Useful articles and interesting videos can sell no worse than paid advertising. We tell you how to fill your site with high-quality content.
In the broadest sense, content can be any information posted on a website, blog, or social networking site. But to understand how to create an interesting and useful resource, it's worth looking at this term in more detail.
In a piece for his blog, Lee Odden, CEO of the well-known digital agency TopRank Marketing, asked 40 fellow marketers to define the word "content." And most of them emphasized that the content you publish should be:
- useful;
- understandable;
- unique;
- meaningful;
- tailored to the target audience.
With quality content, brands sell products and services, educate, entertain or inform users.
Types of content
Content for websites can come in several formats.
Text
Most often, the content for the website means texts. There are many genres and varieties. On the site of any major online store, you'll probably find cards with descriptions of products, news, promotional articles, picks, reviews, tips, and expert advice.
Filling the resource with photos of products and their descriptions is no longer enough. If you need targeted leads, find something to interest your audience with. Most likely, this process will not be fast. A potential customer may spend months reading the company's blog, taking tips, sharing materials, and eventually making a purchase or contract. There's nothing wrong with not making a deal right away, especially if it's a complex and expensive product..
Audio and Video
Clips, podcasts, training webinars, live broadcasts, and presentations - there are plenty of audio and video content options, too. Clips can supplement (and in some cases even replace) some of the text content. Plus, they will attract the segment of the audience that prefers to watch and listen rather than read. Typically, a product with a video review attached sells better than one with photos.
Major retailer Walmart often publishes advice videos or product reviews on its website and blog on YouTube.
Images
Content with an illustration is guaranteed to get more attention than text without pictures. Boring stock photos will automatically decrease the credibility of the text. You should hardly expect an interesting and original text from a company that uses the first picture from a search engine as an image.
A faster and simpler option is collages with elements of corporate identity added. It takes less time and resources, but the picture immediately becomes original and recognizable.
Where to get content
To fill a website with content, companies either hire full-time managers, marketing specialists and copywriters or outsource the work (fully or partially). You can search for and create content for your resource in several ways.
Go to a text exchange of ready-made texts
Sometimes, authors post ready-made texts on special sites. If you need neutral material, without mentioning the company and compliance with strict criteria, you can search there.
Materials from these stores are very cheap, and that is probably their main advantage and disadvantage. On the one hand, you can quickly and without hitting the budget to fill the site with appropriate articles. But on the other - you get not very original material of average quality. They are mainly written by beginners.
Rewriting or translation
It is always easier and faster to work with other people's material than to create your own from scratch. So sometimes you can translate the material of your foreign colleagues or rewrite other people's texts.
The first option is still preferable: it brings the reader much more benefit. Not everyone can study the text in its original form, so your translation will open new frontiers for the user.
The usual rewrite is more complicated. Formally, you can create a unique text, picking up synonyms for some words and rearranging the sentences. But in fact, you will receive the same pass-through material, which will have many clones on other sites.
Blogs
Content can be generated by almost any employee of the company. Every day they do something interesting and useful. And they can share it not only with colleagues and friends but also with a wide audience.
The designer can tell you how to pass the layouts to the developers, and the tech support department can explain how to work on the project after it is launched. If one of them can't write well, that's okay. First, it is always possible to record a video, and second, a copywriter can lead the blog on behalf of employees.
Publish feedback
Customers and partners are also sources of content. Ask them to write a review about working with you or monitor social media and then design it in a consistent style. It takes a little time and is very lively.
Conclusion
Creating interesting and unique content alone is almost impossible, you need to build a team where copywriters and designers work in liaison with other specialists. Some will share their professional expertise, while others will create an attractive package for it.