Even some of the best marketers and writers on a staff are going to hit a point where content becomes a bit stale. The best content production teams find a way to keep readers engaged with informative or thought provoking content. Other teams limit themselves by not using the resources around them like other staff or even current readers to help with ideas.
Producing consistent high-quality content on a company blog or regular website can turn the company or website into a thought leader. Executives of thought leading companies are often asked to speak at industry conferences which can be great marketing. This can also convert quite a few sales as everyone knows conferences are full of deals that are both written and verbal. There are hacks that can help with producing engaging and high-quality content and they are as follows.
Do a Content Survey Of Your Readers
Simply by asking the readers what they want to see, a company can allow their current or potential clients/partners dictate how their content strategy will play out. At the very least, out of quite a few surveys or responses plenty of good ideas can be used to fill out the editorial calendar. Readers sometimes enjoy contributing their own content as it helps build their portfolio and get some recognition as knowledgeable about a certain topic. Do not feel pressured to publish long time reader’s content if it isn’t of high quality as the company blog could lose quite a few more than one reader if low-quality spam type content is published.
Don’t Be Afraid To Look At Your Competitors
Competitors can be a great way to gauge how your company is doing with their content. Taking a look at the content that has garnered the most social attention on a competitor’s website can help shape the content strategy the company should take. While a competitor won’t give website traffic numbers out, a look into the backlinks that are built from the content on their site can illuminate important information.
The pieces of content that garner backlinks from other websites are a great marketing tool. Many companies promote their content in order to garner backlinks but a true piece of quality content can do quite well on its own. Hundreds and even thousands of backlinks can be built just through an engaging piece of content. This can take care of marketing for a company months at a time!
Guide and Resource Can Bring Back Repeat Traffic
A guide or resource that can be used years after its publication is a great example of evergreen content. This will garner consistent traffic months or even years. A great hack to produce some great content is to revisit these guides and update them to be current. This can be a yearly update and some posts can be written about the trends seen in this guide. For example, a company that sells smartphones might have a guide about iCloud unlock on used phones. This article could be written for each generation of the iPhone that have yet to come out in the future. Guides are great as they can answer a question for a potential customer as well as show off the knowledge that a company has.
Interactive content will be mentioned below but guides are a great piece of content to be put into an interactive setting. A resource like a home renovation estimation calculator allows a person to be informed about what a project would cost. This person is much more likely to contact the company that had this pricing resource than an outside company as the company with the pricing resource is more likely to agree to the price estimation that has been given.
Other Types of Content Can Be Powerful
Written content should be a part of a company’s content strategy but limiting content to only written content can become quite boring. Utilizing podcasts and interactive content have never been so important. Not only do readers enjoy this, this can be a great marketing tool as people will link back to this content.
Podcasts can be quite a draw especially if discussing something controversial or having a special guest. This can be a great way to engage with readers and listeners via a custom hashtag on Twitter. This allows the guest or speakers to answer questions live that they might have about the subject matter. The proper equipment for sound is essential as nothing makes a podcast sound unprofessional or even thrown together.
Interactive content can be a great way to allow readers to have some fun with some generally dry subject matter. BBC did a great interactive piece on “Your Life On Earth” which could have been just page after page of statistics and facts. Instead, they took into your personalized stat along with other statistics that are visualized in an extremely interesting way. Certain sectors that are heavy in the data aspect can do a great job with interactive content as well as infographics.
Go For a Weekly Column
People enjoy weekly columns as they feel like they can get to know the writer. Having a different staff member write a post each week can be efficient but it does not allow the writers to develop personal relationships with readers through comments and social media interaction. This can also allow a staff member to become a thought leader on certain topics. Someone who can produce content week after week at a high level can be hard to do but utilizing some of these tips should make this much more manageable. Another tip for weekly columns is that of taking advantage of the time of year. Holidays are a great way to put a fresh spin on an old topic and yearly roundup posts generally do quite well traffic wise.
Producing quality content weekly is going to be difficult but it is possible. Using the above tactics can help break the cycle of boring content that a company has been putting out. Content is extremely important so taking a lax approach can hurt a company immensely. Engage readers, produce content, and deliver a quality product to ensure success!
