Your Ultimate 8 Point Cheat Sheet to Create Killer Content

50% of content gets less than 8 social shares.

Most business' content marketing strategies are so 2002!

Creating random content isn't going to help your business. A randomized content strategy will cause more harm than good. You need to have a plan in place to create killer content and draw attention to it.

Piecing information together from different sources can be a nightmare. We understand you're busy doing what you do best - working on your business, so we brought all of the information here. Continue reading to get all the information you need to skyrocket your success.

Content Guide to Create Killer Content

You might get lucky from time to time and see your social shares go off the chart. Next week you take a look at your analytics and wow - zip!

What happened there? Why isn't my content going viral? Why aren't people over the moon to see this content I worked on so hard?

There is likely a variety of factors playing into your lackluster results.

Once you've gone through this content checklist, you'll be able to diagnose your content strategy's illness and move on to bigger and better results.

Let's get into it.

 1. Determine What Your Audience Already Knows

Many people will find your content through search results. People that find you through search results are actively looking for a solution. There are things that they already know so you don't want to bore them with basics.

Knowing what knowledge your visitors already know and understand will allow you to craft content that is just above what they know. You want to give them new and helpful information. You don't want to create boring information, but you also don't want to create information that goes over their head. 

2. Find Out What Your Audience Wants to Learn

Before you start creating content, find out what your audience wants to learn. Giving your audience information that is new to them isn't enough. If they don't care about the topics you are creating content on, your content will fall flat on its face.

Don't have an "if you build it they will come" mentality. There are too many content choices online for people to spend time on content they aren't excited about.

3. Know Your Audience's Pain Points

If you want to get your reader's attention, the best way to do that is creating content around a pain point. 3.2 billion people worldwide use the internet, but you only want to target your content toward your target audience that needs a solution. This segment of people are the ones you can serve the best and the ones that are most likely to become leads and customers.

4. Answer Their Questions

People that are "Googling" online have lots of questions. Go to Google and do some research. You will find so many questions to answer that you can keep your content queue hopping.

When you decide which questions to answer, go for the questions that relate to their biggest pain points first. Once you've finished those, go on to answer deeper questions. If you can walk through a natural progression of questions, it is very effective.

5. Know Actions You Want Them to Take After Reading

As you are creating content, keep in mind what you want your readers to do after they finish reading. You don't want your visitors to land on your site, read your content and head off to another site.

Share useful information and then give them a call to action. You might ask visitors to view another piece of content, opt into a mailing list or to buy a product. If you don't tell your visitors what you want, they won't know.

6. Create an In-Depth Customer Persona

The more you know about the people you are writing about, the easier it is to provide content that speaks to them on a deeper level. There is no such thing as too much information for your customer persona.

Not only do you need to think about the demographics of your perfect customer but you need to know how they think and make decisions. When you understand their motivations and thought processes it is easier to influence them through your content.

7. Plan Your Content Ahead

Planning might not be one of your strong points, but you need to get good at planning. Planning your content will help you avoid content that is disjointed. When you plan your content, it is easier to interlink and make plans for cross-promotions of content.

8. Know Where the Visitor Is In the Buying Cycle

Once you consider your customer persona, you might think you're at the top of your game. While this is an important part, you also need to keep in mind where your readers are in the buying cycle.

You need to speak to people that are in different parts of the buying cycle in different ways. The call to actions need to be different depending on the buying cycle stage.

When people are in the awareness phase, you want to expose them to your brands and products. When people are in the comparison phase, you need to show them why your product or service is better than the alternative.

You should have content on your blog that will walk them all the way through to the sale. Check your content for any gaps you might have. If you don't have enough content for one of the stages, start working to fill in those gaps for the best results.

Focus on What's Important

When you are growing your small to medium business, you may be wearing an insane number of hats. Before long, one of those hats is going to fall off or at least get a little cockeyed.

Trying to write killer content, keep customers happy, work sales leads and improve products can prove to be a source of stress for anyone. Instead of trying to go it alone, contact us today. We can help your business scale without the stress.