Constantly creating and publishing high-quality content is essential for a successful content marketing strategy. In turn, content marketing is important for any kind of business today, and especially for independent small businesses.
This is why online store owners should carefully plan their content marketing activities and decide how they will be creating high-quality content regularly. Hence, here are the ten content creation tips that every online store owner should follow.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
First of all, you need to identify your target audience. In most cases, this will be the same as your target audience in terms of customers. However, not everyone reading your blog posts or checking your social media profiles will be your customer. This is why your target audience for your content marketing strategy may be wider than your target audience made up of your current customers.
Moreover, you need to think ahead and consider the possibilities for expansion. If you want to enter foreign markets, you will likely need to take into account things like localization (i.e. optimizing your content for a specific region). Don’t forget to segment your audience and then work with each segment separately when creating your content.
2. Set SMART Goals for Your Strategy
Once you know who your target audience is, you can set SMART goals for your content marketing strategy. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound. The SMART technique will help you clearly determine what you want and how you will achieve it (through content marketing). Here are some examples of content marketing goals:
- Introduce New Products or Make Announcements – You can use press releases, social media posts, and blog posts to introduce new products or make announcements to your audience.
- Inform and Communicate with Customers – You can inform and educate your audience about relevant topics (e.g. how to use your products) as well as communicate with your customers through your content.
- Gain New Customers by Generating Traffic – When writing about the topics your potential customers care about, you will be generating more traffic on your website through your blog. In turn, this will help you gain new customers.
3. Define Your Content Strategy
Now, you can get more specific about the way you will create your content. All the aspects of content creation that will matter to you along the way. Some of the things to define in your content strategy include:
- Topics – What topics will you be covering in your content? How often will you cover evergreen topics compared to trending ones?
- Formatting – What formats will you use for your content? How will you organize information in your content (e.g. step-by-step guides in the form of 10-minute videos)?
- Quality Standards – What kind of quality standards do you want to maintain across all your content (e.g. JPEG images of a certain quality, size, and dimensions)?
- Schedule – Which channels and platforms will you use to publish and distribute your content (e.g. blog, social media profiles, emails)? How often will you be posting your content? At what time during the week and the day will you be posting your content?
4. Get the Tools for Content Creation
To help you throughout content creation, you can get a number of tools that will make creating and distributing content much easier compared to what it would be like for you if you were doing it all on your own. Here are some examples of such tools:
- Grammarly – A proofreading tool that will check your text for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and word choice mistakes.
- Canva – A free online editing tool for working with images. It offers a wide range of different templates and customization features.
- MailChimp – An email marketing automation platform for setting up and executing email marketing campaigns.
- Hootsuite – A social media marketing platform where you can schedule posts across multiple social media platforms from a single dashboard.
5. Consider Outsourcing Content Creation
In addition to using different content creation tools to help you create your content, you can also consider outsourcing some or all of your content creation. Essentially, this means that you will be letting independent professionals create your content for you which will give you more time to work on other things.
The best thing about outsourcing is that it can help you save both time and money. You can hire professional writers and editors from the writing services reviews site Best Writers Online to help you create your content. They will do it just as well as you would yourself, but you won’t have to worry about running out of time anymore.
6. Start Writing Your Content
Once the planning stage is complete, you can start writing your content. Of course, you need to stick to your strategy as closely as possible, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t stray away from your plans a little. For instance, you could change your formatting a bit if you feel like the changes will improve your content.
You can first create outlines for every piece of content you create to better organize your thoughts and ideas. Don’t edit your content as you are writing it – instead, write it first and only then proofread and edit it (while using the tools listed earlier such as Grammarly). You can also ask someone else to read your content to get a different perspective about it.
7. Create Engaging Visual Content
Simultaneously, you can start creating engaging visual content that will work together with your textual content for maximum impact. Here are some of the most common examples of visual content and other types of engaging content you can use:
- Images and Videos – Photos of your products, infographics and graphs with statistics about your brand and products, videos explaining how to use your products, etc.
- 360-Degree Views – AR-based 360-degree views of your products to let customers “see” them as if in real life while online shopping.
- Games and Quizzes – Games and quizzes (as well as polls) can be used to engage the audience more and gamify your interactions with customers.
8. Find and Collect Social Proof
Social proof is critical for the success of your content marketing, but you can’t actually create it yourself. This is why you need to dedicate some time to finding and collecting social proof that you can then use in your campaigns. Here are the most common types of it:
- Customer Testimonials – Testimonials and reviews from customers about your brand and products (on social media, review sites, and your own website).
- Expert Reviews – Reviews of your products from industry experts (including influencers in your niche).
- Media Coverage – Coverage of your brand and products by media outlets.
9. Experiment with Your Content
One of the things to always remember when it comes to content creation is that you don’t always have to stick to what’s been done before. You are free (and encouraged to) experiment with your content.
For instance, think about an interesting way you can format your product comparisons. You can do this in a video format, in an infographic, or in a simple social media post among other things. By experimenting with your content, you will be finding new ways to achieve different goals.
10. Track Performance and Improve
Last but not least, don’t forget to track the performance of your content and improve it. Only by tracking performance and making the right improvements can you develop and innovate your content marketing strategy continuously. Do this consistently and make sure that you are always trying to improve your content.
Final Thoughts
All in all, content creation isn’t as complicated as it may seem at first. Once you figure out what works for you and how you can make the process easier, you can streamline all your content creation activities. Utilize the techniques from this article to help you create your own content creation strategy that will give you the best results.
Punit