Posted by Valuable online content serves three main purposes; increasing sales, developing customer relationships, and boosting brand awareness. Content marketing is a pillar of modern marketing to drive engagement with the audience. However, starting a blog and publishing content is one thing, and retaining readers is another. To truly get results, you must create content that is original and relevant to your audience. It gives them information they cannot find anywhere else. Readers today are inundated with content across various platforms. In such a scenario, knowing tips of valuable content and implementing them in your writing can help you drive the desired engagement.
This article will delve deeper into what makes content valuable and how to create such content.
What Is Valuable Content?
Valuable or value-added content is original and exclusive content that meets the search intent of the audience. It can be in the form of a video, blog post, eBooks, podcasts, infographics, and tutorials.
This type of content has certain features. These include the following:
Relatable
Relatable content is the one that the target audience searches for. It helps resolve their query and gives them insight. Relevant content adheres to the specific wants and needs of the target audience. It positions you as an authority figure, and consumers are likelier to do business with your brand.
Relevant content also improves the performance of your website in search engine results pages. This is because your target audience will want to click and read your content as it caters to their needs.
Distinct
Today, everyone wants to read original and honest content. Valuable content is authentic and, as a result, grabs the audience’s attention. Moreover, unique content also raises a business’s credibility.
For example, a newsletter that curates industry information from various sources for the target audience. It provides something new to the readers and saves the time they spend searching for different articles. An eBook is also a good way to create unique and long-form content that depicts the unique personality of your business.
Valuable content that’s unique gives readers a fresh view of a common topic. It is also infused with a personality, such as a video or audio.
Well-researched
Writing content just for the sake of it does not give any results. Valuable content that drives traffic is well-researched, enabling it to answer the user’s query perfectly.
This content is comprehensive and is made after researching your target audience’s questions. It’s hard to find well-researched broad topics because it’s challenging to explore a vast topic deeply and provide useful information.
The best pieces of valuable content are always on a sub-topic of an overarching theme. Such pieces aren’t promotional. Instead, their main focus is to educate the readers.
When readers gain value from the content, they naturally share it with others and fulfill your aim of expanding your reader base.
Tips of Valuable Content to Enhance Engagement
Use these tips to produce and deliver valuable content to your audience.
Have a clear understanding of your audience
Behind every successful blog is a robust strategy based on a sound understanding of the target audience. Only when you identify your real audience can you create content that appeals to them.
You can leverage various tools like Google Analytics to understand your audience accurately. These tools go beyond giving you just general information about them. They segment your customer base, so creating content addressing their unique concerns becomes easier.
Here’s an example to understand why audience segmentation is useful. Suppose you have a health blog. Your audience can be readers with different goals. Some may be women wanting to lose weight, while others may be men wanting to gain muscle. You cannot serve the content for women to men and vice versa. Here’s exactly where audience segmentation helps you tailor posts and cater to the individual concerns of your audience.
Add authority to the content
Establishing authority and delivering value lies at the heart of content marketing. Without authority content, you cannot hope that people will value your advice. When readers view you as an authority, they follow instead of questioning your recommendations.
Some ways to add authority to content and make it valuable include the following:
- Analyze the style and strategies of your main competitors. Find which topics are most popular and address the same ones uniquely.
- Create in-depth and actionable content on a narrow topic. Identify narrow topics in your domain, break them into small segments and create posts on them.
- Use visuals to make the content look professional and trustworthy. Images and snapshots add credibility to the content and enable you to highlight key areas for the readers to see and remember.
- Mention established niche experts to look more authoritative. Note the names of the writers of popular blogs in your domain and quote them in your posts.
- Add research findings to strike an immediate impact. Quote credible research sources in your niche and link them to the original source.
Use cornerstone content for a positive first impression.
Cornerstone content is a foundational piece relevant to your business. Its aim is to forge brand awareness by making people understand your brand. Some good examples of cornerstone content are pillar pages on websites. These are long-form authoritative pieces that help in increasing traffic and getting links.
High-value blog posts can be pieces of cornerstone content that provide lots of information. These blog posts have a main idea that branches into several related posts. These are then connected or linked back to the major cornerstone piece.
To design such content, ensure that it’s evergreen. It means that the content is relevant to your brand and audience.
Here are some examples of cornerstone content pieces.
- A long how-to guide.
- A series of videos.
- A searchable database for any product.
- A kind of data visualization.
- A free app like an EMI calculator.
Easy to understand and absorb
Valuable content is simple. In this context, simple means readable content. Content readability does not come only from using correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
The real meaning of reader-friendly content is writing to your audience’s level of understanding. For example, you won’t write in the same way if your audience is housewives as if it is academia.
Every sentence should be clear and convey its meaning properly. Your content will be published on your site. So, formatting also plays a critical role in making content readable.
Besides using headings, subheadings, bullet points, and tables, it also means utilizing the website space properly. Even if your content is readable but does not correspond with your website design, readers will leave before reading it fully.
Update existing content to make it valuable.
Often, marketers make the mistake of blindly generating more content by looking at their competitors. But that isn’t an effective approach.
A better way would be to audit the existing content. Identify the most successful posts and ask yourself how to make them better. Add value by putting additional information useful for your audience.
This strategy also positively influences your SEO efforts. Alternatively, repurpose existing content by turning it into other content pieces. Some examples include mini-guides, infographics, or micro-content.
Produce Valuable Content and Build a Strong Brand Image!
These tips of valuable content give you everything you must know to start creating useful content. Remember, it all begins with gaining clarity about your target audience. Your content should be credible, well-researched, and readable. It is what will create the best image of your brand for its audience base. For a better understanding of content strategy or tips, you can contact our My learning course experts.