creating effective content for niche markets

It’s no secret that consumers are digesting more content today than ever before. Through our phones, everyone has access to Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, podcasts, blogs, and several other forms of media at all times. Content drives our lives, and businesses that choose to ignore the trend will indeed be left in the wake of brands that capitalize on the opportunity to engage with their customers through multiple channels of online content.

As brands look to create content that engages their audience, they have to solve an everpresent mystery: What does good content look like? Because of the abundance of industries and niches, it’s nearly impossible to create a standard that is effective for everyone. Marketing agencies pigeonhole themselves into specific sectors, and they are unable to scale outside of their niche.

Verblio is designing a solution to the problem. By bringing in the best writers across several industries, they have created an agency that can handle content creation for clients that span a spectrum of niches.

Laura Smous, the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Verblio, recently joined an episode of the Press Play Podcast to discuss how agencies can create quality content for their clients, no matter the industry.

What Does Good Content Look Like?

For an agency, an essential factor in creating premium content is meeting the client’s expectations. You must know what the client’s required outcome is, or you will struggle to meet their needs. For example, if a customer asks for a blog post, they could mean several different things. Are they looking for 300 words or 3,000? Do they want industry-specific content or something that appeals to a broader audience?

“Understanding what will make [your client] feel like they have hit their desired outcome is something that you have to do upfront…And then that ties closely then to your end audience as well, which is just making sure you spen the time to understand who your customers customers are, and making sure that they understand them as well.” (6:03)

For many years, content has been treated as a pay-per-pound service. Video creation is billed according to the video length. Blogs are billed by word count. Unfortunately, this value system does not align with the actual value of content. Five-minute videos are not necessarily more valuable than 45-second videos, and there are times that 500-word blogs outperform 2,000-word blogs.

Agencies must understand what the niche they are targeting prefers. Do they prioritize shorter content above long-form? Are they partial to explainer content or narrative-style pieces? What about top-10 lists? When you nail down answers to these questions, you are better equipped to create content that appeals to your target audience.

“If you know that you have something really special and you’ve got that niche and you have the ability to pull it off and speak to that audience, you are much, much more likely to rank faster by creating this very niche-specific content around a focused segment.” (21:24)

As you begin to focus on different content styles according to the niche, you must measure the content’s success. Commonly, we measure the success of a blog, video, podcast, or post by the traffic it obtains. While traffic is crucial to measuring success, you must also factor in how your audience engages with the content. Often, this comes from looking at a collection of quality content rather than a single piece.

“You want your content library as a whole performing for your business. So, you need page-level performance to get there, but it’s really over time, I think, the collection of things that established credibility that are going to be what sustains you.” (22:54)

When You Shouldn’t Make New Content

While you now know what it takes to create phenomenal content, it’s unrealistic to think that everything you make will be a success. We’re humans, and we miss the mark sometimes. So what do you do with those pieces of content?

Sometimes it’s more important to refresh old content than it is to create new media. When a piece underperforms from what you expect, go back through it and consider why it might have disappointed with its performance. Often, shortening the content or refreshing it with a new format is exactly what it needs to perform to its expectations.

“It may not always make sense to sell someone more content. It may make sense for them to look at a few categories of pieces that have performed well and are decaying, or pieces that should have hit the mark but didn’t, and actually refresh those, which like I said, in many cases may mean less content.” (8:00)

How are you creating content for different industries and niches?