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Marketers for any type of service or product-based business are tasked with the challenge of producing valuable content for their website, blog and social media channels. Finding essential topics to research, explore and discover can be a challenging task. The initial inclination of many is to focus only on topics that directly relate to the product or service(s) offered. Why? Simply because one of the main purposes of content marketing is to engage potential prospects to present your offering as the solution to their needs. While this is an important step, it often creates a misfire to building an audience, securing content amplification and driving search engine marketing (SEM). Valuable content does far more than outline the value of what your company does and also extends beyond that to provide information that is relevant, helpful and important to your target audience(s). To help clients, prospects and others understand the traits of valuable content, FlashPoint Marketing has provided a summary of the most common traits.

Essentials for Valuable Content

1. Custom – It’s not a surprise that custom content is often considered high value because it’s something that appears nowhere else on the web. This means that while the information may be available in another format somewhere else, your process has provided a different angle, perspective or method for interpreting the key facts and data. For example, it’s common in the accounting profession to simply provide a summary of recently passed tax laws highlighting tax rates and rule changes. However, this is not custom simply because the same information can be found on hundreds of other firms’ websites. What’s missing is the unique angle or perspective that makes it something not available elsewhere. To create high value content means to give the reader something completely unique.
2. Focused – A challenge that many marketers face is they are asked to post content to their website that is not focused on a specific target market. It’s important to clearly understand how the content being produced relates to a need, issue or challenge being faced by your target market. The best way to identify these needs is to complete a buyer persona study to clearly identify this information on a broad basis. The more information you have, the more easily you can plan content around the challenge’s prospects are faced with. When you can focus content towards a specific buyer it creates value for both the target reader and directly ties content marketing efforts into company marketing and strategy goals. Avoid publishing content that is not laser-focused because it will have diminished value and does little to build your audience.
3. Helpful – This relates to the above bullet point. If the content doesn’t help the reader learn something new, gain a fresh perspective on an issue or provide a valuable insight, why should they invest the time to read the content? Make sure that all the published company content helps the intended reader accomplish one of the above stated goals and ensure that the content’s title reflects the helpful nature of the piece and clearly articulates what its about. Doing so can go a long way to helping generate interest in your company’s content.

Influence
One of the most important reasons to create valuable content is so the company can generate influence within key groups. If the flow of content being produced is not considered valuable, how will you be able to create influence? With social or other influence, it’s possible to achieve content amplification, or in other words, people in your industry or niche will share your content with their audiences. Unfortunately, many are focused on the task of producing content (say three blog posts per week) but have skipped the task of determining what is something unique they can bring to the table that will keep people coming back again and again.

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Content marketing can be a challenging process to navigate but offers many rewards.