“Build it and they will come.”
Not necessarily. Nowadays it depends what you build and how you build it. Successful content involves words, visuals, and videos that engage, inspire, and motivate the reader to do something, such as buy a product or service. Dominating your competition by using content means being able to do the best job at engaging, inspiring, and motivating.
To make this happen, you need a defined strategy, because talented writing isn’t the only ingredient required. A contractor doesn’t just go out and make a building with materials he finds nearby. Instead, an architect and a blueprint direct the project based on proven design strategies that align with the purpose of the building.
In the morass of available content – the good, bad, and ugly – here are some winning, meaningful, and relevant content design strategies you need in order to beat your competition in the content category:
Thoughtful Word (and Visual) Choices
Your words must be relevant, efficient, productive, and interesting (and sometimes, entertaining). Listicles, top 10s, stories, case studies, and tutorials look great and are easy to read, and we all love “down and dirty” bulleted tips, but what does your content actually say?
To achieve these thoughtful word choices, you must study your audience, observing and conversing with them to better understand what moves and attracts them to a particular site. Look at what they are saying – and how they are saying it – when they talk to each other on social media platforms. Then, speak their language in your content so they realize you get it – and them.
Provide your team with a style guide that captures all the intelligence you have gathered and includes examples to emulate for each platform. You may have to develop a style guide for social media platforms, blogs, and articles, including specific language and tone you know is relevant and relatable to your audience.
However, this is not a static process. Your style guide must be constantly refreshed and evolve as the conversation with the audience changes. There is also nothing wrong with benchmarking existing content models if this helps quickly build out the basic framework.
After you have a style guide, focus on unique, thoughtful word and visual choices that differentiate your content from others in the space. By doing so, you can become the authority in your industry or market segment, which will make you the go-to for content. That brand attribute then can be leveraged to generate revenue for your product or service. In the customer’s mind, if you know what you are talking about, then you must be making something that is just as good, if not better.
In the customer’s mind, if you know what you are talking about, then you must be trustworthy and worth buying from.
Complementary Presentation
Beyond picking the most relevant and engaging words, you need to know how to design the page it is on to enhance that connection. What your content looks like does influence the reader. The more content you have to work with, the more difficult it gets to arrange it in a helpful and attractive way.
Don’t try to make existing content fit a website or blog template; readers will know you forced it. Instead, generate a design and content designed specifically for you. This complementary process helps create a seamless experience for the reader who does not have to struggle to read or enjoy the visual aspects. Good graphic design enhances this experience and heightens the ability for the reader to remember, share, and return.
The Science of the SEO Platform
Content creation is creative and philosophical, but it is also a science. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) enters the strategy picture. No matter how many times search engines change their parameters for SEO, it still counts as an integral part of content development.
Yes, you want interesting content, but how effective is it if no one can find it? Therefore, it must be able to quickly scale the Google ranking mountains in order to reach your audience. Potential readers don’t have time to click more than one or two search result pages so your content has to top the competition. With this said, it’s a simple process of writing something meaningful but that has specific and unique keywords (but not too many!) to identify you in the search engine rankings. Yes, just that simple.
Luckily, technology is simplifying the SEO process. For example, Searchmetrics provides companies with an optimization platform that does a significant amount of the work for you to increase visibility and content relevance. Companies like Ebay have used Searchmetrics to better understand how they were ranking with search engines, including taking advantage of its automated monitoring and analysis of existing optimization. This has enabled Ebay to improve its search strategies associated with their existing content and future content development plans.
Bring It Together With a Content Management System
Streamlining the process of content production is essential, especially if you have outsourced some or all of your content production. It is not efficient to have various content writers sending in content in many different ways. Managing what has been done, how it has been approved, and how it is then published becomes time-consuming, error-riddled, and convoluted.
Instead, technology has answered the call and provided an important strategy for managing content. Content Management Systems (CMS) deliver a platform where content can be uploaded, shared, revised, and then disseminated. It essentially centralizes all content into one location where many can be involved in the process.
Common examples of currently used CMS solutions include Basecamp (which has other tools as well that are helpful for project management), Percussion, WordPress, and Drupal. Find a CMS that scales with your business and can be accessible to all within your firm and from the outsource world. In this way, you can work more efficiently and beat the competition to the publication button.
Content Production Tools
Make use of the technology available that your competition may not be aware even exists. There are content production tools that seemingly appear on a daily basis. While many may not be specifically relevant to your content strategy, you may want to delve into others that can help achieve many of the tactics listed here:
- Parse.ly is a website analytics tool that tracks topic and author performance and promotes in-demand content that correlates with current web and audience trends.
- Zuum is a social media analytics tool that allows you to track what the competition is doing in terms of any viral content.
- Squeeze CMM is a funnel analytics tool that measures content return on investment and follows audience activity, interest, and trends in a report format.
- Silverpop is a market automation tool that brings email, mobile, social media, and more together onto one platform to have conversations with audience members on multiple devices and then measure how those relationships are doing.
- 40 Nuggets is a personalization tool that allows you to tailor content with each audience member through predictive intelligence and audience analytics.
- Visual.ly is a graphics creation tool to generate infographics and data visualization.
- KnowledgeVision is a video creation tool that helps you develop interactive online video experiences from existing presentations and content.
Quantitative Understanding through Metadata
Back to the science of content, metadata delivers information about the content in the form of quantitative evidence that determines how the content is working or not working to generate meaning and connection with its intended audience. Making metadata a key content strategy helps those in charge of content to understand how content can be used, reused, and organized to make the most effective connections.
Making metadata a key content strategy helps those in charge of content to understand how content can be used, reused, and organized to make the most effective connections.
Content Strategist as Architect
Put someone in charge of all aspects of content strategy who can do the research, philosophize and brainstorm, benchmark, dialogue, design, and construct. They will know how to combine the theory of content with the practical business component of content development, combining these into one results-driven content strategy. The content strategist will select the content based on the information available and plan how often it is generated, posted, and measured.
Even if you don’t yet have an expert, pick someone who is interested and wants to dive in. Let them loose but work together to ensure any and all content strategies are aligned with the overall business goals.
Final Thoughts
Successful content strategies must be dynamic. Sure, defining a content strategy can be complex, messy, and painful. Change is good and fully necessary, not to mention a strategy in itself. Put these strategies to work, see how they work, tweak the process, and keep the content coming.
