Stephanie Donelson

Content comes in a variety of formats but one of the most basic ones for content marketing is blogging.

Blogs are great for brands as it gives them the opportunity to build brand awareness through organic search and builds credibility by putting out quality, relevant, and engaging content. Blogs give your customers and prospects a reason to visit your website beyond transactional reasons. Content allows you to build stronger relationships with your customers and helps you find prospects who may not know your brand exists.

Content marketing has enjoyed a serious boom in the last few years as brands realize its value and put more effort and resources into creating content, most often in the form of company blogs.

While it’s great to see brands take advantage of this great marketing channel, you’ll also come across brands that aren’t doing it well. Some brands treat their blog as a catch-all for PR or news, some treat their blog as a place to house product documentation, or others that only post about themselves.

Perhaps your brand is struggling with its content lately and noticed a dip in performance. Have no fear, there are some simple things to change in your content creation process that can help you drive those metrics back to a healthy place.

If you want to ensure your content performs well, you need to keep these seven things in mind!

1. What’s your why?

A lot of time we end up writing blogs because we think we should. It’s like Jurassic Park, “you were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you never stopped to think if you should.”

You should always know why you’re writing this blog or piece of content and what its goal is. If the goal is because you need to write something – please don’t. Outline exactly what you hope to achieve with this piece and what your audience will take away from it.

Your goals can be simple, but you must know what they are. Content goals could be something like:

• Educating customers about a trend in the industry
• Educating customers on your products or services
• Helping customers in their buyer’s journey
• Introducing your customers to your company’s employees or giving them a peek behind the curtain
• Entertaining your audience

Always know your why before creating a piece of content.

2. What’s the reader’s intent?

Once you know why you’re writing it you should know why your audience would want to read it. Are they looking to be educated, informed, or buy?

Reader intent can help make sure you have the right information in your content, it’s structured the right way, and has the right CTA (call-to-action) at the end.

Like the first tip, if you don’t know why the reader is checking out your content they won’t either. Understand what they need out of the content and give it to them.

3. Is the headline clickable?

Your headline should be compelling people to click without baiting them.

We’ve all seen the headlines on Facebook as we scroll through that scream clickbait, like:

• 4 teens changed each others’ lives. You won’t believe how!
• Roundup of epic proposals in 2021: #9 will make you cry
• How to lose 10 pounds eating this one weird fruit
• This man got the surprise of a lifetime – you’ll never guess what happened next

Clickbait is used when the content is not that enticing but the publisher needs eyes on it. There are some principles of clickbait that do work when the content is valuable, but more often than not we’ve been burned too many times by clickbait headlines and crappy content.

Like the examples above, I’m sure I would believe how in the first headline and I’m sure I won’t be crying when I see what proposal #9 is. Your content should sell itself. Save the headline to accurately let the reader know what they’re going to read about.

Want more headline writing tips? Check out my blog post on it!

4. The WIIFM

People love themselves. It’s true. We do. That’s why it’s important to keep the WIIFM in mind as you create your content. WIIFM = What’s In It For Me?

We all scan content looking for how we can relate to it or how it impacts our lives. If it doesn’t, we tend to skim it and forget it or worse, immediately close out of it.

Like reader intent, help pull the reader into the blog or piece of content by addressing the reader directly with the use of second-person point of view, or by addressing their unique challenges in your industry.

5. The structure

Structure your content appropriately for the web. Unless we’re cracking open a book, we often don’t like being met with a giant wall of text on the screen. We love to scan and look for relevant words or phrases that catch our attention.

Make your blog user-friendly by:

• Using headers and/or subheadings to categorize and break up your content
• Adding graphics or video – a good rule of thumb is to have an image every 75-100 words
• Use bullet points to make your content scannable
• Writing smaller paragraphs
• Using pull-quote features

6. The action

When your reader makes it to the end of your blog or piece of content, then what? Have you designated a logical next step for them? What’s the CTA?

Maybe it’s to continue reading related content. Maybe it’s to download a copy of the blog post as an infographic or cheat sheet. Maybe it’s to sign up for an educational email series on the topic.

You never want to leave your audience hanging at the end or wondering what they should do next.

7. The reviews

Finally, one of the easiest ways to improve content performance is by reviewing your own review process.

Has your content been properly edited? Proofread? Has there been a technical audit on making sure images load correctly and CTAs go to the right place? Sometimes content doesn’t perform well simply because it’s not edited or people are distracted by a typo. If that made it through, what else could be wrong with the content?

Make sure you allot time for editing and proofreading before publishing your content.

Do you have other tips for marketers when it comes to improving content performance? Sound off in the comments below!