To generate leads, improve customer engagement, and enhance your organic search ranking for key search terms you need to be producing and sharing relevant content. You need to make the most of what you’ve already got and be proactive and targeted. To make it easy for you, we’re sharing our top tips to help you becoming a content superstar.

Consider your existing Content

The majority of business will already have a readily available bank of content, whether it’s blogs, press releases, slideshare presentations, video, case studies or white papers. You should do a content audit and collate everything you have because you might turn up some gems. Don’t forget, if you have content it might be an idea just to update it rather than re-invent the wheel.

Think About Your Audience

Understanding your audience is a key element in creating good, thought provoking content. If you’re not sure who you’re targeting at the moment, take a step back and look at who you would like to have on your books; what will they be interested in?  Try and define your ideal customer; the industry they work in, their job role, gender and match your content to that persona.

Involve the whole team

If the same person is producing the content then it’s going to get rather one dimensional. Look around the office and see who can bring a fresh angle to an idea. Experts are all around and they will bring light and shade to your output.  You may have a team working on an interesting new project who could share their experiences. Your head of support might want to highlight the work on the unsung heroes who keep your customers happy but who rarely get the profile they deserve.

Mix it up

Blogs are a great starting point as they create rich searchable content but not everyone will take the time to read your polished prose whereas they might want to look over your infographic or watch your video and even better, share it on social media. And remember the human touch.  What’s wrong with posting content about your team’s recent away day or charity fundraiser? If customers are to engage with you they will want to know that you look after the team that looks after them.

And don’t forget to plan for hero content like white papers that can be downloaded from your site and for which in return you can gain valuable information like name, email address and job function to top up your sales lead funnel.

Amplify your content

Having spent all that time and hard work on creating the content, don’t let it go to waste by just leaving it to chance that someone will drop by your website. Think of all the different ways you can amplify your content. Social media is always a good place to start sharing, but be mindful of the type of content you’re sharing as some pieces that work well on Twitter might not be LinkedIn appropriate. You also need to be clear and concise with your messaging so it’s easy for your audience to share as well. Social shares and likes are like gold start in terms of boosting your credibility and pushing you up the rankings.

Traditional PR also can be seen as part of content amplification. A blog can be repurposed for use as an article in the media with the added advantage that you might get a valuable back link from a high authority domain like a leading trade publication or one of the  national media.

Monitor, measure and adapt

There’s no point working hard to create content that doesn’t have any impact, so build measurement into your content process. Google analytics is a great free tool that will show what sort of content is driving traffic. Other tools like CANDDi will give you a lot more information, showing who has read and downloaded your content, how successful your social sharing is and ultimately which customers you won as a result of a certain type of content.