The backbone of a solid brand identity and online content strategy is good web content. How can you inspire an audience, spark engagement, move your customer along a customer journey and keep them coming back for more? The answer comes down to content. Here’s a quick guide to writing good web content, whether you’re just starting out or running an established business.
Chart a Content Course
The first step in creating good content is understanding the purpose behind the content. Why are you writing, and whom are you trying to reach? We’ve written about aligning content with the customer journey in the past.
Web content should fulfill a promise – it should provide useful information that doesn’t waste a reader’s time. (In other words, it shouldn’t be clickbait!) How many times do people search for a topic and sift through website after website of completely irrelevant sites or sites that don’t fully provide the information needed?
Before writing the first word, think about the customer journey and what they need to know. This includes:
- Identify the target reader or consumer.
- What are their goals? What do they want to accomplish by visiting the site?
- What action should they take after viewing the content (this will form the call to action).
- What’s the best content type to reach this customer? (Video, blog post, audio recording, etc.)
Plan the content’s topic, headline, subsections, and call to action around the audience’s goals.
Keep Your Content Simple
From the internet’s earliest days, it was clear people consumed digital content in a different way than print or television. Shorter is better online because people scan content and look for engaging visuals that communicate information in short bursts.
Visual layout matters online, even for blog posts and long-form articles.
Years of eye-tracking data have shown there are effective ways to visually break up content and make it more readable (and memorable!):
- Use plain language.
- Keep paragraphs short.
- Put the most important information at the top. (Most people never read past the halfway point!)
- Break content into logical sections with engaging subheadings.
- Highlight key phrases and use graphic pull-outs where it makes sense.
- Use tables, bullet points, and lists. (See what we did there?)
Writing good web content is a combination of knowing the audience and presenting information in a concise, visually engaging way. Our team helps companies craft user-friendly websites and content marketing strategies that take the guesswork out of reaching a target audience.
And if you’ve read this far into the post, congratulations on going further than most people do in an article!
Producing good content takes a little planning and a lot of creativity. We’re here to be a sounding board for your company or to help come up with a unique content plan for your business. Give us a call to talk about how we can help you create the right content to support your brand.
