Creating great content is more than just putting words on a page. It’s about making an impact on your audience and enhancing your marketing strategies.
In this article you will find the 15 ultimate characteristics of great content to consider in 2024.
And how Writitude can help you to get them right. Automatically.
1. High Quality
High-quality content is accurate though nuanced, reliable, and well-researched. It builds trust and persuades audiences in the most scalable way.
What it does
Quality content can influence minds, change opinions, and drive action. It’s also crucial for SEO. Search engines prioritize original and relevant content, boosting your visibility and traffic.
Would we stop our description of what high-quality content is here, it wouldn’t be very nuanced, though.
How it can be automated
Text quality is different for different channels. And even for different companies. Brand’s unique tone of voice and style will distinguish a text in a range of others.
Thankfully, nowadays all the high-quality text’s parameters can be defined and automated.
Think
- Verbs to nouns and adjectives ratio
- Limiting the use of pronouns and transition words
Compliance with inclusivity guidelines
The use of metaphors
and many more
2. Readability
Readability is key. When content is easy to read, it enhances user experience and increases engagement.
Use simple language, break up text with paragraphs and bullet points, and use subheadings. This makes your content more digestible and appealing.
How it can be automated
In smart writing environments like Writitude you can also use different automated rules to enhance readability.
- Forbid noun strings (you can indicate the maximum allowed length of noun strings
Limiting or requiring maximum number of words or sentences in a document (For example, your Instagram publications may all be just three sentences expressing one thought.)
Limiting the use of acronyms
Spell out numbers
Forbidding adjacent prepositions and many more
3. Use an Outline
An outline is your roadmap. It helps you organize thoughts, structure ideas logically, and ensure you cover all points.
Whether you’re writing a blog post, article, or guide, an outline makes the process smoother and more efficient.
Moreover, if you’re writing keeping SEO in mind, composing better outline that goes deeper in discussing the topic, helps to beat your competitors.
4. Craft a Compelling Headline
Your headline is the first thing people see. A compelling headline grabs attention and promises value.
Spend time crafting a headline that intrigues and entices readers to click through and read more.
What helps to make your headline stand out
- Use numbers, they drive engagements up
- Include keywords
- Use power words (if they go in line with a brand’s tone of voice))
- Use Google’s free SERP simulator to see how your title is going to look on a search page
5. Hook Readers With an Interesting Intro
Many experiences writers will tell you that writing an intro with time becomes sort of a form of art.
That’s why many of them write intro in the very end, after an article is already written. Or drastically rewrite it.
Another great tip is to start talking about the topic you need an intro for to your closest friend. Those first phrases could be the thing that you’re looking for.
Your introduction should hook readers. Start with a powerful statement, fascinating fact, relatable story, or provocative question. Spark curiosity, evoke emotion, or create a connection to compel the reader to continue.
How it can be automated
Definitely try also including some emotionality-related brand voice rules, when automating your guide in Writitude. For example:
- Balance negative emotions with positivity
- Limit overall emotionality of the text
- Require high levels of overall emotionality of the text ..and many more
6. Relevance
“Relevance” in case of texts can mean a lot of things. It can be looked at in the context of your audience, as well as in context of your text’s format or tone. In one word, your text must “know” the crowd it came to “talk” to.
Your content must align with your audience’s interests, needs, and preferences.
Understand who your audience is and tailor your content to meet their needs. If your content isn’t relevant, it won’t matter how well-written it is.
From the other hand, if your content is not written in the tone of voice your audience understands, it won’t be read either.
We know, for example, that such professional audience as engineers wouldn’t appreciate an expert’s article with too much of an extravagant elaborateness.
Their piece of cake is a text that is step-by-step and straight to the point. It may not be too much fun but focus here is on efficiency (in Writitude we’ve even compiled an automatic style and tone guide especially for them — Specialist Talk).
But would you write to the same people an ad, that would be selling them chocolate, completely other set of factors would be emphasised — demographics, their preferences, relationship with healthy lifestyle, sweets consumption, etc.
7. Valuable Information
Reading takes valuable time. And for a reader’s time you have to give something valuable back. Every piece of content should offer value.
It can be new information, unique insights, practical tips, or entertainment. It can be somebody’s expertise and experience.
The more value you provide, the more likely your audience will engage, share, and return for more.
Actually, it could be one of the most important characteristics, if have to name a few.
To get valuable information for your article you can
- interview a company’s expert on the topic
- dig some interesting data on the topic, using such portals like Statista
- use scientific research to enrich insights on the topic
Remember, that graphs and charts always look good in your article.
8. Engagement
Engaging content captures and retains attention. It encourages interaction through comments, shares, and likes.
Use storytelling, compelling visuals, and clear messages to make your content captivating and memorable.
For each channel it can be something different. Research your audience and their preferences to base your choice of the content for publishing on data.
For example, Hootsite surveyed 6,000+ consumers to answer the biggest questions marketers have about what people actually want from brands on social media.
As you see, people are very different — some will engage better with entertainment, some need to learn something new, and some need for the content to be a shocker.
Researching and knowing your audience well puts you in a better position when your aim is to win their emotional involvement with your content.
9. Originality
Create unique and original content. This helps you stand out and establish a distinctive brand voice. Original content engages audiences and improves SEO.
Search engines reward unique, high-quality content with higher rankings.
Use free plagiarism detector to see how your content ir ranked for plagiarism and uniqueness. Just to mention, this article ranks 100% percent for uniqueness!
10. Alignment with marketing goals
What is the goal of your text? Is it unhurried building of relationships? Or maybe you are selling something asap?
Ensure your content aligns with your marketing goals. If your goal is to increase brand awareness, highlight your unique selling points.
If it’s to boost sales, focus on demonstrating the value and benefits of your products or services.
How it can be automated
When it comes to automation, you can experiment with brand voice and style guidelines rules like
- Require/ forbid writing about the company or brand in the first person
- Forbid/ require direct address to the audience
- Control/ forbid/ require the use of questions in text
- Forbid/ require urgent-sounding CTAs
Another great functionality to use in automation tools is glossaries or forbidden and required words.
Require certain words for certain channels or type of texts. And your AI-generated drafts, as well as you writers, will be guided by their semantic field into writing your texts in a certain way.
11. Targeted to the audience
Tailor your content to your target audience’s demographics, interests, and preferences. This ensures your content resonates and engages them.
Know your audience’s age, gender, location, and interests to create relevant content. Know where they hang out. Nowadays, there are many great tools that can search for and find hidden gems, like where your audience can be found.
And we’re not just talking about demographics and social media where they like to consume content, but also other websites that can be relevant to them.
The more you know, the better you are equipped to communicate to them.
12. Consistency
“Just maintain a consistent tone of voice, style, and message across all content formats and channels” is easy to say. But how to implement it?
Yes, consistency helps build a strong brand identity and ensures your audience can easily recognize and relate to your brand. But what if you have a distributed team of writers who need to follow the same guidelines?
Again, brand voice and style guidelines automation comes in handy. Not only in ensures new content writers’ and copywriters’ onboarding with one click.
You can always be sure that your writing guidelines are up to date, experiment with them, test rules on your sample texts, analyze different texts, and update guidelines at your will.
13. Actionable Tips
Include actionable tips. Actually, this point is very close to the seventh one (Content has to bring value). But this is type of value you can act on and immediately use.
Tips provide clear direction and practical advice, enhancing reader understanding and engagement. Actionable tips also establish your credibility and improve SEO performance.
Tips cannot be always directly tied to the product you’re selling — don’t make it all about you. Having a broader outlook gives more credibility to what you’re writing about.
As much as we would love to talk only about Writitude being an amazing tool for communications, PR experts and copywriters, we know first-hand, that no tool can replace a passionate (about their craft), knowledgeable writer.
14. Measurable Results
Use data to refine your content strategy and achieve your business goals. Track and measure the effectiveness of your content.
This helps you understand what resonates with your audience and drives engagement.
Tracking performance may take many forms. From Google Analytics that will require cookies and cookie policy, to privacy-conscious tools like Umami.
These could be powerful SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs, as well as — may be less comprehensive, but definitely more user-friendly for non-SEO content writers — Mangools and Keyword Insights.
15. Shareability
Create great content that not only brings value but is also easy to share. Highly shareable content increases visibility and reach.
Use compelling visuals, clear messages, and calls to action to encourage sharing. What good is from your text if no one knows about it?!
Great content in 2024 is high-quality, readable, relevant, valuable, engaging, and original. It aligns with marketing goals, targets the audience, maintains tone and style consistency, includes actionable tips, and is shareable.
Gosh, that’s a lot! Luckily, nowadays, with Writitude, all these parameters can be automated. So, that you can concentrate on creativity.
By focusing on these characteristics, you can create content that makes an impact and enhances your marketing strategies!
Try Writitude for free here.
