Most likely, you may hear the famous sentence “Content is the king and delivery is the queen” if you are dealing with digital marketing at some level. Every digital marketer knows this fact, but how can you ensure that you are creating engaging, good-quality content relevant to your target users?

There are some factors that need to be taken into consideration before creating engaging content. Actually, “content creation” also needs to be discussed in detail as there are many variations of content creation, like creating from scratch, repurposing, reusing, transcreation,… etc. For this article, we are not going to focus on these points but will discuss the ways of creating engaging content.

Every digital marketer should take into account the basic factors listed below to create engaging digital content for their target customers. Once there will be a structured process in place for content and service creation, it will be easier to make it more advanced and efficient over time through continuous improvement approaches.

1 – Customer Insights

Direct feedback from the customers regarding your content is the best indicator of its engagement. Collecting user feedback via some simple actions like rating functionality or conducting some behavioral analysis to get customer insights are good ways of implementing this. Customers can tell you whether your content is engaging them. Of course, during the initial content creation process, you may use some market research until developing your own insights data within the time.

2 – Marketers’ Feedback

If you are creating content centrally, for instance, in a global organization to be used by local marketers, you also need to take into account those marketers’ feedback. Although you may have market research, customer journeys, … etc., available centrally (mostly the case for global organizations), local marketers are the ones who know the local market conditions better than anyone.

3 – Customer Personas

Customer personas are high-level modeling of your customers’ characteristics and their needs. And, they are also very useful to identify what type of content is in which format via which channel is the most relevant for engaging your customers better. Having customer personas in place will give you the advantage of understanding your customers’ needs and providing expected content and services to support your marketing objectives.

4 – Customer Journey Maps

Another important exercise that should be completed before creating the content is to draw your customer journeys and map relevant content into those journey steps aligned with your marketing objectives. Different stages in journeys require different types and formats of content.

5 – Alignment with Marketing Objectives

Any content or service that is going to be created has to be linked to your marketing objectives. If you cannot identify this relation, you should stop doing content creation and re-think the relevance of your content. Alignment with marketing objectives is the most important factor for creating engaging and good-quality content or service. You may have engaging content, but if it is not linked to your marketing objectives, then it has no value, unfortunately.

6 – Using the Right Channels for Right Customers

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, while content is being identified as king, delivery is being said as queen. Yes, delivering the content in the best way aligned with customer needs is one of the critical success factors impacting the engagement of your customers. You may align with all the previous factors listed above, but without taking into account the usage of the right channels based on customer needs, you may fail. Giving the right messages through the right channels has a significant impact on the success of your content and services.

Conclusion

Engaging and good quality content creation is the correlation of the 6 basic factors mentioned above. You may expand this list for sure by adding more items, but these 6 factors are the key ones that need to be taken into account for success. And, content creation is also not a one-time task, it is an ongoing set of processes connected to each other which are always open for improvement. So, you should also establish a continuous improvement plan to increase the quality while optimizing your processes and decreasing your cost.

Organizations that can put such comprehensive content creation processes in place are closer to become successful in terms of engaging their customers than others who are not implementing such methodologies.