Back to all articlesSo your website’s up and running and you’re trying to boost your online profile through social media, content marketing and other types of campaign – it’s a great idea in theory, but you need to ensure that you’re posting great quality content if you want your audience to engage with you.
While you might be full of ideas, actually executing a solid and effective content strategy isn’t always so easy. The first thing you need to do is assess the effectiveness of your current approach: if you’re finding that you’re losing followers faster than you’re gaining them, you definitely need to review and improve your content! You should also be keeping an eye on your engagement metrics, so you can monitor the amount of retweets, likes, click-throughs, shares and favourites, and also your website visitor stats to see what’s bringing people to your site – and keeping them there!
If you’re feeling a bit disheartened, don’t worry – building a good online profile takes time… but if you follow our quality content tips, you’ll soon be getting noticed for all the right reasons.
5 top tips for creating quality content
1. Ditch the technicalities – you might find details, facts and figures about the intricacies of your industry fascinating, but the majority of your target audience would probably find it quite dull. Find more accessible and interesting ways to wow – use analogies and tangible references that your audience will relate to. Be creative.
2. Admit weakness – this might seem counter-intuitive, but hear us out! Nothing instils confidence quite like a healthy dose of honesty; if you’ve faced a challenge and made a mistake, write a post or guide to explain where you went wrong and how you fixed it. It makes you sound human, credible and full of problem-solving skills!
3. Improve your image – we don’t mean your overall branding, but more that you should consider content from a visual approach, not just text. On platforms where you’re limited by characters (Twitter), this can be a great way of getting a message across quickly and clearly. Post pictures from current projects, before and after shots, graphs, infographics, video clips or even just a cool new product. Try to make it sharp, funny, or of value.
4. Dare to be different – if you want your content to stand out, you’ve got to be seen to be different to your competitors. Take a new approach and stand in the shoes of your clients – what kind of people are they? How can you appeal to them? Take a humorous approach, get more personal with your prospects, look at things from a new angle. It could be as easy as introducing a fresh tone of voice, or creating a ‘character’ to add a bit of individuality and sparkle to your content.
5. Instant attraction – However good your main body of content is, if your headline is lacking, so will the attention of your audience be. If you’re posting a link to a blog or article, or trying to get recipients to open an e-shot, you’ve got to offer something that perks their interest in that primary message. A good headline can take as long to create as a whole article sometimes, but it’s worth the time investment if it increases conversions! Be bold, be funny, be smart, be controversial, offer something, solve a problem or appeal to their curiosity – you can always conduct some A/B testing to see what works best with your target market.