The key to attracting readers to your content and getting them to click through

Even if your SaaS or health-tech company has a deep bench of marketing staff and content marketing managers, there is one area where I find even the most sophisticated marketing teams still struggle: coming up with strong ideas for content that will actually attract readers.

In some cases, the actual content idea a company generates is flawed, while other times the marketing staff frames the idea in a way that is not attractive to readers.

Whatever the case is, as an outsider and reader advocate, I have a perspective that enables me to generate strong ideas and frame them so that readers will actually read your content.

The principle I apply in doing so is quite simple: your ideas and your framing of them must offer something of value to a specific audience.

This may seem like obvious advice, but I find that the above approach isn’t how many companies come up with content ideas. Instead, they often start in one of these ways:

• We want to say . . .

• We need to get the message out that . . .

• Let’s position ourselves as thought leaders in this space by saying . . .

These approaches don’t put the reader first; they’re about what you want and not what the reader actually cares about, which is his or her problems.

Turning a bad content idea into a great one

As an example, imagine a health-tech company that wants to write about health equity and how their technology helps address it. The company frames their content headline this way:

• The Pursuit of Health Equity: How Technology Addresses Barriers to Care.

I’m sure you can see what’s wrong with this headline: it’s not talking to anyone. It’s not offering a specific reader something of value. It’s instead a bunch of abstract ideas, and it seems to be offering academic information, rather than help.

The reader doesn’t want mere information — they want information that will either solve their specific problems or enable them to achieve certain goals.

Now, it may be that the above hypothetical piece would contain information that the reader could apply to their situation. But we don’t want our readers having to make inferences or do the mental work of applying our ideas to their situations. We should be doing that work for them.

So, how might the above headline be re-written to attract a specific reader and offer that reader something of value? Here’s one possible way to re-write it:

• The Simple Approach Hospitals Can Take to Improve Access to Care

This headline is a step in the right direction, but we can still do better. Often, we strengthen a headline by making the value of the offer more specific.

For example, if the below is true, it would make the headline even more compelling to a reader:

• How Hospitals Can Reduce Costs, Increase Health Equity, and Improve Outcomes With One Simple Change

Some reader offers are stronger than others

In designing your content idea/offer to the reader, you should consider that strong offers are simple and easy to implement while bad offers involve a lot of steps and aggravation. For example, while the below headline is making an offer to the reader, it’s not a great offer:

• Seven Best Practices You Can Implement to Improve Health Equity at your Hospital

This headline is offering value, but what it’s describing sounds like it would be a pain. Which would you rather do to achieve a desired outcome? A seven-step process? Or one simple change?

Of course, as you work to craft better offers to readers, you’ll want to craft the strongest possible offer without misrepresenting your solution.

Need help coming up with and framing strong content ideas?

Feel free to contact me here if you’d like to learn more about my process for helping clients develop and frame a slate of compelling content ideas.