No matter what business you’re in, an essential part of your marketing plan needs to be creating great content. Most organizations are struggling to create content, let alone “great” content though. The incredible flood of low quality content, and “curated” content, is part of the effort to satisfy the constant banging of the content drums. Or as Eli puts it “Content is king, and now everyone is king”. So how do you make great content?

Step 1. Creating content, what should you write about?

Discovering article ideas, and finding relevant things to write about doesn’t need to be hard. There’s a good change that your customers already know what your next article title should be, you just need to ask them for it.

Surveying them is an easy way to get lots of great article ideas, directly and indirectly. When you run your survey “Instead of asking boring questions like ‘How many units of alcohol will you consume in December?’ ask ‘Are you going to get drunk over the Christmas holidays?’. It gets you the same information, but makes the user think ‘What’s the next question going to be?’”, it puts a smile on their faces and entertains them as they give you insight – which you can use to create your next article title – such as “70% of men are going to get drunk this December”.

Step 2. Make sure it’s relevant to your audience

Just because it’s funny doesn’t mean it’s going to have an impact, your content needs to be highly relevant to your audience. That’s what’s keeps them reading.  “Writing about America’s knowledge of Indonesia was really popular in Indonesia, they’re curious and interested to know what American’s know about them. The same article wouldn’t generate any interest America, they didn’t even know that Obama had been to Indonesia.”

Get the right content to the right audience or it’ll fall flat.

Step 3. Test, check if your audience is going to like it

Don’t make any assumptions, check and make sure your article ideas are of interest to your audience. “If it’s interesting and relevant enough for a dinner table conversation, it’s ok.” says Eli. Drop a few article titles as conversation topics in idle conversation with a few of your readers. If they seem interested in the conversation that’s a good sign that they’ll read about it or share it.

Wrapping up. How do I know my post was successful?

If done well, a good post can get great back links and maybe even media coverage, whilst that’s a reasonable measure for content success, Eli believes you need to push yourself further.

How do you know that you’ve made truly great content? Read the full interview here and find out.

Full interview: http://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-business/exclusive-interview-creating-content-people-actually-care-about