Producing great content that stands out and helps meet your business objectives takes a lot of work. Fortunately, there are some best practices
you can follow to make the process easier, while also dramatically increasing your chances of getting results.
Creating great content is a lot like cooking. Bring together the right combination of ingredients, and the result can be a triumph. Leave a few key ingredients out, and you might be left with a bad taste in your mouth. In this quick reference guide, we outline the nine main ingredients for creating better content.
Strategy
The first step to building a successful content program is developing a strategy to guide you. Unfortunately, many companies never do and, as such, they lack the organization and focus it takes to get real results. Developing and executing a content strategy with a B2B copywriter that works and delivers everything your company needs isn’t easy. All kinds of companies struggle with this. Fortunately, agile content development practices and technology can be very useful here.
Consistency
When it comes to creating great content, consistency is key. In fact, it’s a critical ingredient for building credibility and a strong reputation. That’s because it’s not just what you say that matters, but also how you say it. When your language, style, structure, presentation, and branding are
consistent, it helps create a unified experience that your customers are more likely to trust. Meanwhile, if your content is inconsistent, you run the
risk of confusing your audience and potentially damaging your brand.
Clarity
If your content isn’t clear, it can confuse your audience. That’s a big problem, especially if it’s designed to educate or help your prospects and customers. Not only that, content that lacks clarity can also increase your
expenses. For example, when customer-facing content is unclear, it results in more calls to customer service, ratcheting up costs and potentially lowering customer satisfaction. By contrast, having clear and concise content goes a long way toward helping your audience understand and recall the information that you’re sharing.
Voice
In business, the words we use are powerful and important. That’s because they establish your tone of voice — a critical ingredient for building a connection to your target audience. Your tone of voice gives your customers a clear impression of who you are as a company, and what it’s like to do business with you. It can also help differentiate your brand by giving it a distinct and recognizable voice. When your tone is consistent, your audience hears the same person speaking, whenever and however they deal with you. That’s a subtle but important way of showing them that you’re a consistent, reliable company.
Terminology management
Large organizations often have hundreds, if not thousands, of unique words and phrases that they use to describe themselves and the way they do business. Ensuring that those words and phrases are used correctly is critical to maintaining your company’s tone of voice. It also ensures that your content is credible and authoritative, and it avoids the kind of confusion that can erode brands over time. Being able to capture, manage, and enforce the usage of the right words and phrases is an important part of developing a mature content strategy.
Content governance
Content governance refers to the systems and processes you use to determine how content gets created and published within your organization. A good governance framework can be additive and assistive to content creators, can create alignment and clarity, and can increase the overall velocity of content creation. Content governance provides transparency into the process of content creation. It also adds visibility across the whole content machine. That makes it possible to identify issues, gaps, and challenges, and then eliminate them, resulting in a smooth, streamlined process.