Finding The Right Content - Inbound Digital Marketing

The term is an old cliché, but content is king when it comes to your website, blogging and inbound digital marketing efforts. The tone and personality you use for writing about your business, products, services and interests online all feeds into creating the identity you wish to set forth for your brand or especially if you are writing for another brand or business, you might have to do quite a bit of research first and ask the right questions.

Setting the Tone...

A good set of branding guidelines should also call out the tone of how you wish for your enterprise to communicate to the world. Do you wish to be serious, informative, friendly or bring humor to your audience? In any case you will want the content to be engaging, authentic and hopefully without error. 

Choosing a Topic...

It's a good idea to plan weeks out in advance about what you wish to write about in a calendar format. Often working with brands there will be some seasonality to consider or other marketing efforts you would wish to include or compliment in writing about. You may also need to gather information from another source or make graphics for your posts and even seek approvals, so planning your content properly will help you.

Be Aware...

If you are writing content for a company that sells packaging for example, it's probably not a good idea to just write content that talks about that company's packaging products. Think about writing in other spaces of interest where buyers of your packaging company's products might be looking for information, for example you could write about new packaging trends or new shipping legislation that affects the distribution of packaged goods.

Basic Search Research...

As part of your research and planning for each article or blog you will want to at least perform an incognito search in Google to see what other people are saying about your chosen topic. Read the content, digest, but never copy other content, that's just not cool + it's plagiarism and it can get you in hot bother, and in any case, Google dings even your own website for duplicate content that you own. It's much better to take the challenge, rise to the occasion and try and write something even better. You might also want to check out what people are searching about online and trends using Google Trends

keyword Research...

During your planning with SEO in mind or search being part of your content writing goals, you will definitely be listing the keywords you wish to include in your writing. Common sense can be applied here but there are software's and tools you can use to help you, I use SEMrush for example. If you are producing content for a client on a regular basis you will know via the organic analytics you are monitoring for them where they are performing for certain search terms, you will be actively working to increase keyword usage for the words or search terms that bring the company you are writing for the best ROI off the page.

Competitive Research...

As part of your basic research and keyword research it will be beneficial to your goal to observe why a certain blog is higher on the page for the topic you are writing about. Again, there are software's you can use to do some competitive analysis to help you on your merry way, when you have been writing content for a particular client for some time, the arena can get quite competitive - this is when you begin to get your writing gladiator vibe on (admittedly I do) and work to bump your rankings up if they fall.

Voice Search...

With Siri, Alexa and many voice activated searches being performed, it's good to consider it as part of your writing. You may wish to include questions into titles for your work or write a good FAQ for your website. This will assist in catching users looking for answers to questions about topics you or your business are offering or close to. You can research what people are talking using Answer The Public or WordStream

Don't Forget the Metadata...

I've seen some fantastic efforts, especially in the start-up business arena where the blog writer is often the business owner. As an entrepreneur, it's passionate writing and they clearly know all about their new product or services, but they have fallen short of adding page SEO or titles to images and alt tags etc. So, while they are actively producing content, they are also actively taking the percentage down of their website score which is an all-important score in getting found on the web organically and can also impact other digital marketing efforts such as paid advertising.

Good Practice...

It's good to form good habits, in the past, present, and am sure future we continue to provide clients a basic template - a how to, so their team members can put together content if they wish before it is placed onsite or push it out into the digital 'elysium' using distribution software's. We always set out a template internally also as we match our writers with brands based on being a good fit for the tonality of the brand or topic.

Get Feedback...

It's always good to have a second set of eyes as mistakes happen - that's life. A. English teacher at school told me I'd be a great writer if I could learn how to spell properly. Thankfully we have tools like spell check and Grammarly in our armory. Having another check of your work, or even looking at it again with a fresh set of eyes is a good idea if you have been burning the midnight oil.

Nuances...

Within the English language, there are all kinds of international, national and local nuances to consider, and you might also have to consider how your copy might translate to another language, so knowing your audience will be a step in the right direction. I once made an entire team of Texas engineers laugh their asses off when I referred to nuts, bolts and alike as we would back in my home in the UK as 'fixings', they thought I was considering attaching heaving items to a beam with turkey stuffing! In any event there is more to Inbound content strategy and distribution than just the writing part, so if it's not your jam - that's why we have writers.