How to Publish Captivating Content
A Marketing article written by Cameron Duchatel
October 5, 2017 | 2 minute read
Publishing a piece of content that’s rich in solutions, adhering to both your existing member base and potential members is what associations strive for, or at least what they should be striving for.
Whether you’re a copywriter, marketing, and events manager, or communication strategist, the impending content you produce has never been more important in today’s interconnected world. Only an arm’s length away is your ability to generate a substantial inflow of traffic and with that comes the potential for new members.
It can be stressful having to publish consistent pieces of captivating content. The following structure will hopefully provide you with a simple procedure to follow in order to improve the flow of your content creation:
Who am I targeting?
The easiest way to target your content is by understanding who your audience is, starting off from a comprehensive point of view and scaling inwardly until you reach your particular niche. The realization that you don't need to please everyone within an entire industry and only an incremental portion of that industry can be eye-opening, whereby within Oceania there is over 40 million potential businesses and consumers to sell anyone-product or service too! For example, if you were selling to a niche portion of that market, let’s say 0.1% of that 40 million, you would still have 40,000 prospective buyers or clients to sell to. Making sure you take the time to understand who you’re serving (your niche) is one of the most fundamental factors to giving your organization a meaningful direction.
What’s my central topic and what themes will flow-on from it?
After defining your audience, choosing your topic becomes increasingly clearer to do. Putting yourself in the shoes of your targeted audience is the best way to write engaging content. You start to think more in-line with what information would help your particular audience. A few research techniques to ensure your topic will be captivating and relevant can include:
- Current trends in your specific industry;
- Problems you’ve personally gone through and;
- Keyword research to determine hot topics for the industry
Keywords are everything!
Keywords are able to highlight specific themes or ideas that your members or guests are looking for. The feeling of finding a piece of content that can answer all your queries on the one page is a fulfilling experience for any reader. Here are a couple of ways you can use keywords to captivate and answer your audience:
- Google keyword planner allows you to input a keyword and then receive information regarding its popularity as well as relatable words to help you refine the terminology your audience is using
- The power to skimming;
- Bolding or highlighting certain keywords
- Using keywords within the headings (H1) and subheadings (H2, and H3)
- Using anchor text (highlight keywords) is a form of captivation for search engines to understand your content, but in the bigger picture, it will ultimately help your audience to find the content.
Remember the power of images!
According to MIT news (Trafton, 2014), online users have the ability to generate multiple concepts and or themes from a single picture before reading anything on the particular topic itself. Therefore, as the old saying goes, ‘if a picture is worth a thousand words’, and you can find that one picture that both entice a user to read your content as well as providing an abstracted summary of it, you’ve done well.
Here’s a quick glance at the content structure from above:
- Who am I targeting?
- What’s my central topic and what themes will flow-on from it?
- Keywords are everything!
- Remember the power of images!
It’s always a good idea to make a checklist before you start your content creation process, in order to avoid sorting through an abundance of irrelevant information. Whether you use the list provided, or make one of your own up.
