This is an awesome step by step guide to write content for your next piece. There are altogether 12 steps in there. Not only it gives clarity but also helps you with vision. An ideal infographic on how to rise from complete mess of mind to coherent, useful focus to engage audience.
A. Goal: The basic here is, whatever you write needs to be aligned to greater business objectives. So, business content writing is not exactly your writing an emotional letter to your girlfriend (who write them anyway, these days). The point here is, there is a precise plan of action behind this and even a small piece of content is actually part of the plan. So, having a goal helps. It does not allow you to deviate. How to set up a goal? Here are few goal examples for you
- At the end of the week I will have 2 blogs, 5 tweets, 2 facebook posts and 1 Linkedin updates
- I will be true to my buyer persona and create all content keeping that persona in mind
- By next quarter, I will establish content with 3 media companies
- By next month, I will publish 2 customer success stories and for that I will get in touch with business manager this week and follow up.
Broadly, you can have the following objectives for your content marketing efforts
- To increase brand awareness
- To drive more traffic
- To generate more sales leads
- To convert more leads from traffic
- To improve retention and upsell, cross sell
B. Rely on data: Reliance on data and not on assumption. This practice not only makes your content authentic but also elicits loyalty and trust from readers. Readers respond to data. Facebook recently has done a study on human behavior and social media and they realized that data driven content are perceived as more valuable, more authoritative and more trustworthy. Data reference makes content more dynamic. Writing a data driven headline is also critical. A copyblogger survey has found out that out of every ten blog visitors, eight will read your headline and only two end up reading the blog post in some parts. This tells how important a headline is for the success of your website. Today, when readers’ attention time is miniscule, a curiosity and data based headline helps get readers’ attention. A Moz study has found out that you can get more social share if your headlines contain data