Content Creation in 2024 For Beginners: A Complete Guide

A lot of writers are producing a long fleet of content, but almost half of them fail at getting the results that they desire from it. Content creation is no easy task. Producing content that would be able to hold the attention of your readers for real can be downright challenging. 

Come to think of it, content is all around us, from websites and social media channels to newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, emails, and the list goes on. It is estimated that an average American is exposed to around 4000 – 10,000 ads per day. The amount of advertising content that we consume daily is simply astonishing. 

Today you can easily create and publish a single piece of content, but making it accessible and meaningful is challenging. However, with the ability to schedule social media posts with social media scheduler, some of these challenges can be mitigated. 

What is Content Creation in Marketing?

Content creation can be explained as the process of identifying a new topic that you would want to write about, deciding upon the form that the content should take, forming a strategy for keywords and structure, and then producing it in accordance with all the criteria.

Forming a content creation strategy is not a quick and one time thing. These processes usually go through multiple rounds of edits and revisions before finalization. In marketing, be it social media or influencer marketing, your end game or audience is always the customer. And that is when you would know that your purpose of creating content would be to sell an idea or product, directly or indirectly to them. The purpose of writing blogs could be simply generating traffic, but the ultimate intent will always be a profitable customer.

The Content Creation Process

For creating great content, you will need a well-established process for letting things flow. As marketers, we have a lot on our plate and we cannot waste time on inefficient systems. That is why we have set processes for everything that we do. Once we devise a plan, we start implementing it for developing campaigns or viral content marketing strategies, we tweak the plan at certain points to make it work, and repeat the system for successful results. We will walk you through every step that is involved in devising the plan, that is the content creation process.

1. Research

Perhaps the stepping stone for any big task to be successful is conducting research. This stands no different when it comes to content. If you want to generate highly competitive branded content creation ideas, you will have to begin with a formal and thorough research. This research can be segregated in two steps:

• Topics and questions

For coming up with ground topics and questions that you want to answer through your content, you will have to develop a buyer persona through some research. Find out what your audience is discussing and what topics interest them the most. Note what your ideal customer looks like and how he/she acts in the marketspace. All of this will give you some ideas and direction to pick your topics.

• SEO research

After you have some direction with the topics, you need to conduct keyword or SEO research to find out the search volume around the keywords that you would be using in the topic picked by you. A good way to begin keyword research can be to write down some questions that your users might have as per their goals. You can then conduct research manually around these topics to see how many of them are asking the same question. There is also the option of using third-party tools for SEO research.

2. Ideation  

Once you have come up with the keywords that you want to target, it is time to begin brainstorming content ideas. One of the best models through which you can organize your content is topic clusters. Here, you can create a long-form, comprehensive pillar page that is based on a keyword that will link to content created by you on related subtopics. 

Brainstorming becomes easier with this model because you will have a structure to follow. The central keyword picked by you can be used to create a pillar content piece that explores the topic in-depth. Then, shorter pieces of content can be created to help your audience dive deeper into the topic and target long-tail keywords.

3. Writing  

Once you have your topics and keywords, it’s time to begin with the writing process. When you write, you need to keep the following points in view:

• You need to write to your buyer persona. For this, use their language and humor to develop a piece that relates.
• Use the right titles, meta descriptions, and supporting teasers to attract your audience. 
• Try to create something unique with your content. You can use a unique writing style or cite new research to emphasize your points.
• Always stick to one idea and make it uniform throughout your content. Do not confuse your readers by changing courses during writing.
• Be concise and clear in what you want to communicate.
• Stay true to your voice.

4. Editing  

Editing is a very important step of the process. You might think that you have written the most perfect piece of content but you should always look out for bottlenecks or content gaps in your piece. How you want to edit depends on your choice. But there are a few points that you should always keep in mind when you edit, like usage of active voice, clear language, short sentences, and ample whitespace.

5. Uploading  

Once your content is ready after all the strategy and editing, you will need to put it up somewhere for the audience to read. A content management system is a software that can be used. It hosts digital content and lets you display it on your website or anywhere else on the web. The advantage of using a CMS is that it connects all your content and stores it in one place. So, linking to a landing page in your blog becomes quite easy. The system also makes analyzing the results of all the content you created for a specific campaign easier.

6. Publishing  

This part might seem extremely simple and you might think why need an explanation on something as simple as hitting the publish button. But, we want to emphasize on the fact that publishing at the best times can maximize the impact of your content. 

When you are just starting out, clicking on publish right away might not impact your audience much. But if you have a schedule, like publishing posts every Tuesday, then your audience expects one on Tuesdays. A social media scheduling tool can help you set a publishing schedule and automate it.

7. Promoting content

After going through all the above mentioned steps, it is finally time to promote the content created by you. This can be done through multiple mediums like email marketing, social media, and even PPC ads, or else you can use different content marketing tools like content syndication to leverage your content assets and ensure the content you publish for your audience is useful, interesting, and relevant.

When you promote your content to grow your business, you need to consider the channels your audience is most active on. It can be Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. There is also the option of collaborating with influencers or other brands that will help you promote your content and reach more audience.

Types of Content That You Can Create

Content can come in different forms. It can simply be a piece of writing, or audio, video, and an image. Here are some common content types that you will find in marketing:

• Blogs
• Articles
• Emails
• Social media posts
• Infographics
• Podcast
• Audiobooks
• Animations

These are the types of content that can be created. Now we will dig deeper into how digital content creation can be done from different viewpoints. It can be content for SEO and content for social media.

Social media content creation

It is known that social media posts have a shorter lifespan than other content types, but they are still highly valuable. In fact, a huge number of marketers think that social media can drive customer engagement and lead to higher sales.

Social media posts can also bolster your other content marketing efforts or else you can use content marketing tools to strengthen your content creation. The most important thing to remember when you create social media content is that you have very little time to grab your reader’s attention. You need to make content that will take their attention in that limited amount of time. For tips on creating compelling video content, check out our guide on Creating Engaging Video Content for Social Media.

Here are a few tips to create engaging social media content:

• Use short-form content
• Make use of eye-catchy visuals or graphics
• Add relevant hashtags
• Utilize keywords in generating hashtags and title

SEO content creation

Keep this in mind, whenever you create content, you are making it for two audience groups: your customers and the search algorithms. The customers are the easier part to crack, the latter is a little more complex because it retrieves information and forms patterns. Modern day search engines like Google are very intricate. 

If you want to make your content rank highly, it is not easy, especially for high search volume keywords that signal and intent to make a purchase. You need to tailor your content in a way that includes keywords for every stage of the buying decision made by the user. Content that goes into blog posts and videos should be optimized for search so that users can easily find the information they are looking for. Here are the things you can keep in mind for cracking the complex modern search engines:

• Use high quality keywords in your content that matches the user search intent
• Write supporting content like blogs
• Use on-page tactics to increase rankings. For this, structure your content with HTML in which you can use headings and subheadings that search engines can easily recognize.

Read More: How To Post on Pinterest?

7 Free Tools to Make Your Content Creation Tasks Easy in 2024

We read about how a CMS can help you manage your content better. But if you need help with creating better content and making your publishing tasks easy, there are many content creation tools in the market.

1. Canva

This tool will let you create beautiful designs for any platform that you want. You can create everything from social ads to Facebook cover photos or infographics. The templates presented on Canva are aesthetically pleasing and can be customized in terms of colors, text, and images.

2. Vidyard  

If you want to implement your video marketing strategy at the best cost point, use Vidyard. It is a video hosting platform made for marketers. You can customize your videos here by adding text, overlays, transcribing, and CTA buttons, and it has SEO features too.

3. Giphy  

GIFs have replaced emojis as a completely routine form of communication, and therefore, has become a popular form of presenting content. GIPHY will let you search for millions of pre-created GIFs from their database. You can even create your own GIF with this app. Learn how to create a GIF from a video using step-by-step instructions to get started.

4. SurveyMonkey

Every good marketer knows the importance of creating surveys to get feedback from customers. SurveyMonkey is a leading platform to help with this very task. You can create and distribute survey forms with the help of this app.

5. Grammarly 

This is a very helpful tool for a layman as well as an advanced content writer. Grammarly lets you put your content through a thorough scanner that will detect all the errors in your language, grammar, sentence formations, and even detect plagiarism. This tool is a must have.

6. Ahrefs 

Need something for keywords too? We got you! Ahrefs is a full blown SEO software suite that includes tools for keywords research, rank tracking, link building, site audits, and competitor analysis.

Start Creating Content Today! 

Now that you are equipped with a beginner’s handbook to creating content that will perform, you must not wait and begin asap! The process of content creation is an interactive one and it pays off very well with your audience. 

Frequently Asked Questions