails to a dedicated subscriber list of prospective and current clients. Email lists can be business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B), and some businesses adopt both email newsletter types.
Many brands and businesses send email newsletters monthly, bi-weekly, or weekly. These emails contain news about a business, brand, or promotional offers. An email campaign is an excellent way to stay in the minds of your former, current, and potential customers.
5- Podcasts
Podcasts contain recorded audio (sometimes with video) content for distribution through popular channels, such as Apple Music and Spotify. The content you’re distributing may be pre-recorded or live. Using podcasts helps you reach potential customers who might not be interested in reading long-form content, such as ebooks.
The versatility of podcasts allows for sharing information, getting insights from industry leaders through interviews, or providing a behind-the-scenes view of your business. Podcasts are auditory, so listeners don’t have an active role—unless you are taking views from them.
6- Your Customer Success Stories
Success stories of customers are testimonials from real-world clients. The testimonials come in multiple formats, including blog post reviews, video testimonials, influencer testimonials, and social media testimonials.
The third-party, objective viewpoints will help reinforce your digital marketing efforts, which builds trust among the target audience. These stories can also help legitimize your business when you cite big-name brands and well-known personalities as your customers.
Wrapping Up
Content creation is a continuous process with a big payoff for your current and prospective clients. Once you have the process down, you will generate creative content that delights the target audience and grows your business!