Beginner's Guide to Content Creation

Quality content creation continues to be one of the best digital marketing strategies you can undertake. While some still haven’t jumped on board, the entrepreneurial emphasis on content creation is not “just a fad.” The reason content creation yields such a high return on investment is because it’s highly approachable and digestible by target audiences, while also boasting a very low upfront cost. Content creation can be anything from social media posts, to blogs, to podcasts, to videos–in other words, really any original share of information that your organization can produce. When content creation is high-quality, and follows a few key steps, it can be an incredibly lucrative investment of time especially since one piece of content can be used across multiple platforms. In fact, HubSpot found that content marketing brings in “3x as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 62% less.” When done strategically, content creation and subsequent content marketing also lead to increased website traffic, inbound leads, and higher conversion rates. On top of that, high-quality, consistently-posted content is actually incredibly sustainable and can stay relevant for years to come–resulting in better SEO over time (aka more inbound leads over time!).

Before we dive into a few of our favorite tips for epic content creation, let’s talk about why content marketing works. We’re currently living in what’s referred to as the “Information Age” (bear with us, we promise this isn’t just a history lesson!). This period of time is marked by an overwhelming amount of information creation and spread of said content, leading to a sizable market shift towards creating original content as proof of innovation. Citizens living in the Information Age (all of us) have placed an incredibly high value on content that we deem useful or engaging. It could be useful or engaging for a number of different reasons (we learn something, it’s enjoyable, it informs decisions, etc.), but at the end of the day content marketing works because the more relevant and memorable your content is, the stronger your competitive edge during this time.

Now that you’re completely sold on the relevance of content creation and why it works, let’s move on to a few things you can keep in mind when you venture into content creation for your company.

1. Define your company's voice (and stick to it)

We can’t stress this point enough: Define your company’s voice and stick to it. Your company is unique as is its voice and every piece of content that you push out into the universe should reflect that originality–otherwise it might get lost in the vortex of information that we just discussed. With our clients, our approach is to come up with what we call a “voice guide” that outlines the key words that describe your company’s voice and breaks down examples of each, how to apply them, how to achieve consistency, etc. We encourage you to start with the basics and find some core adjectives that you would like readers to understand as your voice. We’ll give you a peek under the EnticEdge hood and tell you that ours are approachable, authentic, and credible. Meaning, when a member of one of our target audiences engages with a piece of our content, they should feel as though what they just read/saw was approachable, authentic, and credible. Once you’ve defined those few key words with your team, stick to them. Make sure that everyone is on the same page, and always do a sanity check before publishing to make sure that you hit all of your voice credentials on the nose. If you’re interested in additional advising when it comes to defining and projecting your company’s voice, contact us here.

2. Keep your content accessible by your target audience

This sounds so simple, but it’s very easy to get caught up in a storm of content marketing and forget who is actually engaging with your content and/or who you hope will. You should produce content that you can reasonably expect your audience to be able to understand and actually want to engage with, then publish that content in channels that you can reasonably expect your audience to populate. For instance, let’s say you run a small eCommerce business that sells affordable, sustainable clothing and one of your target audiences is college students. You probably don’t want to have a highly technical tone and only post on LinkedIn since chances are that a lot of your target audience won’t find that tone as approachable as something more lighthearted, and probably aren’t looking for clothing-related content when they’re on LinkedIn. On the other hand, let’s say you currently run a fin-tech startup and your current target audience is young professionals–then perhaps the technical tone and LinkedIn presence make more sense.

3. Reduce extraneous information

We know you’re a genius and your business is off the charts innovative, but you also don’t want to be an expert in everything and especially not all at once. In learning design, there’s this wonderfully simple principle coined by Richard E. Mayer called the Coherence Principle. Basically it says that if you’re trying to teach someone something, anything unrelated to your learning goal impedes processing by the learner and actually distracts from your core concepts. So keep it straightforward and to-the-point. That doesn’t mean you can’t have fun and create an enjoyable experience for your audience, just make sure you don’t toss in information that isn’t useful to the takeaway you hope your audience will gain from your content.

4. Leverage visual assets

The average human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than words, and most people will actually only read 20-28% of the text on any given page. While that may seem improbable, think about the last time you actually sat down and read every single word of a webpage or even all of lengthy Instagram caption. Leverage visual assets for a more engaging experience that gives your audience what they’re looking for with less processing time required.

5. Don’t forget your keywords

Remember, high-quality content that includes your SEO (search engine optimization) keywords will actually keep “working” over time. You’ve probably heard the phrase, “the internet is forever,” well in this case that’s a good thing. Let’s say you post a blog for your website traffic to view that’s full of visual assets, catchy text, hits all of your voice guidelines, and is basically the most epic piece of content you’ve ever posted on your site, that blog will continue to drive traffic to your site over time. It also actually may bring in exponentially more traffic over time as its very own SEO improves!

Now that you have a starting spot for creating some great content, we want to encourage you to be consistent with it. Posting consistently isn’t just better for inbound leads and SEO, it will actually help you get more confident with creating content in the first place. Best of luck on your content creation journey, and feel free to tag us on Instagram or LinkedIn with any epic content that you create! @enticedge.

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