When it comes to marketing your company, quality content is the first thing to flash across one’s mind. Content marketing has a vast impact on your business. It involves creating and presenting relevant content which helps in providing higher conversions, engaging your target audience, and motivating them to become your future customer.

In fact, the content itself is a huge part of your daily life. It keeps us informed, and entertained, provides guides, solutions to our questions, and more.

When you enter a question into the search bar, those links that appear on your search results are content. Those articles that give you expert advice are content, those business informational blogs, video tutorials, Instagram feeds, memes, GIFs – all are content. Even if you know it or not, you consume content every day in various ways. 

Now you can understand the importance of content…

As a person who writes blogs or content for a company, we already know that content creation is difficult. There’s just no getting around it. Whether you’re coming up with new topics or writing according to your regular schedule, it is difficult to come up with qualified content that you’re proud of. It involves lots of creative and logical thinking and ideas which can be time and energy-consuming. But in all of this while writing the one main thing you need to keep in mind is knowing your customer. This is what inbound marketing is all about.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is about knowing your customers and engaging them through highly qualified content. Behind every effective inbound strategy is valuable content. Content is one of the essential parts of the success of your inbound marketing. This means it is important that content should be relevant and qualified, it should be able to achieve your business goals such as increasing brand awareness, and conversions, engaging potential customers, driving more traffic, and encouraging customers to buy your products and services. We’ve narrowed down a few steps to write quality content that will help you to boost your inbound marketing strategy. 

The Content Creation Process:

1. SEO Research:

To create quality content it is important to have a plan that matches your business objectives. It is the most basic and foremost thing to consider before writing content. Without a plan, you don’t even know where to start, what topic to write about, what kind of content to produce, what types of questions your audience might have and so much more. It is necessary to consider these questions and confirm whether these ideas can be applied on a larger scale in front of a larger audience. Simply writing a blog would be a waste of time plus energy.

The best practice of inbound strategy is using SEO to find keywords your target audience is looking for. SEO-keyword research would help us by showing a search volume of a specific keyword phrase and even tell whether writing content on that keyword would be worth it or not. 

While writing your aim should be to target the keywords which have high monthly search volume and then use them directly to provide solutions to the problems they are trying to solve. A simple way to go for these keywords research is to note down some points and questions related to their goal and problems. Then start performing keyword research on them to see if enough people are looking for them. The best way to target the correct keyword is to look for long-tail, low-volume keywords with less keyword difficulty. This will be the perfect chance for you to rank high on SERPs and present your content in front of a larger audience. There are several keyword research tools you can use. According to me, SEMRush and Moz keyword Explorer are the best keyword research tools.

2. Brainstorming:

Once you’re done with keyword research, it’s time for brainstorming your content ideas. According to research, the best way to organize your content is through topic clusters, meaning a detailed pillar page including keywords that we have researched in the previous step. 

Now, the way people search for information has been changed, and pillar pages are part of the topic cluster model which helps your content strategy to adapt to this change. That’s why it has become necessary to create a pillar page. In simple words, brainstorming gets easier through topic clusters because it provides you with a structure to follow. You can cover your topic in depth using your main keyword and then create short content pieces such as blog posts, templates, and infographics which will help the audience to know more in-depth about the topic.

And while writing when you’re stuck somewhere, the pillar page would be a great place to return. You can examine the pillar page to see which point can benefit you with a little more information or clarification. This will help you expand your content marketing strategy, as well as the content you write to support your pillar page, can become a new subtopic, by properly linking you can help increase traffic to that pillar page.

3. Production:

This is the process of creating your inbound marketing content according to the keyword and brainstorming you’ve done in the previous steps.

Although there is no secret formula for writing great content, there are a few tips that can enhance the quality and quantity of your content material.

  • Write catchy headlines that encourage readers to read your content more. If your headline doesn’t shine, the readers won’t attract and you’ll not be able to achieve the desired results with your content.
  • Always keep in mind while writing that you’re writing to your persona. Use their voice, their thoughts, their substitutes to build content.
  • Try to create something different. Don’t just disgorge information that is already out by your competitors. 
  • Use catchy titles, meta descriptions, and other unique teasers which will attract the audience to read your content. Pervade new styles and cite new research to support your points. 
  • Add relevant and authentic information to your content. False information can mislead your audience.
  • Try to be simple and true to your voice. Do not use eloquent and deep vocabulary in your content.

  • Don’t beat around the bush. Stick to your point and be concise and clear. You want your reader to relate to you and derive value from your content, not just skipping confusing and irrelevant sentences.

4. Proofreading:

Editing your work is the most subjective process. After completing your first draft, go back and proofreading might smooth the rough edges in your content. It depends on you whether you want to edit as you go or wait for a few days to read it with a fresh mind and eyes. 

In several cases, writing improves as it goes on to the second or third round of editing no matter if it is written by a professional writer. While refining your content you should look for grammar, active voice, clear language, punctuation, and short sentences.

There are some editing tools such as Grammarly which help you to cut down your editing time. 

5. Uploading:

No matter how good your content is, it will not do any good if it doesn’t reach your audience. For this, you need to upload your content on every platform where your audience can access it, it will increase the visibility of the content you create.

A content management system is software that helps to display your content on a website or anywhere on the web. It gathers all of your data and stores it in one place. As customers do research before making a purchase, featuring your services and products on your website using CMS brings your business front and center of your target audience. It prevents you from having a disjointed content marketing system.

6. Promoting the content:

After publishing it’s time to promote your content. You can do it through various mediums like social media, email marketing, and PPC advertising. 

Before promoting your content you should consider which channel your target audience is on. It is necessary to find them where they are and then promote your content on that channel. For promotion, you can use both organic techniques like posting your content on a website or blog, posting updates on social networks, etc, and paid strategies like including content on social ads.

Start Creating:

Quality content starts with knowing your target audience. If you don’t know for whom you’re writing, you’re not able to create compelling content. 

Once you have followed the given content creation process, you’d be able to create engaging content to encourage the audience as well as grow your business. Always keep in mind that your goal of inbound marketing content is to provide the maximum value to the audience. Make sure that the content you create must educate the audience instead of generating sales.