5 Key Factors For Successful Content

A golden rule you should always go by is: your content is only as good as the effort you put into creating it. So if you want to achieve a successful online marketing campaign, dedication is essential. Just providing a fantastic product or service unfortunately just doesn’t cut it anymore.

Effective content speaks to the online community and instantly connects with them. It also shows your prospective customers that you’re not solely focused on revenue, and that you want them to have trust in you and your brand. In this post, we discuss the 5 key factors you need to consider in order for your content to be successful.

First of all, you want to define some goals. This is important as it will determine what success actually means to your business. Once you have some goals in mind, your content strategy can be built to focus on tasks which may help you achieve these goals. Examples of common content marketing goals include driving traffic, gaining conversions through downloads, contact form submissions and calls, or enhancing brand awareness. You may want to focus on one or two of these, or try and make progress across all of them – that choice is up to you. What you will need to consider though, is how you design a specific piece of content to attempt to meet one of these factors. For example, a well researched and thought out blog post may help to drive traffic, but may not fit so well against other business goals.

One thing to remember though, is that powerful content can bolster your online marketing by generating leads, as well as facilitating SEO.

With this in mind, let’s look at five key factors for successful content.

1.    Quality

“Quality content” is so much more than a catchy buzzword for marketers. It’s one of the factors that search engines such as Google use to determine your rankings, so it’s imperative that your content is up to scratch. Spelling mistakes, typos and broken links are not acceptable in the digital age, and you’d be surprised at how often they occur.

So what is considered quality content? As we’ve already highlighted, this is precisely what Google wants to provide users with, but it can be tricky to determine what that is, especially as it’s subjective. The easiest way to ensure your content is deemed worthy by Google, is to ensure it’s relevant and effectively answers a user query. Good quality links also help, and you want to make sure your content is targeting some specific keywords too.

Introducing an auditing process for your content is a great way of ensuring that your message remains consistent, keywords and key themes are targeted and quality is maintained.

Sites with irrelevant, low-quality content will suffer the consequences and will be demoted in the rankings.

2. Powerful Titles

At the ideation phase, it’s important to establish your predominant target audience and research what your competitors are producing. This way, you can create content on topics that will resonate with the right people.

Once you’ve got your ideas, you also need to make your titles targeted and as engaging as possible. If you’re uninspired when writing a title, how do you think your audience are going to feel? Optimise your content by ensuring that you always include relevant keywords and phrases in your titles and within the copy.

Here’s some useful tips for headline writing:

1. Know exactly who you’re talking to
2. Optimise for keywords and phrases
3. Look to solve a problem
4. Bring in stats and / or numbers to catching readers’ attention.

3. Useful Content

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What do they want to see? Get to know them and you will soon discover what content appeals to them the most. You can then create tailored and targeted online campaigns for your desired audience from the off.

There isn’t a secret formula for making your content shareable, but a great place to start is to make it useful. Content that benefits the end user stands a better chance of being shared online and acquiring quality links too.

Examples of useful content include:

• Infographics
• Videos
• Interactive content like quizzes, polls, surveys and questionnaires
• User guides
• List format posts

However, this will ultimately depend on your target audience, so remember that it’s important to do your research first before you start creating your content.

4. Creativity

It’s fair to say that no one likes to feel like they’re being sold to. Heavy sales-led content can have the opposite effect by putting too much pressure on your readers and sending them running for the hills. Instead, we like to be educated and entertained through quality, creative and inspiring content.

So get creative. Don’t rely on your tried-and-tested method. Just because that’s the way you’ve always done things doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right approach.

Make the most of relevant, upcoming events and breaking news stories to make your copy instantly connect with your audience.

If you create content for the sake of it, your audience (and Google) will be able to tell and over-optimised content is clunky and usually too pushy on the sales side of things. So explain what’s in it for the reader and why they should continue to read on. Remember we’re all guilty of skimming online copy when it’s in front of us, so get to the point straight away, and make your readers wants to spend a little time with you.

5. Frequency

With more than half the world now on social media and 4.54 billion people around the world using the internet, it’s never been more important to keep active online on different channels. This will help increase brand awareness and traffic and will also improve your rankings and conversions in the long run.

So how often should you post on social media for example? Well it’s all about balance. Too little and your audience will soon forget about you, too much and it becomes spammy and you may well get un-liked, un-followed or even blocked. The key is to predict, measure and then repeat. As a general rule, you should be posting whenever you have quality content to share, but to keep things a little simpler, here’s a brief guide to help you get started:

• Instagram: 1-2 per day is a good benchmark. Don’t go above 3 though!
• Twitter: around 15 per day if you can – tweets have an incredibly short shelf life!
• Facebook: once per day, definitely no more than two
• Pinterest: try and aim for around 11 pins per day
• LinkedIn: aim for 1 per day or at least 2 per week as a minimum.

A comprehensive content marketing plan can help you target the key areas that you’ve identified and scheduled in promotional activity to share your content.

That said, bear in mind that you don’t always have to stick to your original plan. If you find that a marketing method or content type is performing better than others, it may be time to reassess your approach. Your plan needs to be fluid so that you’re able to adapt to new content ideas.

Let us know your thoughts on the factors for successful content. Do you have any good examples to share? If so, leave a comment below.

For more information on content marketing strategies that deliver results, get in touch today.