When it comes to content making, you need work that is influential in order to stand out. But simply creating a social media presence can be a daunting task. The competition is stiff, and there can be an overwhelming feeling where you don’t know where to start. But if you want your brand to grow and get recognition, you will need to have a content marketing strategy that can be used on social media.
The power of social media is in the sheer size of the number of users, with it being estimated that 4.41 billion people will use social media worldwide by 2025. This staggering number might sound terrifying to a brand without a presence, but do not worry! Content making is broken down into niches that your content can fill. When it comes to filling that niche, having striking and memorable content will help your brand expand. Creating influential content is about having content that is both strong and consistent and we will talk about the specifics below.
Generating awareness around your brand is possible through influential content. Here are the key secrets to creating impactful and influential content:
Start With Your SEO Strategy and Map Out Potential Content Ideas
Making influential content often begins with your blog. Research shows that marketers who blog regularly experience ROI 13 times greater than marketers who don’t blog. Content marketing creates three times as many leads as traditional marketing and costs 64% less, and 57% of marketers say that blogging has brought in new customers.
However, blogging isn’t just about pumping out new ideas and hoping they stick. To generate influential content that brings in traffic, you need to develop content ideas based on SEO keyword research. Learn about the specificity of keywords and hashtags with tools such as Google Trends to see if certain keywords are on the rise or what is the specific demographic that uses them. Making content that makes an impact requires strategy and planning on behalf of the brand.
SEO can be difficult, reaching out to the right SEO company can help you develop an effective marketing strategy that gets the job done. Especially when you are just starting out in building a business and internet business, a good SEO company will not only help you develop a great marketing strategy, but they will teach you the ways of good SEO, making sure that you will be right on your way to having a brand with internet recognition and content standing out above the rest when it comes to making content.
Set Goals
It might sound like a silly question, but: what are your goals? There are the bigger ones: having a successful business, having a brand, having a suitable income, but these questions don’t set realistic goals. If you want your business to succeed in the real world, you need to use real-world numbers in order to conceptualize your goals.
When it comes to building the foundations of a business, you need to set very, very specific goals. How many followers do you want on your brand’s Instagram? How much money do you want in sales on your website? How high do you want the conversion rate to be? Content making is the starting point to realizing these goals.
Work out some realistic numbers and try to set those goals, but as we will talk about below, these goals cannot be set in stone. The tough thing is that the internet cannot be predicted, and you can’t give up if you get set back or your goals are taking longer than previously expected. Nearly half of marketers admit that they struggle with aligning their social media campaigns with the company’s goals. That’s just part of the process.
Create a Brand
A strong company’s brand identity is worth its weight in gold. The iconic imagery of brands—the colors of Coca-Cola, the golden arches of Mcdonald’s, and the design of the Starbucks symbol—are perfect places to get inspired by for content making. When you are building the brand, ask yourself questions on the imagery:
- Does this design stand out?
- Is my brand’s motto memorable?
- What makes my brand different from other brands?
These three questions are a good place to start the workshopping process of building and designing a brand. A brand identity is supposed to be a reflection of your high-quality content and is supposed to remind users of your content. In addition, it should drive them back to your site or turn visitors into customers. It’s important to do your research on how you can create eye-catching graphic design for content making to stand out above the rest and get your hard work noticed.
Find the Right Community
When it comes to influential content, there are people who have done it well, and people who need a little bit of improvement. A lot of times, people who are on social media reach out to people within their niche to promote their content.
Look over and research other people who have promoted their content well. This is a great place to source inspirational content to start off. When performing research on content making and seeing other people’s work, start off by asking yourself:
- What about this content makes it so strong?
- How do they interact with the rest of the internet (their colleagues and their potential customers)?
- When you leave the page, what do you remember about the content? Do you remember any of it?
These are just a few examples, but having questions helps to sharpen your mind when performing research. Your peers are not your competition, in many situations, they are actually more than willing to help make familiar content to them, and it’s a great opportunity to create SEO boosting backlinks and promote each other’s work.
Spread the Word
After finding a community, a great way to build influential content is by actively being part of said community. If you are running your own business especially, it’s great to use even your personal Twitter or Instagram to reach out and help promote your content.
Before you have real content posted is a great time to reach out to those other content makers whose work you really admire and ask for any advice. It might be surprising, but if they have the time they are usually more than willing to help you out. Pushing yourself and your work out onto the internet needs to not only be consistent but also needs to occur through multiple vehicles (as we will talk about below). Content making can be promoted in any way possible, it just needs to get out there, where other people can see it.
Learn About Your (Potential) Audience
Without your audience, your content has nowhere to go. It’s important to know not only the niche your content is filling, but if there is anything you can do to help promote your work and pique the interest of your audience. There are a few questions you should ask yourself when doing research about your content:
- What is my audience looking for?
- What do they like about my content?
- What do they expect from my content on first impression?
When it comes to seeing if your content making is working or not, you can always just ask your customers. Sending out surveys to customers and people who follow you on Instagram for a chance to win a free product is a great way to see what is working. Free promotions are another great way to help make an initial splash with content on social media. People love the chance to get free things!
Create a Content Calendar
It cannot be emphasized enough: get yourself a content calendar. Before you ever start uploading content, you need to have a calendar to plan out when and what you are posting. Content making is only successful when it is done consistently.
Consider the Type of Content You Want to Produce and What Effect It Will Have on Your Audience
Impacting your readers begins with understanding what they’re looking for. Consider your niche as well as what your competitors are doing.
Start with foundational content like guides and how-to pieces that are informative and actionable. While opinions can generate buzz, they’re not always the best type of content to churn out for your website.
Think about your audience and the industry you’re operating in. Ask yourself questions like, has this been done before? Am I filling a need when making content? Is this more impactful than other advice I can find on the internet? Am I offering value that will encourage people to share this content? Does it help my audience? If it wouldn’t be impactful to you, it likely won’t have the impact you want on others.
Leverage Your Social Media Pages and Professional Network
Organic traffic is helpful, but social media makes it easy for you to get word of your new content out into the world and allow it to be shared by others.
Now’s the time to focus on both your SEO and social media strategy. Before putting your content-making skills to the test, look back on your research from earlier in this guide, and see how your strategies can help develop the best content for your audience.
Of course, it’s important to remember that networking can benefit the spread and influence of your content as well. Tapping into your existing professional network and sharing high-value pieces can encourage your contacts to share your work with their audience, expanding your reach and helping your brand grow.
Don’t Just Set Your Sights on One Form of Content
Blog content isn’t the be-all and end-all of your content strategy. When it comes to content, making media with high value like videos or infographics is easy to share. This can also help you generate backlinks to boost your domain authority.
Convert blog posts into other forms of media for greater impact and influence on your audience. Spread your content over as many types of media to guarantee that as many people as possible can see your work.
Create the Content (Plan)
When creating the content, look back at the rest of this guide and examine each piece we have talked about. Each piece should have helped you in the process of content making, learning something about what you want the content to be and how you want it to be perceived with the company’s goals in mind. Using organization metrics such as a topic cluster is a great way to view all this information visually, and see how they relate to one another.
Assess and Adjust
But constantly creating content is an intense job, and not to mention this would be on top of running a business. Fortunately, there are plenty of companies out there who are more than willing to help you build influential content that will stand out above the rest. While sometimes it might be difficult to determine when your SEO ROI will occur when it comes to content making, SEO companies can help keep your company’s goals in mind and show you how your company’s media presence can make a splash.