What does great content marketing look like?

Creating great content is more important than ever. Content is an excellent way for your company and product to engage with customers. However, how do you know your content is great?

Two Views of Content Marketing

In order to define content greatness, we should start with how content is viewed in your company. There are two views about content strategy/creation:

1. Content as a tactic: If your content is a tactic, its value is secondary, and you use it to support other business goals.
2. Content as a product: But, if the content is a product, it delivers intrinsic value to your customers. It does more than just a supporting role to your business goals. It is your business goal.

As an example, if you have the campaign to generate leads, getting more leads would be your primary goal. Whether customers are happy with your content or not doesn’t really matter as long as they fill a lead form. However, if you care whether customers are satisfied with your content or not, then you see content as a product. You use content to enhance your brand positioning and to help customers solve problems.

How To Create Great Content

A solid content marketing strategy would increase your conversion rate. When talking about a high conversion rate, we are focusing more on quality than quantity. What are the characteristics of great content that convert then? The answer is — great content is engaging, useful, and transformative.

• Content is engaging when it not only captures audience attention but also keeps that attention actively focused. It’s like you give a promise to the audience and deliver that promise in the content.
• Content is useful when it solves the audience-specific problem. Every time someone interacts with your content, he searches for a solution to his problem. His problem could be big or small. It’s your content’s job to deliver that solution.
• Content is transformative when it changes the audience in some meaningful way. The transformations don’t need to be groundbreaking. It could be as simple as encouraging someone to click on a link or fill a form. The most powerful transformations are when content encourages someone to change their behavior or their belief.

Creating transformative content is the most difficult one. It requires a lot of research to gain insight into customers. To me, it’s a fundamental aspect of a brand development process.

The Six Elements of The Content Marketing Process

Brittany Berger suggested that there is an over-focus on content creation than the rest of the content marketing process. It’s kind of true. I also had the same mentality. I used to believe that the more content I created, the more reactions I would have got from my audience. However, I later found out that it’s impossible to create great content without proper research and presentation.

So, the less you create and the more you amplify what you create, the less you’ll need to create.

Here are the six elements of the content marketing process:

1. Content Strategy — this is the first step that you do before you start creating content. You have to create a content plan, understand your audience, choose the channels and apply SEO strategy.
2. Content Creation — having a content plan and breaking it down into small elements would help you create content more efficiently. Knowing your audience to understand what type of content they like to consume is also critical.
3. Content Optimisation — the obvious action here is to apply an SEO strategy to your content creation. Doing keyword research and prepare content around it.
4. Content Distribution — now you are ready to share your content with your audience. You can email your content to your email list, share it on social media, or target influencers in your industry.
5. Content Repurposing — while content distribution is more about bringing people from other platforms back to content on your website, repurposing is about bringing the website’s content to the people on other platforms. For example, you may reformat your blog post into a video. Or you may break a long blog post into small pieces of information for social media.
6. Content Maintenance — this step is about ensuring that your content stays fresh, optimized, and aligned with your current business goals.

I was a victim of the faulty belief that I have to create more content to attract more leads or interests. And, I mostly ignored the rest of the content marketing process. In reality, the opposite is true. I should spend less time creating content as a way of spending more time on the neglected areas of the process.