It’s very easy to make your marketing content fail. What we consider as an interesting and useful for our users, in reality, is not that fun for the readers. Preparing our new cycle of articles we spent a lot of time wondering about the form, subject, context. First, to make it useful and valuable. Second, to gain the bigger audience. Third, to improve it.
This experiment helped us to prepare a long term strategy. But also, it was a great lesson on how to create a valuable content.
We discovered there are five premises.
1. It needs to be authentic
The content should describe real problems. An authentic experience.
We want to present a true story, challenges of our company which consists of two teams: developers and marketing. These are real people and real money.
In articles we share our insights presenting the time allocation in our team. We show how much time we spend on key tasks like Customer Service, Inbound Marketing and projects like, for example new Graphical Timesheet.
2. It needs to be useful
The content should provide knowledge. It should give solutions ready to use by other teams which struggle with the same or similar problems.
In our case it is a problem of implementing time tracking in the organizational culture.
We are convinced that the cycle will be helpful, especially for a) digital, marketing and PR agencies, as well as for b) software houses and development teams.
It is also an attempt to evaluate other projects and experiments in the terms of ROI, for example:
a) digital, marketing and PR agencies need time tracking to:
- gain the knowledge about time allocation across top priority projects and tasks – in our case it means to learn more about our clients, SEO, Content and Public Relations
b) development teams need to record time to:
- find out how much time do they spend on coding, fixing bugs, unplanned tasks, other stuff – this will enable to evaluate the proportion and work on them if needed
- check on their own estimations to be better at it and to get to know the real figures
- additionally, in our case it is a need to use own product.
3. It needs to be unique
Good content should present things not touched before by anyone else. There is no point in repeating the subjects that could have been published many times earlier.
4. It needs to be clear
Not everything what is completely obvious to you is clear enough for your readers. Of course, writing articles for the specific group you assume that they are familiar with some aspects of the subject. However, sometimes it is better to write more, than risk that some things will stay unclear.
5. It needs to contain real data
In our cycle we’re going to share real data and keep presenting the results of our experiment with time tracking implementation.
We believe this makes as more reliable. It shows our clients that we also struggle some problems and we are looking for solutions on how to solve them. Real data give a more clear image of it.
Nobody would give you a perfect recipe, but hopefully, our post will inspire you and help you create a great content for your own blog. Good Luck!