If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times: Content is king. It’s everything for modern marketers. Everyone and their mother is creating some form of content.
The problem is that simply “making content” doesn’t cut it anymore. Writing a few paragraphs and stuffing them with keywords won’t yield search results (to the great relief of those looking for answers with real value).
The evolution in the quality of online content is a good thing for consumers. However, it presents a unique problem for content creators: your content needs to be (gasp!) good.
Creating fresh content that satisfies searcher intent while also appearing in search engines is a vital part of a good 21st-century marketing strategy. Let’s break down why and go over a few tips to ensure your content keeps those eyeballs on the page.
Why Should Content Be Interesting?
Any honest person engaged in content creation will admit that it’s hard to see why content needs to be interesting. When it’s a piece of marketing collateral, in particular, it’s easy for “interesting” to be overrun by other priorities, like utility, conversions, and other marketing goals.
But it turns out that interesting content isn’t just important. Keeping “interesting” engaging helps you accomplish those other marketing goals more effectively.
How so? There are many ways that good content (i.e., consistently high-quality content) can benefit your brand, such as:
- Increasing dwell time: Your audience will stick around on your site longer if there’s good content to be had. This will boost your dwell time, which happens to be a critical factor of SEO.
- Boosting engagement: From social shares to on-site CTRs, good content draws consumers in and encourages them to engage with your brand.
- Establishing your authority: Whether through blog posts, whitepapers, social media, or any other format, quality content reflects your own authority, sending the message that you know what you’re doing, and consumers should trust you.
- Creating more conversions: If you write your content well, it will attract the right people, resonate with their pain points, and effectively offer your company as a solution to their problems.
Making a case for why content should be interesting is easy. The natural follow-up is how you can do so … which is where things get interesting.
These five tips can help you analyze your content, then tailor both past and future content to be more captivating for your target audience.
1. Focus on a Niche
It’s hard to be interesting when you’re talking about broad topics. Tackling something like the entire tech industry can be very generic. Instead, zoom in on an area like AI or emerging tech.
Picking a niche and steering into it gives you a couple of key advantages. First, it helps you really flex your knowledge on deep matters within your field.
Second, it gives you the confidence and authority to make strong, clear points. You can even be controversial because you have the clout to back up your opinion.
Focus leads to a better exchange of information and, consequentially, more interesting content.
2. Cultivate a Brand Voice
If you want your content to draw readers in, you want it to be consistent. Ground zero for consistency is your brand’s voice.
If you use a different format, tone, perspective, and so on with every piece of content you create, it’s hard to zero in on the stuff that resonates with your audience. Instead, create a brand voice (you can even go right ahead and codify it in official branding documentation) to keep all of your content creators moving in the same direction.
A solid brand style guide helps you foster a voice for your content that is personable and relatable. It allows for the introduction of things like humor and storytelling, too, without concern about things getting out of hand. A style guide can also be a great way to streamline things if you do something like hire a freelance editor to speed up the content creation process.
3. Avoid Writing for SEO
If you find that you’re creating content for search engines, stop. SEO content is essential, but it shouldn’t be your top priority for several reasons.
If a reader clicks on a link and finds that the blog writer who wrote it catered to search engine results and downplayed the need to include any substance, they’ll bounce off your site in a jiffy. Also, Google is already good enough to understand good content.
Always cater to readers first and the search engines second. If you write killer content, the search engines will pick up on it in time based on their ever-improving algorithms and how readers react.
4. Use Analytics to Your Advantage
You may be focused on creating interesting content, but that doesn’t mean you should overlook something like data just because it can be cold and calculating. Analytics can be a game-changer when catering your content to what your followers want to consume.
Try reviewing the analytics for your last five to 10 pieces of content. Ideally, do this on each of your channels — like your blog, social accounts, and emails. Look for what content statistically performed better within each channel and consider why that might be the case.
You may find that you touched on a topic that resonates with your readers. Perhaps the particular style of something got them more interested. Maybe the inclusion of more statistics did the trick. Whatever it may be, use that info to improve future content.
5. Mix Things Up
Finally, don’t be afraid to shake things up with your content creation from time to time.
If you usually write blog posts, try adding some image galleries or videos into the mix. If you’re always writing short Tweets, try linking to some longer whitepapers. Hiring a freelance writer within your niche will give you a fresh perspective.
However you go about it, look for ways to spice things up from time to time. This will avoid boring any of your consistent followers with the same content repeatedly.
Breathing New Life Into your Content
When your content is interesting, it takes on an entirely new level of value. It boosts engagement and SEO, establishes your authority, and can lead to more conversions.
If you feel like your content lacks that extra oomph, pull up those analytics and give your content strategy a once-over. What can you improve? Consider bringing a freelance writer into the mix to maintain voice consistency. An expert writer can also help you focus on your niche more.
Understanding how you will boost your writing will help you create interesting content that will perform better and, ultimately, take your marketing efforts to the next level.