Original Content Is Critical To Your Business’s Marketing Strategy

by Formada

Feb 2, 2024

Wanting To Improve Your Business’s Approach To Content?

Ever wonder how some businesses seem to always have the most unique and engaging content? Day after day, they’re publishing quality blogs, emails, and social media posts, and you’re not even quite sure where or how to get started in creating original content for your business. It can feel overwhelming and discouraging.

Odds are, it’s because they have a dedicated brand copywriter on staff, or because they’ve hired an agency to do their writing for them. And remember this: Every business has to start at the beginning when it comes to creating quality copy for their brand.

And that’s my biggest advice here: Just get started. It doesn’t matter if it’s someone on your team or if you hire an agency to write copy for your business. Just get started. You’ll learn so many important things about your business, your brand, and your customer’s needs throughout this process.

But it does require dedication and attention. If you don’t have dedicated resources in-house, then you should consider hiring an agency to provide copywriting services, even if the idea of having someone outside of your organization writing on the business’s behalf makes you uncomfortable.

While I understand that a lot of companies out there are hesitant to hand over their brand to an agency copywriter, due to the risk of them misrepresenting the brand, the alternative is worse, in my opinion.

Instead of having fresh content, you have an increasingly stagnant website. You’re missing opportunities to engage with your audience on social media. Your SEO, and therefore your lead volume, is suffering because you’re not regularly publishing blogs.

Capturing a brand’s voice is an art. At Formada, our Content team works very carefully to ensure that your brand is not just accurately represented, but that it’s elevated. Here’s how we do that.

We Never Make Assumptions About Your Brand, Or Your Goals

In our experience, this is one of the things that differentiates us from our competitors. We take the concept of a “discovery call” really seriously. We’re showing up to discover everything that we can about your business, your goals, your challenges, and possibly how our team and our services fit in with those things.

We’re not going to show up with an off-the-shelf deck filled with stock suggestions. In fact, in most instances, we’re not going to show up with a deck at all. We’re showing up to listen. We want to know about your experience with creating and publishing content, and what a successful content strategy looks like to you.

We’re coming to this discussion in order to capture as much information as we can from you, and if we choose to work together, we’ll also be giving you our Brand Discovery Survey.

The Brand Discovery Survey is designed to help you communicate the critical details of your brand, how you want to position your products and services, how you solve problems for your customers, and other characteristics that will help us differentiate you from your competitors.

Creating Original Content for Your Business: Where SEO Fits In

So, in addition to the information that we capture in your discovery call and the Brand Discovery Survey, we also do keyword research on your industry, specific products or services, your competitors, and more, and cross reference those with your website any existing blogs you’ve published.

This helps us do a few things. One, it helps us identify any content gaps you might have. Two, we can get a clearer picture of how your competition is ranking in terms of their content. Third , this process will also show us content opportunities we might not have considered in the first place.

SEO is always evolving. Simply stuffing your content with keywords isn’t going to help you rank. In fact, it might actually ding your credibility in the eyes of certain search engines.

Despite this constant evolution in SEO, there are some constants. One of those constants is creating original, thoughtful, and useful content — content that your end-user can actually benefit from.

And by focusing on those three things, you’ll be able to publish content for your business that will align with your audience’s needs, and will earn authority from search engines.

Creating Original Content for Your Business: Original, Thoughtful, and Useful.

Original content matters, because you’re giving your readers something unique. It can be a highly niche aspect of a topic that isn’t covered by other brands, or you might be offering a different perspective on a topic that’s been written about ad nauseam by other publishers.

Thoughtful matters, because it shows that you’re thinking beyond that writing itself.

Are you organizing your content to make it more readable?
Are you including internal and external links?
Have you given consideration to the structure of your URLs?
Instead of solely focusing on the most competitive keywords in this subject, have you found ways to use longtail keywords in your content?

These tactics also help web crawlers analyze and identify your content as being relevant to a searcher’s query.

Useful matters, because the content isn’t for you. Your content, whether it be ad copy, blog content, a landing page, a social post, or a web page, is for a specific audience.

When creating content for them, you need to think about a number of things, including adapting your voice for the medium you’re in, helping them to better understand a concept, and, perhaps most importantly, tell them what you want them to do!

Though all three of these factors are important, the latter two are probably the most missed opportunities for brands.

Creating Original Content for Your Business: You Have More Opportunities Than You Think

When creating content for your brand, we typically don’t recommend limiting yourself to subjects solely related to selling your products or services. With a tactic like blogging, you have the opportunity to go far deeper than other mediums.

You can really flex your expertise, and you can answer some really important questions that your customers are curious about.

Here’s what I mean: Say you have a business that sells pencils. Doesn’t sound too sexy, does it? A more pedestrian approach might be limited to descriptions of the pencil — it’s size, color, graphite weight, etc. After all, it’s just a pencil, right? But what if you went deeper?

You could write blogs about:

The Pros And Cons Of Using Traditional Vs. Mechanical Pencils
Why Graphite? The History Of Pencils And Their Construction.
Do You Know How A Pencil Is Made? An In-Depth Look At How We Manufacture Ours.
Ever Wonder Why Pencils Are Yellow? Here’s Why!
What To Do When Your Pencil’s Eraser Causes Smudging
3 Clever Ways To Sharpen Your Pencils When You Can’t Find Your Sharpener

The point is, no matter what your business is selling, there’s a way to make it fascinating to your audience. There’s a universe of ways in which you can promote it, speak to the many interests of your customers, and establish your authority on the subject.

Maybe they’re not buying a pencil every single day, but when they want some, you’re who they think of, because in their minds, you are the destination for great pencils.

Why? Because you’re giving them something to connect to beyond the object itself. You’ve created an emotional tie. You’ve captured their imagination. Built trust and authority. That’s potent, powerful stuff.

Creating Original Content for Your Business: Don’t Forget The Calls To Action

Shockingly, calls to action, or CTAs, are often overlooked, but are essential in getting your audience to take the next step.

This is where your copy needs to be explicitly clear. What do you want them to do? Call you? Fill out a form? Subscribe to your newsletter? Like? Share?

They need to know specifically what you want them to do, and you need to be unafraid to ask.

With the right campaign structure in place, your marketing team or agency partner will be able to accurately assess what blogs or web pages are getting the most visits, as well as which calls to action are performing the best.

This insight will help you improve your performance, increase your leads, and ultimately have a positive effect on your revenue.

Can’t AI Just Do All Of This For My Business?

Given how prevalent the discussion around AI tools has become lately, I would be remiss if I didn’t briefly touch on this topic.

Simply put, I think that we have a healthy sense of cautious optimism and cautious skepticism regarding these tools.

One, AI tools for writing have already been around for some time. Grammarly and predictive text, for example, are both AI tools.

Second, while the sophistication of these tools will no doubt grow over the next several years, at this point in time, their use is still better suited for helping writers and content creators generate new ideas, reframe certain concepts, or reorganize existing content.

So, yes, while you can use AI to do some of these things, it won’t necessarily have the value that original content creators can generate for your business.

At Formada, our goal is to continue to employ more people to do more great writing for our client base while giving consideration to these tools in ways we feel align with our values and goals. More on all that later.