Content is King, right? We’ve heard that so much we’re tired of it, but it is true. Content helps you establish authority, propagate your brand, as well as create and nurture relationships with your audience. Not all content is good, but these four tips can help ensure your content marketing will work well for your business.
- Does your content resonate with your brand, and offer value to your audience?
If people read your content and it looks or sounds like someone else, you will lose credibility. Your brand will also suffer if your content is written with different voices all the time. When you created your logo (not your brand, your logo) the designer should have offered to create a style guide as well. A style guide is not inexpensive, but it is worth its weight in gold for brand consistency and building recognition.
A style guide tells you which fonts, tone and voice, structure, spelling and grammar, brand message, and more to use in visual as well as written content. Consistency will help people recognize your brand – and that’s what you want. Hopefully you opted to have ae style guide created, and you follow it.
A quick note about visual content – which includes graphics, images, videos, and colors: Don’t treat visual content any differently than you do written words. It needs to be consistent. A style guide should also address images as well as how and when they are used – and this includes your logo.
- Did you research your topic before you wrote about it?
Before you write (or record a video), research your topics to make sure you’re providing current and accurate content, Things posted on the internet last forever – or at least it seems like forever – so your information source may be outdated. Provide current and accurate content, check any instructions you may provide to ensure they work, and also check any links to make sure they lead where you intend them to. Be open, honest, and accurate and you will build a following.
- Do you gate all of your content?
Gating all of your content is a bad idea. If you force people to register or login all the time, or make it difficult to get to your content in any way, people will give up and stop reading. Gated content has a role to play in building an audience, but if you only offer gated content, people will find someone else’s content to consume.
Use ungated content to grow your audience, help with brand propagation, and improve your search engine results.
- Is your gated content (and the registration data) secured?
There are too many hackers these days. Make sure you are using secure access pages and storing any collected data securely as well. Breaches happen – and smaller companies are targets of hackers. Company size doesn’t protect you. Your content is invaluable in encouraging followers to share something about themselves. If anyone can bypass the login and get your content without giving you anything in return, you get the short end of the stick.
Content will help power your marketing and it drives the best brands. Focus on creating content that adds value, is accurate, grows trust, is consistent, and helps build relationships. If you do, your content marketing strategy will help grow your business as well as create a loyal fan base that will eagerly share your content and talk about your amazing company.
