There are certain skills every budding entrepreneur needs to have. And, in this increasingly digital age, being able to create high-quality content is one of them.

Even if you plan to employ people or outsource your content creation to freelancers, it’s important that you know what good content looks like. That way, you can provide proper direction and ensure that the final product fits your brand.

Creating good promotional content also requires more than just writing with style. Having a strong SEO strategy, thinking about how you’re going to build backlinks, and having a well-thought-out plan to promote your content is vital, too.

If you want to learn how to generate quality content for your business, start with these six tips and you’ll be well on your way.

Start by finding your brand voice

While writing with style isn’t the only requirement when it comes to creating good content, it does make a difference when you’re trying to build a recognizable brand.

When deciding on your brand voice, consider your industry, consumer base, and product offerings.

For example, the perfume and fragrance industry is generally known for having an elegant, high-class, and professional image. If you sell adult perfume or cologne, chances are you won’t want the writing on your website to be upbeat, casual, and chock full of current slang. It should be on the more sophisticated side.

That said, if you’re in the perfume industry but marketing a fragrance line towards preteen girls, you might want to sound more modern and cool in order to appeal to a different consumer base than your adult-focused competitors.

Writing with a single, consistent style gives your brand a readily-identifiable voice and a relatable personality. This, in turn, strengthens your brand’s image by giving the company a distinct character — one customers can easily recognize and rely on.

If you’re looking for inspiration on how to brand your small business, here are a few organizations that are doing it right.

SocialPilot works with online tools aimed at young, web-savvy people, so referring to “Awesome Twitter Tools” is absolutely within their brand wheelhouse. This tone would be too casual for certain businesses, but it makes total sense for this particular company.

Mailchimp, the email automation service, reflects its brand consistently across its website, too.

A lot of Mailchimp’s copy has a friendly “clubhouse” feel to it, which really gives the brand a sense of community. This can help to build loyalty with the platform’s users and customers, which is a great technique you could replicate with your own content.

Another very different organization that gets its branding and tone of voice right is the fast-casual burrito chain Chipotle.

Everything on their website is aspirational, holistic, and reflects their “change the world” attitude about — you guessed it — burritos.

The company rebranded not too long ago, and are now passionate about sourcing their ingredients sustainably while working to reduce their carbon footprint. Their positive and hopeful messaging does a great job of reminding customers about the company’s values and goals.

Writing style goes a long way towards presenting the brand you want, regardless of the industry you might be working in.

Always put time into finding the right images

Image-focused content offers the best way to communicate in the current online world. It’s fun, it’s shareable, and it makes us want to grab a friend and say, “Hey, check this out!”.

Visuals are a huge part of the interactive online experience. In fact, according to a Venngage survey, 74% of marketers say that more than 70% of their content includes some form of visual asset. So, if you aren’t putting the time into making your content look great, you might struggle to keep up with your competitors.

This number will likely increase dramatically in 2021, too, considering that the majority of our interactions in the last year have occurred online.

High-quality images seal the deal when it comes to branding. Potential customers want to be able to see the same branding reflected across platforms, and images drive that promise home.

Here’s a great example of how to utilize branded images, which comes from the sustainable shoe brand Allbirds.

If you sell clothing and footwear, prospective customers will always want to see these up close. But you should also use your imagery as an opportunity to reflect your ethos and overall branding. Allbirds is a brand with an environmental focus, and they sell footwear for active people, so it makes total sense that their image shows someone sporting their wares in the great outdoors.

There are lots of natural colours, the image has a soothing aesthetic, and you can see that the person in these photos is very active. This is a great representation of what the company is all about.

You should always check the quality of your images, too. In fact, poor-quality images can actually hurt your brand more than a lack of images. Blurry or off-topic images signal to the reader that a brand doesn’t take itself seriously, doesn’t have a concrete identity, or isn’t going to be very professional to deal with. This can be incredibly harmful, so proceed with images, but proceed with care.

Check out our budget-friendly visual marketing tips if you would like to learn more about getting your imagery right.

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Start building your content around keyword research

If you aren’t already building your content around keyword research, doing so will help you to develop both your content marketing and SEO skills.

Keyword research should be the backbone of any search engine optimization strategy, because it will help to ensure everything you do actually caters to your customers’ needs.

You can use a tool like SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool or Ahref’s Keyword Generator to find the phrases you should be including in your content. Simply type in a word that’s related to your products or services, and you’ll be given a whole host of words and phrases that your ideal customers are plugging into their search engines.

Next, think about how you can build a content plan around the keywords that you find. Are there any questions you could answer, or are their common topics you could create guides about?

It’s important that you don’t just focus on the keywords that receive the most searches, though — you also need to consider a range of other keyword metrics, such as the searcher intent and the competitiveness of the phrases you want to rank for on the search engine results pages.

It can be tricky to get the hang of keyword research when you’re first starting out, but it’s worth working on because creating keyword-inspired content could help to send a lot of high-quality organic traffic your way.

Pay attention to what your customers are saying

Listening to common customer queries can also provide you with excellent content ideas. So, ask your customer service team to make a note of any particular questions or concerns that keep coming up time and time again.

To make this as easy as possible, you should ensure you’re providing your customers with plenty of opportunities to get in touch. Remember that different people will like to communicate in different ways, so you should encourage queries by telephone, email, and social media.

It’s also becoming a lot more common for businesses to add chatbots to their landing pages in order to answer their customers’ questions quickly and effectively. According to Botsify, this can help to boost your conversions and increase customer engagement by 80%. So, consider adding this feature to your site — as well as helping you to generate more content ideas, it could generate more leads for your business.

Try to create guides, FAQ pages, and tutorials inspired by common questions you receive from your existing customers. Chances are, if they have these queries, others will too. So, creating content that addresses them could help to drive more traffic to your website, build trust with prospective clients, and even save your customer service team a lot of time in the long run.

For more ideas on how to improve your customer service efforts, consider exploring what competitor research can teach you about customer service.

Always think about how you can repurpose your content

If you want to create content for lots of different platforms, this can take up a lot of your time.

For example, you might be running your company blog, a knowledge hub full of evergreen content, multiple social media accounts, and a regular newsletter. A particularly smart digital marketing strategy you can use is to save time by repurposing as much of your content as possible.

There are plenty of ways you can do this. If you’ve created an infographic as part of a guide, consider sharing this on visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. If you’ve written a how-to guide, consider whether it could be turned into a video tutorial for YouTube. And, if you’ve just published a new blog post — about fashion trends for the coming season, for example — think about whether you could turn this into an informative Twitter thread.

If you want to do it well, content creation is always going to take up a big chunk of your time. But, by repurposing as much as possible, and thinking about how different ideas can work on separate platforms, you can streamline the process a lot.

Focus on addressing your customers’ pain points

Finally, the most important part of content creation is to make sure that every piece you create has a purpose. Addressing your customers’ pain points shows not only that you care about improving their lives, but also that you are dedicated to doing your job well.

Think about how you can share your expertise to answer your customers’ questions or make their lives easier.

For example, Sked Social and HopperHQ both offer an Instagram planning and scheduling tool and their customers are people who are trying to get the most out of their social media platforms. One of the most common questions they’re likely to get is when a post will typically receive the most engagement. So, HopperHQ has put together a handy little guide to the best times to post on Instagram, which covers everything their audience might need to know.

Similarly, Continental Message Solution helps to solve their prospective customers’ problems with how-to guides. They specialize in providing after-hours customer service assistance for a range of different industries. So, they’ve created a guide to setting up an answering service for a medical practice. This allows them to show off their expertise, target a very specific segment of their ideal audience, and build trust with people who may be willing to pay for their services down the line.

Finally, FreshBooks, an accounting software provider, has created free invoice templates that are sure to really help the small businesses and freelancers they’re trying to attract.

This allows them to build trust with their target audience, show themselves as an authority in their field, and hopefully give prospective customers a reason to circle back to them if they ever need accounting help in the future.

Think about the problems your ideal customers are likely to have, and provide them with the solution through your content. They’re sure to be impressed, and will be far more open to spending their money with you in the future.

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Summary

When you’re looking to establish your business and grow your customer base, creating high-quality content is non-negotiable. So, it’s well worth developing your skills in this area.

In order to create memorable content, you need to nail your brand voice, use the right visuals, and provide your customers with exactly what they’re looking for. If you’re able to achieve this, you’ll start to see your business grow in no time at all.

And, if you would like to improve your content creation skills even further, SkillsYouNeed has some additional content marketing and copywriting tips for you to check out.

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