The production and dissemination of compelling content has grown in significance throughout the growth of the internet. What began as a fun way for people to share information and opinions morphed into a key marketing and branding tool for the business world—and following the COVID-19 outbreak that drove companies online, it’s become essential.
In most cases, the goal of generating content is to achieve ROI, with the specific nature of the required value depending on the situation. Sellers will seek to push people towards their products, of course, while consultancies will attempt to demonstrate their niche expertise. Actually achieving that goal is much easier said than done, though.
This is particularly true when you’re targeting an audience that’s well-versed in the subject matter you’re addressing. Prospects will be far more discerning and able to notice when you make a misstep (getting something wrong, for instance, or just describing it poorly). They’ll also be much more critical of your presentation choices.
In this post, we’re going to look at four ways in which you can diversify your content to suit knowledgeable audiences, improving the quality and reaching more people. Let’s begin.
Collaborate with relevant experts
However good you make your content, and however influential your perspective may be, there’s always value in bringing in further opinions—and the internet allows you to source them quite easily (in principle). Think about how documentaries are made, and how myriad experts are brought in to lend weight to the conclusions reached. You can do something similar.
In the process, you can enjoy the other benefit of content collaboration: expanded reach. If you include someone’s comments in a piece of content, that person will be much more likely to want to share it with their online followers. You could team up with several other experts in your niche to produce an expansive piece of evergreen content, and it would prove useful for everyone.
When identifying possible collaborators, think carefully about recognition. If your audience members are knowledgeable, they’ll already have some industry authorities they respect (and some they don’t), so it’s vital that you make the right choices.
Nest details in collapsible sections
Most pieces of digital content are intended to have broad appeal. The goal is to be mentioned far and wide, showing up in response to as many Google searches as possible. This is why so much content is built around answering common queries. The basic process of looking up frequently-asked questions and using them as section headings is very effective.
It’s so effective, in fact, that you’ll often see it used in ways that are title-independent. Provided I’d reached the promised content, I could have used questions for my subheadings in this piece even though the title mentions “ways to diversity content.” The home office topic we touched upon earlier provides an easy example: this piece on home office optimization mentions “four easy ways” to improve productivity but couches the content in queries.
It’s also true, though, that going into too much detail can cause problems. People can have short attention spans, and waffling on about technicalities can lose them—but those technicalities are vital when you’re trying to impress more familiar audiences. How do you resolve that conundrum? One way is to nest the details.
By including the most in-depth analysis in expandable sections, you can allow each reader to decide how much (or how little) they want to learn. If they don’t care about a particular issue, or they already know what you have to say, they can skip over it and focus on something that is useful to them.
Use different formats as appropriate
If you’re feeling detached from the world, well, you’re not alone—in feeling that way, of course, or in general. Being stuck in a room for a long time inevitably saps morale, but don’t forget about the incredible technological tools at your disposal. By now, you’ve likely taken the common route of setting up a potent (if utilitarian) home office: barring myriad accessibility accessories and audio cables, you’ve achieved a smooth productivity environment. Are you taking advantage?
Well, if you’re just working on the same old content types, then you’re clearly not. You can do more. Assuming your laptop is vaguely recent and cost more than you’d pay for a sophisticated toaster, you have enough horsepower to produce audio, create animations, and even edit some high-quality high-resolution video. The multimedia approach is the way forward.
If you’ve never created those types of media before, then it’s going to take you a while to figure things out, but that’s fine. It doesn’t really matter where you start out: it matters where you end up. And since there are countless free guides and tutorials just a Google search away, it’s hardly as though you don’t have the resources you need to produce a video explainer.
Invite and fulfill content requests
Lastly, if you’re truly eager to create content that can satisfy a knowledgeable audience, why not simply ask people what they’re looking for? If you don’t know what your target prospects think of what you’re doing, you’ll have a really tough time meeting their preferences. Reach out via social media to ask them one simple question: what content would you really like to see?
Maybe there’s a particular industry-related question they’ve yet to see answered. Perhaps there’s a point in one of your existing pieces of content that could be massively expanded upon. You might even find that people would like a podcast version of a particular article. By simply delivering what they ask for, you can earn a lot of goodwill.
