“Content is king,”
“Brands should create more content.”
“Content Marketing is all the Marketing that is left.”
If you got a penny for every time you heard words like the ones above, I bet you’d have a lot of pennies.
Content marketing is a buzzword nowadays, and everyone—experts, salespeople, soccer mums, gardeners, you name it—is talking about it. Sadly, only a few people know the rules for creating content that grabs attention, evokes emotion and gets people to take action.
With millions of brands creating and publishing content every day—statistics record a whopping 7 million blog posts churned out daily—you might be tempted to think effective content marketing is a walk in the park. In real life, it requires skill, intentionality, and adherence to specific content commandments.
This blog post outlines four content commandments for effective content marketing to help your brand reach its content goals.
1. Thou shall put thy audience first
I saw an animation once, The Magician’s Elephant and one scene perfectly described the struggles of pleasing an uninterested audience.
The story unfolds in a fictional town called Baltese, which was originally a magical place where everything felt possible until the war came, followed by a strange thick cloud of doom that sapped all the magic away. People just stopped believing in magic.
Fast forward to a show organized a while later, with the opening act being a magician whose dream was making the people of Baltese excited about magic like they once were. IT WAS A DISASTER. The more magic tricks he tried, the more the crowd booed—well, that is until he performed the final trick, which got the whole town talking.
Would his audience have been more thrilled if they were magic lovers? Yes!
Would his act have been more accepted if he did something the audience wanted to see? You bet!
The point is the world revolves around your audience, literally.
In the grand scheme, your audience comes before your products, services, content calendar, and whatnot. Don’t get me wrong, these things are important too. However, none of them would matter without a starving and interested audience.
Before getting into the nitty gritty of content creation, it is essential to answer questions like:
Who is my audience?
What are their goals and interests?
What keeps them up at night?
What language do they speak?
What kind of content do they find appealing?
How do my products and services make their lives better?
Answer these questions, and you will have taken an essential step in the content marketing process guaranteed to offer effective results.
2. Thou shall develop a unique brand voice and stick to it.
Think of your best friend for a second—the one you spend long hours talking with on the phone. Imagine you got lost in a crowd and had to trace the sound of their voice to find them. Would you recognize it amidst the many other voices? I’m guessing yes—I know I would.
In the same way that humans have a voice, every brand needs a voice to express its identity.
Your brand voice is the totality of your brand’s personality and should be consistent enough to be recognizable by your audience. Take Apple, for example. If you have been around the Apple space long enough, you should be accustomed to the simple yet confident voice it uses in all its content and communication. It stands out and is easily recognizable by die-hard Apple users.
One of the secrets of effective content marketing is developing and maintaining a unique and consistent brand voice— such that your audience can spot and recognize your content from a crowd of similar brands.
3. Thou shall research thoroughly
Research is at the center of effective content marketing. They go hand in hand and complement each other.
In the words of renowned copywriter Gary Halbert:
“If you do your research properly, if you do enough “prep,” your ads and sales letters will almost write themselves. It’s like painting a boat. The actual painting is easy; the hard part is the faring (preparation) or getting the boat ready to be painted.”
If your goal with content marketing is to create high-quality content that resonates with a target audience, you must prioritize research as a part of your content strategy. From researching your target audience to digging deep for compelling content ideas, research can make all the difference to your content marketing.
4. Thou shall optimize your content for search engines
If there is one thing more important than creating high-quality content, it is ensuring it gets seen by the right people. After all, what good is content marketing if your brand’s content never gets to the target audience?
This is where search engine optimization comes into play.
SEO goes beyond sprinkling a few keywords across your content, hoping the web crawlers sniff them out and reward your brand with a high rank on the search engines. It is a long-term investment into your content marketing strategy, with guaranteed returns on investments—if done right.
With that said, you shall optimize your content for search engines consistently. Here are a few tips for incorporating search engine optimization into your content strategy:
- Conduct thorough keyword research.
- Write like a human—not a robot—writing to other humans.
- Create valuable content that meets the expectations of your audience.
- Pay attention to details, like meta descriptions and title tags.
- Always include relevant links, internal and external.
- Incorporate compelling visuals into your content.
- Create content consistently.
Successful search engine optimizations take time and require lots of patience and persistence. With consistency, you’ll see results.
Go into the world and create content!
Everyone is creating content nowadays, but only some adhere to the content commandments guaranteed to make their brands successful and reap the results of their hard work.
Thankfully, if you adhere to the four commandments outlined in this article, you’ll be among the top percent of brand and business owners nailing their content marketing. How delightful is that?!
Go on now—go into the world and create outstanding content!
