One of the hardest parts of building a strong marketing strategy is regularly and consistently producing content.
Coming up with relevant content ideas is even harder.
And if you have multiple pieces of content that need to be created about the same topic, well, now you're looking at some of the most difficult marketing work. Because you don't just want to generate bland, mediocre content. Anyone can do that.
No, what's really hard is to generate great content. Content that people want to read, that will educate, entertain, and inform. There are AI systems that will churn out content for you all day long, dozens of pieces per day.
But it's all crap. No one wants to read it and you'll waste all this time, money, and real estate on garbage.
The difficulty comes in creating high-quality content about the same topic on a regular and consistent basis.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
It's possible to create a lot more content around a single topic, using three different keyword strategies.
One thing that's really important when we're looking at content creation is to understand our visitors' intent. What are they looking for? What's their search motivation? What's driving them to search for the terms we want to rank for?
It's important that you think about the terms you're trying to target because they're a core element of what your company does, or what your product or service does.
Many marketers don't really think about the person's intent, and so they end up creating content that ends up being too educational and not actually helpful or productive.
So you want to produce the right kind of keyword strategy around cool topics that can be helpful for your visitors. Which means you have to think about a few different ideas around the search intent.
Inspiration-Related Searches
The first thing to think about is inspiration-related searches.
That one's easy: What are the things they're searching for or that they would need around your core topic? They may be looking for some kind of inspiration or element to inspire them.
These are pretty common and most marketers get this part right. For example, at Web Canopy Studio, our visitors are usually looking for web design inspiration: What are some cool website design ideas? What should my website look like? What's the best website platform to use? What are three must-have design trends for my website?
When we start thinking through these elements, we can move away from just website design as a core term and get into actual tangible ideas. That allows us to take our new keyword or key phrase that we're trying to rank for and actually elaborate on it for some really cool content pieces.
For example, we could (and probably should) create a blog article that we update every year to show examples of trends and designs that we think are really cool, and worth trying to emulate as we build out our clients' websites.
Inspiration is a great way to think about what terms people are going to use in that kind of context.
Instruction/Education-Related Searches
People often come to your website because they need information or they have questions they want answers to. So what are the instruction-related searches people are going to be making?
This is a great way to capture people at the top of your sales funnel (TOF), which means you want to think of how-to articles, checklists, and so on. You want to be a little over the top in what you're producing because you want your readers to have that sense of "Wow, this is a great resource. These guys really know what they're talking about!"
But the information you provide will be a little overwhelming, so they'll start to realize, "I need an expert. I can't do this all myself. I'd better ask these guys since they know what they're doing."
If they wanted to do it all on their own, they could.
In fact, I'll take a quick aside here and tell you: Give away the good stuff on your blog.
That's right, don't hold anything back. Tell them how to do your job. Tell them what they can do. Teach them how to do the things you're good at.
Yes, your readers might try to do it themselves. They may think, "A-ha! I can save myself thousands of dollars and I'll do my own taxes/file my own patent/build my own website."
Except, depending on what you do, they'll quickly realize they're out of their depth. They'll think, "I'm not an accountant/attorney/web designer, I'm a [insert profession here]. I don't have hours and hours to spend doing this stuff; I'll just have the real experts do it.
Implementation-Related Searches
The third keyword strategy is one of implementation. These are the kind of searches people do when they're looking for help with implementing something. Whether they're looking for a vendor, freelancer, product, or software that's going to solve their problems, you should think about how they can actually implement the thing they want to do.
This is more of the bottom of funnel content that people do as you're guiding them through your sales funnel. They've read your TOF content, they've gone through your sales process, attended your webinars, read your white papers, and they're a-a-a-almost ready to pull the trigger, but not quite. They want to make sure they're about to make the right decision. So they want to see how to implement the solution you're proposing and whether it's going to be as easy as you said.
They're looking for someone to be an expert and hold their hand and guide them, or do it for them.
Don't Forget the Calls To Action (CTAs)
Finally, if you're doing a content strategy and you're not including CTAs to download some kind of free giveaway, like a checklist or template, you're missing out on some serious leads that would otherwise convert on your website.
Your CTAs are critical because if you're not including them, you're just publishing a magazine. And while it's probably more informative than most magazines, it's not doing you a bit of good.
Speaking of CTAs, be sure to take our own free website conversion assessment. It's a quiz of 30 or so questions that will grade how effectively your website is converting, generating leads, and driving your bottom-line sales revenue
