Content is a powerful tool. It attracts leads, closes deals, and onboards customers. If your marketing team can deliver content that your audience wants and needs, they’ll attract the people actively looking for your product or service organically.

Creating great content doesn’t happen in an instant – it takes hard work and it’s underpinned by a solid process. Content creation is the process of planning, producing, publishing, and promoting visual or written content that aims to resonate with your target audience. Some typical content formats include blogs, video, webpages, social media posts.

Why is effective content creation important?

An effective content creation process is the cornerstone of any successful inbound lead generation strategy. Many companies rightly view content as a strategic tool for business growth so having a structured, strategic approach to the content creation process ensures your team’s effectiveness. Using data to gain insight, researching your target audience thoroughly, and analyzing your competitors’ content are actions you can take to create content more effectively.

Creating content that’s curated to your target audience needs and wants positions you to get the right kind of eyes on your company and to provide value to those passively browsing your website, blog, or social media. Effective content gets the attention of potential customers and existing ones and gives them a reason to keep coming back.

Here, we’ll look at tips for creating content that feeds into an overall better content creation strategy.

#1. Put your audience first

Your primary objective is to drive interest in and ultimately sales of, your product or service. And you can only do that if you really understand your audience.

“90% of successful content marketers prioritize the audience’s informational needs over their sales/promotional message.”

Lisa Murton Beets, Director of Research at the Content Marketing Institute

As a marketer, your instinct may be to use content to explain how your products and services can solve challenges for readers. But it’s more valuable to create content that immediately supports your prospect’s problem by offering useful knowledge they can use immediately.

For example, maybe you sell cakes. The trick is not to keep telling people how your cakes will make them happier for eating them. Instead, publish a step-by-step recipe for a best-selling cake, or show people how to store a celebration cake before a big event. Blogs and TikTok or Instagram reels work really well for practical content like making recipes.

Put your audience first and offer instant value, to create trust because you’re not selling to your audience – you’re helping them.

#2.Tell Stories

Click to read Unraveling the power of stories with Nick Mason | Turtl

Every piece of content published has one thing in common – it will be read, watched or listened to by humans. And humans are hard-wired to respond to stories.

Hopeful and inspiring stories invite empathy and connection, and also help to make the message memorable.

“Character-driven stories with emotional content result in a better understanding of the key points and better recall….In terms of making impact, this blows the standard PowerPoint presentation to bits. I advise business people to begin every presentation with a compelling, human-scale story.”

Paul Zak, Professor of Economics, Psychology and Management

Many brands have a brand story explaining why the business founder started out. This is a great way to connect with an audience and evoke emotion by humanizing your business proposition.

Examples of great brand storytelling tactics

The brand-value story: A powerful example comes from TOMS shoes who give away a pair of shoes for every pair sold.

The human story: Nike is a master of brand messaging through true-to-life brand story campaigns.

The About Us story: Notion show us how to deliver a simple brand story on its About Us page.

#3. Quality vs quantity

“Content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing but costs 62% less.”

Content Marketing Institute

On average B2B businesses spend 20-30% of their overall marketing budget on content marketing, with 22% of respondents in a Content Marketing Institute survey spending 50% or more of their marketing budget on content marketing.

“83% of marketers believe it’s more effective to create higher quality content less often.” – State of Inbound Marketing Trends 2022, Hubspot

Hubspot surveyed 1,600+ global B2B + B2C marketers across various industries for a retrospective annual report.

If the majority of marketers see more leads from content marketing than traditional outbound methods, and there’s more focus on raising the quality of content over the output, we can be sure that marketers are doubling down on content planning, research and presentation.

#4. Interactive content

The Hubspot survey also finds that interactive content was perceived as the biggest content marketing trend to watch in 2022.

Interactivity works as part of a content cycle and can inform future content experiences. Audiences enjoy content they can interact with, and this activity is logged as a data point on the platform serving the content – giving insights into user behavior.

Better platforms provide analytics such as dwell time, geographic location, shares, and UTM tags to show where your audience came from. You can also identify exactly who has read the content and how many times, which means your team can pick out the warmest leads and serve them exactly the right content for the next stage of their journey.

This depth of first-party data can be used to:

retarget leads
segment audiences
inform the content creation process and campaigns
drive sales

The awareness you gain helps you improve the quality and relevance of your content creation process and direct your resources and budget more efficiently.

#5. Personalization

“Stop creating content that no one consumes. In 2023, content should meet the needs of the customer and add value to their experience. Brands are creating so much content today that users just don’t have time for subpar stuff. They will only interact with your content if they think it’s actually helpful. “

Adobe Experience Cloud Blog

Adobe predicts personalization as a hot content marketing tip for 2023. The SaaS giant also places highly researched content, and content that offers a better user experience as top trends this year.

“78% CMOs see custom content as the future of marketing and 80% believe that custom content should be central to marketing.”

Demand Metric

Your favorite commercial websites personalize your browsing experience by basing what you’re shown first on content you previously interacted with. In the same way, it’s now possible to serve content to suit people’s recent behavior – and this type of content creation marketing serves you warm, highly engaged leads.

#6 Measurement

71% of B2B marketers say content marketing has become more important to their organization in the last year: B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Insights for 2023

Content Marketing Institute

Measurement is core to creating valuable content. You need to measure your content to see what is working and to support your strategy going forward.

“Measuring your content’s performance is key. Every time you create content, there’s an associated cost. You need to know how effective your content is and where to your direct budget.”

Jenny Howe, Head of Marketing Operations at Turtl

The best content creators learn from everything they publish by using data to make improve strategy and report on content marketing ROI. Use your data wisely and implement what you learn from it and, going forward, you’ll see the performance of your content improve.

Best practices for a seamless content creation process

Once you’ve done the heavy lifting of defining your content strategy and your content plan, it’s time to design a content creation process that flows like water. Having a tried-and-tested process to fall back on will help you to create high-performing content consistently and with less stress. Here’s some best practices for a seamless content creation process:

SEO research: From defining your target audience, you’ll probably have some ideas about what content they’d find valuable. But before you race ahead, make sure to do thorough SEO research to confirm your hypotheses. Doing this will prevent you from investing time into creating content that’s too niche.

Brainstorm ideas: When you’re confident that you’re going after the right keywords, it’s time to brainstorm content ideas. Host a brainstorming session with your team to bring new, innovative ideas to the table. Then, make decisions about which to move forward with first.

Create the content: Now it’s time for the fun part: making ideas a reality. Use the tips we’ve previously discussed to create compelling content that leaves an impression. Also, make sure to present it in an engaging, visual way.

Make sure to QA: After you’ve created your new piece of content comes the editing process. Review the piece for tone, language, structure, whitespace, etc. to refine it and, if possible, send it to a colleague too – a fresh pair of eyes does wonders for perfecting your content.

Publish it: Once you’re happy with the final product, you can release it into the wild. Upload it to your content management system, make sure all the formatting is in order, then hit that publish button (in accordance with your content schedule, of course).

Spread the word that it’s out: You’ve put a lot of work into making the content, it deserves as much attention as possible. To get your content noticed, use your social media pages, email marketing, even paid advertising to promote it. Don’t forget to consider where your target audience is most active when deciding where to push it.

Analyze its performance: An often overlooked but crucial step to the content creation process is analyzing how your content performed. Using data and analytics to track engagement can shed light on what went right and what needs to be improved next time around.

If you’d like to learn more about effective content creation, we’ve detailed advice covering user journeys, ICPs, partnerships, and more. Download our in-depth guide, Ten Rules to Elevate Your Content. For a complete understanding of full-scale B2B content marketing strategy, our detailed guide should help.

Click to read Ten rules for excellent content creation | Turtl