Impactful content on the right digital layout in digital marketing has always been the crux of lead generation. Thoughtful, well-structured and properly articulated content written with target audience in mind can help a great deal in attracting prospects by enhancing client engagement on the digital platform. With most major search engines using algorithms that give higher SERP weightage to engaging content, the imperative for developing an effective content structure has become all the more amplified.
Listed below are 5 specific ways to ensure that you get the right content for your business:
Use dedicated SMEs for creating quality content
Content marketing at scale cannot be treated as a part-time involvement. Despite having an in-house team, it has been observed that many companies fall back on their editorial schedule due to lack of timely involvement of SMEs. For conducting inbound marketing at scale (multiple articles per week), this investment is exponentially magnified given the amount of research and editing that goes into writing genuinely insightful articles. The model followed by most companies includes using Subject Matter Experts to provide editorial oversight and guidance to generic content writers who then do the actual content development. This is typically done to ensure that SMEs make productive utilization of their time as billable resources in making/selling of a product or service. While the quality of content produced using such models may be fine for generating traffic and volume, it is unlikely to generate engagement where the audience expects deep-dive, hands-on content that educates them beyond publicly available information. At Syptus, we make an argument against this traditional content creation model when the goal is to create engagement with consistency and scale. Outsourcing content development to a dedicated team of SMEs may well be the only tactic available to Content Marketing Managers looking to run outcome driven Content Marketing projects that produce high volume, high quality content which in turn result in qualified leads.
Stick to a content theme
Engaging content is always tailored for specific audience and context where the context is derived from the particular journey stage that a prospect might be at. Explaining the use cases for a product or service to an early stage buyer may make a lot more sense as opposed to doing so to a late stage prospect who has asked for pricing options and post go-live support arrangement details. A best practices guide, on the other hand, would be a lot more relevant to someone who has already purchased your product or service or someone currently with your competition but with an active intent to switch. Theme based content development is the ideal tactic to generate engagement and has the additional tactical benefits of providing a sequential flow to content.
Here are six themes we follow internally to help match content purpose with audience intent.
- Use cases – A descriptive and convincing use case is a great way of putting your business plan across the potential investors for engagement and lead generation.
- Industry trends – Keeps you updated with the latest industry trends. The future of artificial intelligence, upcoming IoT technologies, robots replacing customer service agents are some of the trending industries that need to be focused on. Such articles typically delve into where the industry is headed as a whole along with specific examples of leading innovators.
- Best Practice Guides – These articles provide audience with a set of best practices when undertaking your product or service implementation. E.g. How do you structure API calls for fetching data from a large AdWords or Facebook Account? How do you design a database for high query performance?
- Framework guides – These articles provide your audience with step-by-step method for implementing your product or service. E.g. talk about how you manage data analytics engagement? What are the steps to create enterprise architecture for marketing technology?
- Points of View – As typically opinion pieces, these articles that project your thought leadership around a particular niche. They talk about a position that the author takes and then summarize the rationale using qualitative and/or quantitative analysis.
Make use of numbers
Let the numbers talk your way through the article. This tactic may not be relevant for all the content themes but should be used where relevant. Numbers are easy to comprehend and can be of great help when it comes to showing qualitative information in a better light. While this may seem to make things easier, the over usage of numbers and data may end up making the whole article a bit confusing. An article must essentially maintain the right amount of balance between the numerical data followed by a readable explanation to make it easier to read and pleasant to skim through later on for reference purposes.
Follow a logical structure
While adopting theme based content development may help in organizing ‘what’ goes into your article, sticking to a consistent logical structure will help organize the content for easy consumption. While there may be various ways of structuring an article for different domains, the best practice is to follow the order — document summary that lays down the crux of argument, short introduction that describes the document structure, core content that articulates the author’s position and finally a conclusion. Additionally, an article with smooth transitions, bullet points and easy-to-read small paragraphs will be able to retain a reader better as opposed to random, disoriented cacophony.
Use compelling graphics
This one is a no-brainer. The power of raw text can be amplified significantly with the right graphics that gain attention instantly and draw users into reading with greater intent. However, randomly placing images into raw text may actually harm the intent of the article more than enhance it, given that images must closely project the concepts and ideas outlined in the article. Once again, this requires a great deal of internal co-ordination between SMEs and the creative team and may not always be possible in most internal marketing departments.
Summary
Producing engaging content designed for human consumption is hugely different to writing run-on-the-mill articles that focus on the technical makeup of text and which are clearly intended to dupe search engines into giving higher SERPs. The investment required in generating this content at scale and on a consistent basis is significant and must start with fundamentally transforming the content research and development function. Content generated as part of a methodical approach that aligns people skills, writing approach and content production process goes a long way in ensuring a consistent flow of highly qualified leads.
