Good content is the key to success in a highly competitive marketing landscape. Marketers now place a premium on high quality content, which lets them better engage their customers and improve visibility through better search rankings.
But what makes good content? Content that appeals to one consumer will not necessarily appeal to another, even if they’re at the same stage in the marketing lifecycle. The key to sharing effective content is to understand the consumer, find out what appeals to them and deliver accordingly.
The first task is to profile consumers based on the information they’ve given you. Nine in ten buyers regard content targeted to their industry or job function as valuable. When consumers are delivered content that matches what they are doing, they are more likely to read it and find something valuable to take away.
It’s important, especially for B2C marketers, to limit technical information and jargon. Keep your content simple, easy to consume and easy to share. Technical jargon may help with search engine rankings if you know customers are searching for specific keywords, but in most cases, SEO should be a secondary focus.
Loading up content with keywords will be obvious to your prospects. Even if it does perform well in the search, the consumers who read it may actually be put off by obvious inclusion of keywords. Good content should be conversational and easy to understand while providing real value to the consumer. If you can convince the prospect to share the information within their industry or network, then you’ve created great content.
