It was once famously said, “content is king.” Although this phrase was uttered years ago, it still rings true today. Websites are chomping at the bit for more content to entice visitors, convert cautious customers and populate their barren websites.
You can’t just throw any old content up there though. With it playing such an important role in improving your rankings and perception among audiences, each piece of content you produce needs to be carefully prepared and produced to suit particular needs. Some content works better than others, and some pieces are essential to have on your website.
Best Pieces of Content to Add in your Website
Here are five pieces you need to start working on for your website today.
Team content
This may or may not surprise you, but your team is a huge asset to your business. We don’t just mean in terms of the work they do, but how important they are for content creation. This goes beyond your graphics department, video editors and copywriters too. Everyone from your less the charismatic finance director to the new hire is a great piece of content waiting to happen.
Tailored content production that’s focused on the behind-the-scenes of your business and the staff that populate it is brilliant for boosting engagement and building trust in your brand. This kind of content can take many forms. Vlogs filming the process of how your team completes daily tasks are a great way to give people the look behind the curtain that so many love. An interview Q and A blog with new starters is a great way to introduce a new face to your audience and subtly tell them you’re growing.
All of this content helps to build a perception of your brand as one that is populated by real people with genuine life experience. This doesn’t just inspire confidence but creates an affinity for the people that work there amongst your customer base. Profiling your team tells the average customer they’re giving their money to real people with real passions. The average person feels much more comfortable buying from a real face and is more than willing to extend their time spent shopping to get a look behind the scenes at what the office they’re buying from looks like. It’s all part of the inquisitive human nature.
There’s also no requirement to take this content too seriously or play it completely straight. You can use it as an opportunity to build your brand and show off a unique side of your business. Write blogs about company-wide events and charity days you do together. Just like people want to know about your team’s interests, they are curious about your internal culture. This is especially important for B2B sales, as many companies prefer to work with businesses that have a similar culture and ethos.
Product videos
Sometimes it can be hard to get the full essence of something across with a picture. Product videos have become an ecommerce essential in recent years out of an audience’s desire for more information. Too many customers have been burned by products that don’t look quite like they did online, leading to a culture of caution around product imagery. The average customer wants a much more authentic look at what they’re about to buy.
This is why it’s vitally important to start investing in product video content. There are numerous routes you can go down, depending on what you’re selling and the build of your website. You can provide short video highlights of a product, which simply show it off in a more detailed way than an image or description would. Or, you can produce product demonstrations, which give you an opportunity to go more in-depth into features that might be tripping customers up.
This type of content also plays a role in establishing a sense of trust from your audience. Product videos help to improve how they perceive both the products and your legitimacy as a business. It’s also another opportunity to get yourself and your team on camera. You can treat these videos as a brand-building exercise, using them to develop the tone and voice of your marketing. Never underestimate the visibility and clarity that video content can offer.
Read more: What are the Best Video Marketing Tools
Product guides
All this talk of videos shouldn’t make you rethink the importance of the written word though.
Large swaths of your audience will prefer to read content and information rather than take it in via video. One of the most common types of content that people prefer to absorb through this medium are product guides and comparison pieces. A video may offer you a more in-depth look into a feature that isn’t inherently obvious from the beginning, but an article can tell you why that feature is so useful and, more importantly, better than a similar one on a rival product.
This evergreen content can sit on your website as long as you continue to sell the products or the service. It’s a brilliant way to keep customers informed and cut down the number of customer service calls and emails you receive a day asking for more details about a product, or advice on which one to buy. If your work is long-form and informative, it can help establish you as a thought leader or industry heavyweight. This is important for acquiring more opportunities for exposure and links from credible websites. In short, this type of quality content leads to opportunities for even better content.
Better imagery
We may have bashed the idea of imagery a couple of paragraphs up, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have its benefits or a place in a modern website. If you were to change all of your images to video not only would you be left with an incredibly slow website, but no time to create any other form of content, let alone other work. Imagery should continue to be an essential part of your content calendar.
While it may not feel the same as a video you spend days editing or an extensive blog piece, imagery is integral to your marketing strategy. Visuals matter on your website, and that doesn’t just mean banners and graphics. Visual content helps to tell the story of your brand and compliment the products and services you offer. They are a visual cue that help to not only to explain what something is, but craft a personality and tone around it and your business.
Evergreen content isn’t exclusive to blog posts and videos either. You can create infographics highlighting service or product information that can be used to bolster the quality of existing blogs or given their own space to act as industry discussion content.
Social feeds
You don’t need me to tell you about the power of social media. Well, these platforms have grown so powerful their relevance has superseded their homes and it’s important to somehow work them into your website.
Social media can influence the content of your blog. This can mean that your audience either votes on the topics they would like you to write about, or even questions for you to answer. You can also use audience generated and submitted content to fill out your website and show new visitors the relationship you have with your existing base.
The easiest way to integrate social content though is to add a rolling social feed to your homepage. This is a brilliant way to shake up the content on your website and keep things fresh. A social feed can show visitors everything you’re posting on social media, everything your audience is posting about you or the replies to a hashtag campaign. It’s an incredibly versatile form of content, and humble brag about your engagement levels.
