Ericka Lewis
Whether you’re creating your next ebook, infographic, webinar or blog post, coming up with new topics to write about is a tedious and often tiresome feeling we’re all too familiar with. Going a step further to validate the topics you want to pursue are actually worth writing about is even more of a time-consuming effort that more often than not, doesn’t get the attention it needs.
To keep us motivated to put in the effort to validate our content however, it’s important to remember that validated content is proven to drive more traffic and attract more customers.
While your ideas don’t need to be entirely brand new, there does need to be something new about them and your strategy to execute. Lucky for you, HubSpot just announced the launch of their new Content Strategy app., aka your new content validation BFF in your content marketing strategy toolkit. Here are reasons why your content needs validation:
Your Ideas Aren’t Facts
Truth is your ideas aren’t facts and in an age where every one has a voice, creating valuable content for your customers starts with validating your claims. What’s more, is that creating content out of ideas without evidence as to why and how it will stick to our audiences, can lead to failure. Ideas are great and all, but in order for your audience to gain value from your brand and become loyal to your brand, you’ll need to back up your claims with concrete and credible ideas.
Solutions Are Found Within Credible Content
At it’s core, a content marketing strategy that works well will always seek to provide true solutions for the buyer or the potential buyer. Credible content gives your audience the solutions that it seeks or at least guides them to these solutions.
Credibility can take on many forms and styles. Credibility can be established by referencing credible sources like authors or businesses or citing information from credible and reliable books, research, and other published works.
Using real life examples is always a great way to make your content credible. Whether it’s a personal experience or someone you know, real life stories provide a human element to your ideas that help your audience relate and feel connected.
Quality Yields Loyalty
In addition to credibility, your content topics need to have a hook. Ask yourself: what’s the story? Why should my audience care? These answers don’t come easy, but once they do, it makes creating valuable and remarkable content easy peasy. When you can answer what’s truly in it for them, you’re on your way to creating quality content that naturally yields a loyal following.
Create Content That Gets Found With HubSpot's New Content Strategy Tool
Gone are the days of blindly creating content in hopes that the ideas you’re sharing will make your customers swoon, only to be disappointed by how little traffic your content actually produces.
With HubSpot new Content Strategy, marketers can now easily define their strategies and determine exactly what to write about by sorting through an automated list of topics their websites are already ranking well for and determine what the market is looking for.
"Content Strategy automatically references over 3 billion records to determine search volume, intent, and similarity. With this much data, marketers save time and energy in determining which topics are worth revisiting and which are not by analyzing how much traction previous posts have received on similar topics."
Once you have validation on which topics perform better than others, you can confidently move forward with a search strategy that attracts customers. Content Strategy identifies key questions and answers marketers should target and allows them to turn any one of them into a central piece of content.
Rest assured that HubSpot is on top of its search game. Content Strategy not only helps identify the best keywords to go after, but it also allows marketers to easily setup internal links in one click to point to the pillar page, helping increase its search ranks. If you don’t call that winning, I don’t know what is!
The Takeaway
Simply put, any and all content needs validation in order to be defined as great content. Great content is sticky, it attracts and it converts. To have clear, credible and concrete ideas is to have a winning content strategy that results in a loyal following.
It’s not always easy to get into the mind of your customers but with resources like HubSpot’s new Content Strategy, you can stay in tune with creating content that matters to your audience and get a grip on how to adjust your strategy over time.
