In this article, we dive into various types of content and lay out a content creation process you can follow.
What Is Content Creation?
Content creation is the process of creating various forms of media that appeal to your target audience.
For instance, content strategists often identify relevant topic ideas that align with marketing goals. And writers, video producers, and other creators turn these ideas into exciting pieces of content.
Here are some of the most common roles based on our State of Content Marketing report:
Why Is Creating Content Important?
Because it’s a key part of content marketing —a long-term strategy that involves developing and sharing content across channels to reach and engage your target audience.
You do this through search engine optimization (SEO), which involves creating and improving your website and content to rank higher in Google’s search results.
Types of Content
It’s a good idea to produce various types of content to maximize your reach. Here are just a few:
Blog Posts
Blog posts are a great way to educate readers (and they often account for a lot of website content creation). Blog posts also help with brand awareness, search rankings, and customer loyalty.
In fact, the marketers and business owners surveyed in our State of Content Marketing report said both short-form and long-form articles were some of their best-performing content formats.
Coming up with fresh blog ideas and executing them well is important. It helps your content to stand out from the crowd.
Infographics
Infographics do a good job of conveying complex or data-heavy information in a digestible way. They also help break up walls of text. And tend to be shared on social media and referenced by other sites.
You can look for interesting data relevant to your industry and visualize them with infographics. Or find inspiration from popular infographics in other industries.
Infographics can be impressive. For instance, look at this infographic that shows how Captura removes carbon from the environment.
What if you don’t have the resources to produce complex infographics? Simpler infographics like the one below can also do the trick and get your point across.
Videos
Videos can be standalone pieces on YouTube or your website. But they can also enhance text content.
And 45% of the marketers and business owners surveyed in our State of Content Marketing report cite video as the single most effective content format.
Videos can be labeled with metadata, like tags and descriptions. But they can have limited searchability compared to text.
And you can repurpose existing blog posts into video content. Founders and executives can also post short video clips on social media sharing their thoughts.
Whether you opt for live-action footage or computer-generated visuals, here are several video content ideas to look into:
The video (shown below) provides readers with additional details on the efforts their experts put into protecting ecosystems.
Podcasts
Podcasts create a deep connection with listeners through storytelling and discussions. They help build a loyal fan base.
And nearly two-thirds of the U.S. population over age 12 has listened to a podcast, according to Edison Research .
Identify topics that both you and your audience are passionate about. Then, plan your content ahead. Decide whether you will invite guests or run solo, how long should episodes be, and more.
After you record episodes, you can publish them on podcast directories like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.
Try to release various types of podcast content to engage your audience. The popular business podcast “Acquired” is great at this.
Social Media Posts
Social media content enables brands to reach over 4.5 billion users . So they can connect with different audiences and cater to their preferences.
And comments, likes, shares, and direct messages offer an opportunity to interact with audiences and foster a sense of community.
For example, TikTok is known for its fun, short videos (shown below). And high-quality imagery is popular on Instagram.
These platforms also collect user data. And brands can tap into this data to improve their content.
For instance, popular SEO-focused content can be turned into short explainer videos and shared across social media accounts.
Test different types of social media content to see what performs best. Here are some ideas to get you going:
You also want to be approachable and share helpful content as well. Here’s how we do that:
Interactive Content
Interactive content encourages users to engage with your content, which can translate to them spending more time on your site, following you on social media, and more. This can increase brand awareness and even help them move closer to making a purchase.
One way to ideate interactive content is to think about your audience’s needs. And how you can meet those needs in a way that static content can’t.
Quizzes & surveys: Enable visitors to learn more about themselves or their customers and employees through a series of questions
How to Develop a Marketing Content Creation Process
Create great content by executing on an agreed-upon content strategy . Here are some key content creation steps you and your team can follow.
Generate Content Ideas
How can you find that information? Here are several resources you can use to learn more about your audience:
Analytics tools: Use Google Analytics, social media platforms, and other tools you have to learn about your audience’s interests and problems
Sales reps’ input: Talk to your sales reps to discover the topics customers and prospects bring up most often
Customer support calls: Listen to recorded calls from you support team to identify common themes across support calls that can be proactively addressed with content
Online communities: Look for the topics your target audience talks about on forums, social media, Slack groups, and other online venues
Competitive research : Examine your competitors to discover what kind of content they’re creating or find new angles on popular topics
As you research, make note of overarching content ideas that align with your audience. These topics can inform seed keywords—broad search terms you can enter into a keyword tool to find more focused and relevant keywords.
Research Topics
Now, it’s time to research topics based on your ideas and seed keywords. To find specific angles that you can create content around.
Open the tool, type in your seed keyword, select the target country, and click “ Search .”
You’ll now see a list of keywords related to your topic, sorted by search volume. Like this:
For example, maybe you don’t sell on Amazon. Just add “amazon” to the “Exclude keywords” field.
You can also use the suggested groups and subgroups in the column to the left of the keyword list. This helps you sort keywords by subtopics.
Then, use the “Advanced filters” drop-down to find long-tail keywords. This option enables you to specify the word count, search engine results page (SERP) position, and other details of your ideal keywords.
You can repeat this for multiple groups and subgroups. Then, you can group them into keyword clusters (groups of related terms) you can create different pieces of content around.
You can also find ideas by using Keyword Gap to find out which keywords your competitors are focusing on.
Navigate to the tool, enter your domain and the domains of up to four competitors, and click “ Compare .”
When you see the dashboard, scroll down and click on “ Missing ” in the “All keyword details for:” section.
Once you have a solid list of topics, you can use them to plan a content calendar that lays out when each piece of content will be published and on which channel.
A brief outlines the specifics and expectations for a piece of content. It guides the process to ensure everyone understands the objective, audience, proper messaging, and other details.
Tip: Alien Road Keyword Manager offers an automated way to create topic clusters. Click the green “Create list” button, then add your seed keywords in the next menu, and press “Create list.” You’ll be provided with various clusters to work with.
Produce Great Content
Maybe that means assigning it to a team member or freelancer. Or maybe you’re producing the work yourself.
Actionable: Good content encourages the audience to do something, whether it’s to think differently, apply the knowledge they’ve gained, share the content, or make a purchase
There are other nuances to producing great content that you can explore in our content quality guide .
The article delivers value by sharing multiple examples, quotes, and data points. It’s written clearly and uses a lot of imagery to get the point across.
And its structure is logical and easy to follow. It takes readers on a journey, starting with how Discord was launched and ending with what lies ahead.
You also need to make sure an article is easy to understand and optimized for your target keywords.
Type or paste your content in the text field, add your target keywords, then click “ Get recommendations .”
You’ll now see suggestions for improving your content related to “Readability,” “Originality,” “Tone of voice,” and “SEO.”
You don’t have to act on every recommendation. Assess to determine which ones are important to you, and then implement them.
It’s also easy to share this content with team members to edit. Either share directly in the tool or choose the option to “ Move to Google Docs .”
Once your content is written and edited, it’s time to publish it and work on promotion.
Promote Content
Content creation and marketing go hand in hand. So, you can (and should) promote content across multiple channels. To help it reach even more audiences.
Traffic Analytics can give you even more ideas on ways to promote your content. Because you can use it to learn more about how competitors drive audiences to their website content.
You’ll now see the percentage of traffic your competitors get from various channels, including referral, organic search, paid social, and more.
The “Traffic Journey Details” table at the bottom is especially useful for seeing how certain channels drive to certain pages.
For instance, if you select “ Sources ” and “ Organic Social ,” you can see which social platforms drive the most traffic to your competitors.
These insights can help you understand which channels are successful in driving traffic to your competitors. To help you prioritize your own distribution channels.
Analyze and Iterate
Analyzing your content performance can help you understand what works and what doesn’t. So, it’s important to track metrics that make sense for your marketing and business goals.
Conversion rates: The percentage of users who take a desired action on a webpage, such as making a purchase or signing up for a service
Page or video views: The total number of times a webpage or video has been viewed by users
Organic traffic : The visitors who arrive at a website by clicking an unpaid search result in search engine results
Episode downloads: The number of times your podcast or other episodic content has been downloaded by users
Now, adjust the time period to see the specific data you’re interested in by going to the date in the top-right corner.
Monitor the most relevant data points for your site as a whole and for individual pieces of content. To find out which topics, content formats, and pieces perform well.
Then, you can move away from the topics that don’t resonate with your readers and focus more on ones that do.
Content Creation Tools
There are many content creation tools on the market. Some help with research, some with writing. Others help with creating visual elements.
SEO Writing Assistant
SEO Writing Assistant is an AI-supported tool that evaluates your content for readability, originality, SEO, and tone of voice.
The tool can also help you SEO-optimize your content. It lists semantically related keywords you can add based on your target keywords. Which you can then incorporate into your content.
ContentShake
ContentShake is an AI-powered content writing tool that helps users ideate topics, write and optimize content, and publish.
The tool helps you find the right angle for your content, generates a recommended outline, offers recommendations, and analyzes similar content from competitors.
And you can send articles to Google Docs or publish them directly to WordPress. All without leaving the tool.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that can generate topic ideas, write various types of content, provide feedback on your writing, and more.
You can even share your style, flow, and tone of voice preferences. And it will edit the content accordingly.
Keep in mind: AI-written content should always get a thorough human review for accuracy and desired style.
Canva
Canva is an online tool for creating blog images, presentations, social media videos, infographics, charts, and other types of content.
The tool offers plenty of templates for many different formats. To help you quickly elevate your content quality.
Descript
Descript is a multimedia platform for editing video and audio files, capturing and sharing screen recordings, generating transcripts, repurposing content for social, and more.
And it’s easy to share content with team members. So they can review and provide feedback.
You can also write and edit your script directly in the tool. And watch as your script is turned into video.
Take Your Content Creation to the Next Level
And you can gain an edge over the competition if you choose your content types carefully and execute each piece well.
Take the next step in your content creation journey with The Content Marketing Starter Kit . Or by trying all of Alien Road content and SEO tools for free.
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