Content Creation Strategies for Businesses

Today, we want to discuss forms of content, and developing the execution of content creation strategies for businesses. 

For the past decade, digital marketers and organizations have focused on continually trying to keep up with the ever growing changes happening with the google algorithms while developing their content creation strategies. For those unfamiliar, the google algorithm is essentially how data is read, ranked, and placed within search engines. 

Although the algorithms aren’t going anywhere, marketing of the future will entail a different strategy.

Industry leading marketers such as Neil Patel and Gary Vaynerchuk have hammered on the idea that 2020 and beyond will entail enhancing user value and engagement on content in order to rank well. 

This all sounds great, but what type of content are we creating in the first place?

Forms of Content

There are various forms of content, but the content that generates demand in the present and future has one thing in common; A digital presence. According to Hubspot, here are 12 different forms of content that organizations can focus on:

1. Blogs
2. Videos
3. Infographics
4. Case Studies
5. eBooks
6. User-generated content
7. Checklists
8. Memes
9. Testimonials/Reviews
10. Whitepapers
11. How-to Guides/Academies
12. Influencers/Paid Ad Content

Answer Questions

Regardless of the form of content you choose, it is critical that you’re answering end user questions and providing value.

As an example, the google answer box is a key indicator that you’ve created content that effectively answers user questions. It looks like this:

This makes it easier for a user to get an answer quickly, and not have to scroll through an entire page to do so. By simply clicking the drop-down arrow, you should have a comprehensive answer that gets you directly to the point:

The Future of Content Creation Strategies for Businesses

To sum up the trends that we’re seeing, valuable content creation strategies of the future will answer users’ questions, enable engagement, and ultimately prove to be valuable to the user regardless of the channel (video, text, voice) that it is being consumed. 

Regardless of your ability to optimize SEO to meet the latest and greatest algorithm changes, valuable content will win in the end. 

Putting a Strategy in Place

We’ll call this portion the hierarchy of content creation that will enable you to look at different forms and begin executing on those forms.

1. Identify your ‘bread and butter’ solution

This entails what your organization is best at. If you’re a Pizza restaurant, maybe it’s your award-winning sauce that has been in the family for 80 years. If you’re a surgeon, maybe it’s your fast decision making process that you’ve implemented while under pressure. Regardless, convey what you’re good at in a way highlights how you can solve your target markets’ problem. 
2. Once you’ve decided what your ‘bread and butter’ is, let’s do a little keyword research

Earlier we discussed that SEO algorithms aren’t what’s going to enable your organization to win, however it’s important to understand the way that your audience identifies your solution. 

For example, in 2019, a huge buzzword in the IT industry was ‘digital transformation’ which was a fancy way of saying upgrading your IT infrastructure. The problem? You can discuss ‘digital transformation’ until you’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t mean it resonates with your audience. What the audience was really looking for was an ‘IT Consultant’ that can help them in their path toward a transformed digital infrastructure! 

Leveraging Google’s keyword planner is a great way to look at terms that your audience is searching for, and how frequently they’re doing so. It’s important because you’ll quickly realize that you should be talking about ‘IT consulting’ rather than ‘digital transformation’. 

3. Choose your forms of content

Using the 12 different forms of content above, identify 3-5 that you can reasonably execute on and push out to your audience. 

Example, we create a video discussing the secret sauce at our Pizza shop that has been in the family for the last 80 years, and some reviews that it’s received from consumers. We then take that video and create a blog post recapping the video with some additional insight. After that, we convert the video into a podcast and post it online for people to listen to. Then, we take some of the reviews about our sauce and post them to our website, and then share it on social media.

That’s five pieces of content that stem from one video. All users consume content differently, so with the appropriate data insight, you’ll see which forms work best for your audience and can then continuously evolve your content strategies to meet what resonantes best with your users.  

That’s great, now what?

Rinse and repeat. Leverage the analytics that are tied into your site, videos, podcasts, and social media posts to determine what your audience responds and engage with. They may not all perform great, but that doesn’t mean that you should stop producing content on one channel just because a different channel performed better. 

Ultimately, you’ll improve the content that you’re putting out on all channels, and your audience will gain value based on their preferred content consumption method.

Consistency

Consistency and patience are key to implementing your content strategy. To put things into perspective, it can take 6-9 months for a blog post to finally start to gain traction. That means a post from January may not even reach its full potential until August! Quality content creation strategies produce value in the long-term and may not show an immediate ROI. Based on a 6-9 month lead time, let’s use the chart below for some more perspective. 

Blog Created	Blog Reaches Potential of Engagement
January 2020	August 2020
April 2020	November 2020
July 2020	February 2021
October 2020	May 2021

You can work on a blog post in July that you may not even see results on until the following year. 

Now, a blog is just one form of content and is meant to provide context on the importance of consistency in your content creation strategy.

Stay consistent, and keep improving. 
For help implementing your content creation strategy, reach out today.