Brands around the world create a lot of content, with everyone writing blog posts and generating other forms of content on every topic imaginable.
And it’s exactly because of this, that you need to work on creating great content that is informative, and stands out from the crowd.
Whether this crowd is a particular industry or appeals to a certain audience, you need to work out how you will be better than everyone else, or at least differentiate your content from everything else out there.
So how exactly can you make your content stand out online?
Create User-Generated Content
Encourage your website visitors to send in their own images, put them up on social media, or engage with your brand some other way.
This could be photos for future blog posts, for a video, or other forms of content. The best photos could win a prize, for instance.
Help Readers Find Useful Information
While many people think linking to other blog posts or articles on similar topics is essentially leading a potential customer away from your brand, this is not always the case.
By linking through to others talking about the same topics online, you show that you’ve thoroughly researched a topic. Outbound links that will help out your audience should not be avoided when they prove useful.
At the end of the day, the real aim is that someone has visited your website, read your content, and will remember your brand as having good ideas. This is how you build the basis for thought leadership.
Make Use of Tools
BuzzSumo, Ahrefs, and many other tools can help you generate better content online.
They analyse what is performing best in the search results, and in social media.
This will give you ideas on the best topics, what people are talking about, and what people are searching for.
This will inform your content strategy, and help you generate content that will get more clicks.
Consider How You Can Improve Other Content
Take a look at your competitors and what kind of content they are creating. Then brainstorm.
What exactly could you do better? Could you choose better topics, or do you have more knowledge on particular topics? Maybe your competitors haven’t covered a particular topic, that leaves a gap for you to fill. Perhaps their tone of voice is bad, or the posts are poorly optimised for search, or don’t use a particular keyphrase that you know people are searching for.
Whether it’s down to the quality of the content or the marketing of this content, assess how you can top your competitors, and get straight to it.
Use More Images
For particular industries, text-heavy blog posts or articles can get a bit dry. And many businesses are still not including any images whatsoever.
Make sure you are using an image or two at least when creating a blog post. This helps break up your content, and also draws the eye of a reader. Just make sure the photos aren’t too dated or particularly cheesy, as stock photos can tend to lean that way sometimes.
As for the cost of stock photos, you can find free images over on Pixabay, or Unsplash, and many other websites. Just check the royalties of the images before you go using them.
Consider Different Content Formats
A blog isn’t the only form of content you can generate. It’s really quite simple to get involved in generating other forms of content that people can digest in different ways.
Maybe you could start a podcast, or a vlog (video blog) on a particular topic. This helps people who enjoy visual or audial content more, and you can help gain new audiences.
YouTube is big business, and you can really carve a niche for your business if you see there is an audience. Creating high-definition video nowadays is easy, and doesn’t take too much expertise if you have a suitable subject, such as guides or a “how-to” guide. Of course, if your industry is competitive, then professional video editing can be required.
Offer Downloads
Whether it’s a PDF guide, a summary of the blog post, an infographic or any other form of content, offering downloads within your blog can really help people remember your brand.
Depending on your industry, this could also include maps, menus, case studies, and much more. Anything that will be useful for the reader, and help inform them in the future.
Create a Series
While ongoing blogging is important for rankings, and generating other forms of content can help, coming up with a particular series as part of a marketing campaign can help you get more clicks and potential views.
If you can lure people in with a particular topic, and provide informative content they need, then they will wait for a part 2, and come back for more.
This also allows you to capture data, such as an email address, that you can use in other marketing efforts.
Create a Marketing Funnel
In a similar vein, generating a marketing funnel can help you promote a particular service or product.
Think of what content people will be searching for in relation to your service or product, and generate a marketing funnel around this.
A funnel can take the form of blog posts for people to find your brand, downloads to capture their emails, and then subsequent follow-up emails with perhaps more downloads in order to filter more customers down the funnel.
Whether you already have a blog or are looking to get started with content marketing, get in touch with the team at Xanthos, who will be happy to discuss how we can help grow your online presence.
