One of the central principles of content marketing is that content should be helpful to readers. In fact, the Content Marketing Institute describes content marketing as “providing truly relevant and useful content to your prospects and customers to help them solve their issues.”
With this in mind, it’s not surprising that how-to content has become an increasingly popular way for marketers to provide real value to current and potential consumers. If you’ve been thinking about creating instructional content for your brand but didn’t know where to begin, we can help.
Why It Works
What makes how-to content such a powerful tool for marketers? A number of factors contribute to its value:
- Establishes Credibility and Authority: When you expertly address challenges and provide solutions, you’re boosting your brand’s authority in a big way. If your how-to content is more detailed and easy to follow than the competition’s content, you’ll score even bigger wins in terms of clicks and SEO.
- Builds Customer Loyalty: Giving your customers what they need is an easy way to earn loyalty. Not only does good how-to content help you lure new customers, it also helps retain your current ones.
- Flexibility: There are countless ways to create how-to content. You can put together videos, write detailed articles, create Pinterest pins or develop instructions that accompany a series of images. No matter what type of products or services your business offers, you can probably write how-to content for them.
- Strong Demand: “How-to” searches are popular. Really popular. According to Google, the number of searches for how-to content on YouTube grew by 70 percent in 2015. In that same year, users in North America viewed a whopping 100 million hours of how-to videos online. That’s a lot of learning!
A How-to Guide for Creating How-to Content
It’s normal to feel intimidated if you’ve never written a guide or tutorial before. However, instructional content is surprisingly easy to create. Here are a few steps you can follow to ensure you’re on the right track.
1. Identify A Common Problem Or Task
As the goal of how-to content is to share your knowledge and expertise with your audience, your first step should be to choose a topic that relates to your business and is relevant to your potential customers. Ensure your task is something that’s feasible for consumers in your market – you’ll get fewer clicks on a tutorial for work that’s best left to specialists or professionals. Spare parts website Repair Clinic provides some great examples of useful how-to content that solves readers’ most common appliance-repair issues. This website incorporates how-to guides into their navigation and site search, so users never have trouble finding the right guide for their problem.
2. Create The Title
Your headline should be simple, but it should also clearly describe the task or problem being explained in a single sentence. For a bit of inspiration, check out Home Depot‘s DIY guides – their titles are accurate and concise, yet descriptive.
3. Break Down The Task Into Steps
This part of the process is similar to writing an outline for an article. You’ll need to divide the process you’re describing into a series of actions. If you’re having trouble breaking the task down into steps, it’s often helpful to actually perform the task yourself. When you look at the process from the perspective of your readers, it can be much easier to separate the work into logical steps.
4. Write The Content
Once you have your outline complete, you can move forward with writing your how-to content. Start with a short introduction that entices readers to keep reading, and then describe each step of your process. You don’t need to get overly creative with your wording – simple, direct language works best in instructional content.
5. Don’t Forget About Visuals
Photos or illustrations help make instructional content easier to follow, so add as many visuals as you can. Some processes are best demonstrated in a video – you can experiment with different formats to see which works best for your topics.
Engage, Entertain and Educate
There’s no better time than now to begin adding how-to content to your content marketing toolbox. Content marketing isn’t just about entertainment – it’s about offering useful information in an engaging manner. Try offering your readers some helpful how-to content and start reaping the benefits right away.