With every conceivable business wanting to gain a foothold online, creating content is a very important part of the marketing strategy. There may be a lot of content that you can use but none has the same power as written content. It is the most basic but packs the most value—even more than videos or pictures. And in order for your website to be successful, your company needs to have a viable and effective written content strategy.
Why you need a written content strategy
Written content is the simplest way that your corporation can convey what it is all about on your website. It can put into context and explain all other content that you have there. It offers a chance for your company to build its online presence. Written content is the easiest way to promote your brand. It can also help leave a lasting impression on potential customers to keep your brand in their minds.
You can make your company website more interesting with written content. It provides added value to a site that would just otherwise be talking about its own products and describing itself. You can cater to a lot more people by providing information that can be both entertaining and useful since not everyone is online to buy your products. It is cheaper and far easier to produce original written content than videos or pictures that can have a lot of copyright strikes.
Written content provides far more value for money if ever you decide to invest in a written content strategy. There are a lot of marketing techniques that can be applied to and in tandem with written content. It can help create a lot of engagement with your prospective consumers. It can help attract potential customers and lead them to your website. And with a properly executed written content strategy, this can help convert all these website visitors into paying and returning customers.
The basics of written content strategy
Your written content strategy is your template for success. In order to have tangible results, you need to have a plan on what you intend to do with your written content. It can set the tone of your website, help in knowing what kind of written content to produce, and work towards the goals of your company.
You first need to identify your goals. This would help you know what kind of written content you need to put out or create in order for you to achieve your strategy. You also need to know why you are producing such content. This will help you determine what kind of written content has value to your audience.
Identify your audience
When you create your written content strategy, it is important that you consider your target audience. What you write should be simple and easy to understand. You may be targeting a niche market, but this shouldn’t be an excuse to liberally use technical jargon. Writing easy-to-read content can be very helpful for beginners who are developing an interest in the niche.
Well-written content helps build your site’s reputation. If you have a lot of helpful content that provides information for newbies to industry veterans, you become an authority in the matter. What you would say will be considered when they make decisions. Accessibility to all kinds of people will greatly help your marketing cause.
Get to know your audience more
Identifying your audience also helps you set the tone of your content. You will be able to set the “personality” of your corporate site and adapt it to the majority of your audience.
Doing market research is also part of knowing your audience. Not only will your market research tell what kind products they would like most or what they would more likely buy from your company, it would also give valuable insight as to what kind of information they are looking for.
Aside from the tone of the articles or written content, you would know where to publish or share them. You can link to blogs and social media sites, so they are eventually led to your website. It is important as well to know why they do things and why they buy things. This will help you more when strategising what kind of written content will encourage them to keep reading and buying from your corporate website.
Identify what they are usually searching for
You will get a wealth of information when you are able to identify your audience. The most important information that you would get from them is what they use as keywords when they look for information related to your industry.
Keywords are the lifeblood of all content. They are the tags you can use in optimising your website. Keywords are also the main topics of the things you need to write about. They would be helpful in knowing what kind of articles to produce.
When you have what your audience is searching for, they would be sure to keep coming back to your site for information. This, again, helps build up your online reputation because they will know that you make the most sense among all the fluff they see on the Internet. These keywords in your written content help them keep on popping up in the search results page and help give more visibility to your website.
Plan your written content
You might have a general content strategy governing your written content strategy. Your corporate website needs all the variety of content to keep it interesting and engaging for returning customers or users. They need to continually see value in coming back to your website after the initial awe has worn off.
You should make sure that while your written content is optimised to be found by search engines, you have to be sure that they are also well-written. Meaning that they make sense, are well-researched, free of grammatical errors, and formatted in such a way that they may be able to provide information at a glance.
Planning your written content includes making an inventory of what you already have. This will help you identify what kind of written content you have like articles, lists, how-tos, etc. It can also help you know what kind of content works with your audience based on what has been shared and viewed the most. This can help influence you on what you need to do more of, or help you decide which direction to take in your written content strategy.
Update your content
It would make sense to review what you have in order for you to update what you have put out. This will help your corporate website become more relevant. Your website will look to have all the newest information. There may be changes in technology that have made the information in your previous posts or articles outdated. This can also help you tweak your content with the keywords that are more effective.
Conclusion
You need to maximise the value of your content in order for your corporate website to succeed. Having a written content strategy helps you streamline what you need to do and avoid redundancies that could derail your corporate website’s marketing.
Having a well-thought of and documented strategy makes it easier to revisit strategies that don’t work. Or you can simply go back to the strategy to get a sense of the direction you need to take whenever you are out of ideas or when you believe you have lost focus.