Why is content consistency so difficult to achieve?
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Consistency across branded content should be simple and front of mind for all marketers. For some reason though, it’s hard or near impossible to achieve.
Why is the most mundane trait of content creation — consistency — the most difficult to achieve, despite being fundamental to content success? Are brands functionally unable to run consistent content, or is it not high on the list of employee priorities?
While content marketers borrow from journalists to aid storytelling, it sometimes feels like they’ve skipped the sub-editing part. More often than not, content marketing feels like a series of one-off ideas rather than a habit. When it comes to creating content, many marketers have admitted that developing a consistent plan is one of their top challenges.
Inconsistent content could be doing more damage than you think to your strategy. This is because when your content isn’t consistent, you confuse your audience and present your brand in a negative way.
As the Native Advertising Institute states; “consistency in your content strategy makes you relevant and keeps your audience engaged.” The key to an effective content strategy is consistency — consistency in quality and quantity. Watch as we discuss the importance of producing consistent content.
Why is consistency difficult?
While many businesses and content marketers admit time is the biggest barrier to creating consistent content, there are a number of other factors that affect the process. Too many distractions and too big an emphasis on the outcome rather than the process are the common issues linked to the inability to create consistency. While it does require extra work, the payoffs for brands are clear.
The five benefits of consistent content
1. The ability to create trust and authority with your audience
Consistent content allows you to create a trusting relationship with your audience. Engaging content positions you as an authority within your field and a trustworthy, reliable source of truth. Consistent, evergreen content also provides the opportunity to build creditability and strengthen your reputation within the market.
By developing this authority, Google will then reward you and position your content at the top of a search.
2. Increase your audience retention
Creating content regularly is the key to building a loyal audience or customer base. But remember, it does need to be informative especially if you want return visits. By creating valuable content, you capture the attention of your audience while subtly reinforcing a positive brand impression.
3. Gain social media traction and build personal relationships
Sharing content regularly across social media platforms puts your brand across in a friendly and more personal manner. But once you gain social media traction, it is important you don’t ignore the conversations occurring on your account. Read the comments, interact with your audience, and take note of their behaviour across your content. By doing this, you can then create content that is tailored to their interest and which will drive engagement.
4. Build a stronger SEO presence
SEO can be a challenge because search engines are constantly updating their algorithms, which then affect how your content positions. But with the right use of keywords, knowledge and expertise, your content will organically shift to the top of a search query. As we mentioned earlier, to build authority you need to execute consistent, high quality content. Once you showcase yourself as a source of truth, Google will rank your content higher.
5. Engage customers to make further purchases
With the use of a CRM, you can collect and manage all the data that makes up your audience. With this data, you can create engaging, relevant content that speaks directly to the reader and their pain points. This provides them with a reason to engage with your business and develop a sense of belonging to you.
Achieving consistency
So, you understand the benefits of creating consistent content, but how exactly do you achieve it?
1. Create a content strategy that focuses on the business’ objectives
Your content strategy needs to include your audience and personas, the type of content you want to focus on, its frequency, and how it will be distributed. During the development of your strategy, you need to also ensure all of your content supports one another and influences at least one of your personas.
Once you have a clear strategy, add your business’ objectives (both digitally and offline) and highlight the steps associated to ensure they are achieved. For example, some goals could be:
- More leads
- Higher engagement
- More sales
- Brand awareness
2. Develop a style guide on how you want the business to be presented
This guide should be created in conjunction with your overarching strategy and should act as a resource for how you want your business positioned. This is important as it ensures your team maintains a consistent voice, tone and style when communicating with your audience, whether it is through email, social, advertisements, or the website.
3. Build a team and perform quality control checks at each stage of production
Your team is important to ensuring you develop content frequently and your objectives are met. Within your team, you may have a copywriter, social media specialist, and a content or digital manager who focuses on the strategic approach. Once your team is built, develop a system that ensures each team member is accountable for their efforts — this ensures the strategy moves along smoothly.
4. Create a content calendar and distribution plan
The content calendar should be the place of truth. It can be used as an accountability document, a process report, and a schedule to ensure everyone knows what has been done and what is in the pipeline. A content calendar should be maintained regularly to ensure it encompasses trends and topical content.
Within your calendar, you can include brainstorms of possible topics and ideas and plan social media campaigns. It should also bring to life your distribution plan that includes a variety of platforms, paid distribution tactics, and a promotional schedule.
5. Perform regular testing and uncover what works and what doesn’t
Data plays a crucial role to content creation. No decision should be made unless you have the data to back it. Ongoing reporting of each content piece is crucial to the success of your overall strategy. By measuring how your content performs, you can understand if your strategy is working and if your goals are being met.
You can use tools such as Google Analytics, Search Console and SEMrush to gather data sets such as:
- Time on page for engagement
- Page views to determine topics resonate with your audience
- Bounce rate to understand if users are leaving without taking another action
- Keyword rankings to track SEO efforts
Read more from Click2View:
- Want to put out better content for your audience? Here’s why you need to design think your content.
- Ever thought about what content marketing and traditional newsrooms have in common?
- Data is important not only as numbers, but for storytelling.
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Click2View is Southeast Asia’s premiere full-service independent B2B content marketing agency servicing clients like Microsoft, Google, Visa, Prudential, and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.
