In the digital landscape, the one thing that connects ops, marketing, employee retention, customer education and acquisition is content. No wonder, content has emerged as the king of the digital Game of Thrones (pun intended!).
However, there is still an ocean of businesses that do not give content the importance that it deserves. On the other hand, those businesses that are routinely producing quality content are looking for new ways to delight their stakeholders with their content.
If you fall in either of those categories, this blog post is for you.
Let’s look at the three content assets you need to start investing in right away:
Educational Content
Educational content is perhaps the most important type of content for marketing purposes. Anything from ebooks to comprehensive guides and blog posts can be used to induce potential customers into your sales funnel.
Not to forget, since most of this educational content will answer the most common questions asked by your potential customers (on search engines), you will be able to optimise for relevant keywords and rank high on the search engines.
Moreover, in exchange for the right content assets, such as exclusive ebooks, business owners can ask for email addresses to grow their email list. This, in turn, opens up fresh avenues for making sales through email marketing drip campaigns.
Training Content
Training, unlike a few years ago, is not an endeavour meant only for bigger organisations. Small businesses depend significantly on their small teams for their success and hence, keeping employees happy is crucial to success.
Training and development has emerged as a popular and effective way to keep employees engaged with your organisation.
The importance of training however, is not limited to boosting employee
retention.
Customer success is an important contributor to the success of businesses small and large. More businesses are using training content to make sure their valued customers can make the most of their products/services.
The best part is, deploying training is not a complex task anymore. With eLearning technologies becoming more accessible and affordable, even small businesses can effectively invest in training their employees and customers.
Moreover, with mobile learning content solutions, you can rest assured that you will not have to invest hundreds of hours creating user-friendly content for your stakeholders.
Trust And Credibility Focused Content
Even if you are generating the most detail-led articles in your niche, unless you are able to convert prospects and (website) visitors into paying customers, having a well-trained team will be of little use.
Before a prospective customer gets to interact with your team, they will probably interact with your website and thus, it needs to communicate trust.
There are many easy and effective ways to communicate trust with content. Some of them are:
- Reviews: The modern user places a lot of importance in user reviews. In fact, in a survey, 57% respondents claimed that they will only work with a business if it has 4 or more stars. This makes it clear that when a user lands on your website, they should be greeted with positive reviews about your business. Moreover, since most searches start on search engines (Google) and business directories (Yelp), it is equally important to have positive reviews on those platforms.
- Video Testimonials: Video testimonials are a superb way to communicate social proof and trust to your audience. This effectiveness is because one, video testimonials are very difficult to fake and two, in front of the camera, there are more chances that a happy customer will go into the details of what they like about your service. While these are great at communicating trust, it is a good idea to get started on video testimonials only with your best and most invested customers.
- Guest Posting: Guest posting on reputable blogs in your niche has dual benefits. The first benefit is that a guest post gives your additional visibility in front of the blog’s audience. Moreover, being a contributor on a reputable blog is sort of a testament of your expertise. This expertise, over time, will help you position yourself as an authority in your industry. As this happens, your audience’s trust in your brand will also grow.
Another extremely important type of content used to create trust is user generated content. Let’s talk about it in more detail.
User Generated Content
User generated content, as the name suggests, is your users talking about or interacting with your brand with content that they generate.
The simplest form of user generated content is customer testimonials. Testimonials lend credibility to your brand and the claims you make in your marketing communications. Moreover, customer testimonials offer potential customers social proof that other people have used your product/service to effectively solve their problems.
With that said, the scope of user generated content doesn’t end with customer testimonials. User generated content can, for instance, also be used to drive social engagements.
Unincorporated, a design and development agency based in LA does this beautifully with their #copywritingchallenge. Once a week, they choose a popular product (like the Apple Airpods in this example) and ask their followers to write a clever ad copy for the product.
This challenge works because the products they choose are loved by all and almost anyone that has worked in marketing (aka ideal audience for Unincorporated) has thought about how they would market their favorite products.
By creating this kind of engagement, you will be able to increase your chances of being visible to more audiences organically. Moreover, at least for the people engaging with your social media activity, you will be boosting your brand recall value.
Conclusion
As more brands are engaging in creating content to rank better on search engines and empower their sales funnels, few are investing on the innovation of creating content that resonates with individuals that care about their brand.
My final advice here is simple, instead of simple creating content, create less but meaningful content that finds a place in the reality of your audience.