As apart of an in-depth look into content development. Here is my recommended process for content development for articles, whitepapers and case studies.
Here are few tips to help in create a great article:
1. Be a detective. Find subject matter experts
I can’t stress how important it is! When you’re writing content you won’t know the subject and will rely on others(specifically subject matter experts).
You need to be Sherlock and find clues in your office as to who the information you need to make great marketing assets. That info will resonate to potential clients. Subject matter experts with industry knowledge or product knowledge will provide profound assistance too. Use there knowledge to give your story credibility.
2. Understanding your audience
You’re not writing for yourself. You’re writing to build an audience to continue to come back again and again.
Questions to ask:
- What does your potential readers want to see?
- What type of magazines or publications do they read?
Here you will also need to rely not only on subject matter experts, but sales and product teams to leverage important audience knowledge.
Other questions to ask: How do they typically read stories? Phone, email, website? All great things to know. If data is not available. Test it out to gain metrics.
3. Editing the material
You’ve wrote your 1st draft. Now comes the hard part…revisions to content. Content needs to have the right flow and readability. It will need to incorporate content design which I talk about in Step 4. Remember Articles may take multiple revisions to get the correct message out, but stay calm and continue to revise until you feel good about it.
4. Make your content design worthy to read
Content needs a visual design.
I can’t stress how important layout is for readers. It needs more than a pretty picture or silly GIF. From top to bottom for scan-ability purposes. I agree with the belief that scanability is key for article with the advent of mobile.
Stressing certain points in bold, break apart paragraphs, underlining, and possibly using bullets are huge pluses too.
NEW blogpost coming next week…
This ends part 1 of this blogpost. In the part 2 I will talk with you regarding getting your article published and the process of gaining an audience for your finished news release.
Thanks for reading,
Anthony