Content that sticks

Today, original and authentic web content is more valuable than ever before. The recent uncertainty over its future has cleared and the process, although painful for some, has actually had a very positive overall effect on the quality of the content.

Now more than ever before, the message must be useful and the delivery must be clear, clean and concise to succeed. Fortunately, there are some easy steps that businesses can take to ensure their content is sending just the right message.

Know the end game

Just as race car drivers learn to look toward where they want to go, so should businesses learn to see the goal they are striving toward and establish a straight path to get there. Often goals are stated as vague, pretty sentences with no real direction. These lack the structure and determination to be true goals and are, therefore, seldom attainable. Instead, to be successful, goals should be practical, achievable and easily envisioned.

Do your homework

Goals are just goals without the tools necessary to achieve them. A successful marketing campaign is one of the best tools that a business can employ to help them achieve their goals. The marketing campaign should rely on precisely crafted content that will encourage customers to act.  But, great content cannot be created without understanding the audience it is directed toward.

Proper research is the best possible way to learn enough about the audience to both fine tune the message to its fullest potential, and also to ensure that the most relevant keywords are being utilized within the content.  But the research should not stop there.  Studying successful competitors and gaining an understanding of how they use content can help you avoid some of the pitfalls along your own pathway.

Craft the message

Creating great content has four main principles.

• To be effective, the content’s message must accurately reflect what the business intends to say.
• It must be said in a clear, concise manner. Padding the message detracts from and devalues the entire message, causing readers to lose interest in the content.
• The content must be interesting to the reader, perhaps containing a helpful nugget of information or an interesting fact that will hold their attention.
• The message should have enough value for readers to feel the time they spent reading it was time well spent.

Get the message out

Now that you have created some really attention getting content, publish it. The only way to truly gauge its effectiveness is to get the message out to the audience it was written for. Feedback from this audience is the best way to know how to fine-tune the message or if it needs adjustment in some way. Additionally, make sure that readers have an easy way to share your message, maybe with a built-in share button on the blog or website where the content appears. A reader sharing your content among their virtual circle of influence is a great way to maximize the effectiveness of your message.

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