You might not know this but today, Sept. 18, is a national holiday to remember: National Cheeseburger Day. We know, we know, everyday now has an arbitrary national holiday that has little to offer outside of free food or funny tweets. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth celebrating.
For our own National Cheeseburger Day celebration, we took a look at what makes a great burger. From a perfectly toasted bun to secret sauces, there is a lot that goes into creating the perfect staple of American food. And as content marketers, we could relate to trying to find the perfect mixture of ingredients and techniques to create something that people love.
In content marketing, much like cooking, there is an overwhelming amount of options for composing content or content strategies. It can feel like there are too many cooks in the kitchen, countless ingredients to choose from, or numerous recipes to follow that it becomes impossible to form a cohesive content plan.
So to help you break down the necessities and create captivating content, we gathered four tips for constructing delicious content inspired by—you guessed it—cheeseburgers.
Toasted to Perfection
Similar to the bun on a burger, the introduction and conclusion to your content supports the meat of your message. Set yourself up for success with attention grabbing, empathetic introductions and conclusions to drive your point home. While supporting the content on the page, the introduction and conclusion sections are also great opportunities to support your business as a whole. Mentioning your experience, products, or services help highlight your expertise and reinforce your credibility.
Even more important, no one likes a soggy bun! That’s why the best chef’s place the lettuce directly underneath the patty—it keeps the juices from seeping into the bun. Keep your content clean and clear and by writing distinct section headers. This will help structure your content in an easily digestible way and make sure your thoughts are well-organized.
Grade-A Beef
Just like a burger, content without meat (or protein for our vegetarian and vegan readers) just doesn’t cut it. Your content needs to be worth your audience’s time or else it won’t produce results. The secret to noteworthy, memorable content is offering hearty advice to your readers in the form of listicles, steps, tips, or guides.
One of the best ways to create valuable content is to answer common questions your audience might have and pack your answers with statistics, quotes, and anecdotes that validate your point of view. This ensures that your audience can find a solution to their problems with your content. And because you’re answering a specific, commonly asked question, this strategy could also help improve your ranking in voice search results.
The Right Amount of Crunch
Burgers are commonly found in grills and restaurants across the country, so to keep surprising guests with new inventions, Chef’s often experiment with different food textures. The same should be done with your content marketing. As content marketers ourselves, we know that reading several blog posts each day can get boring, so why should we put our audiences through that? We need to surprise them with something different.
Create crunchy content moments of your own by producing a mix of blog posts, podcasts, videos, case studies, and more. The variety helps break up any monotony in your current content strategy and entices audiences with new formats. In fact, four times as many customers would rather watch a product video than read about it, according to Animoto. And in addition, your mix of content creates cross-linking opportunities that will potentially boost your search rankings or traffic.
Secret Sauce
A good sauce is the difference between a great burger and an excellent one. It is one of the only burger ingredients that can completely change the flavor of each bite. In terms of content, we believe that the difference between great and excellent content is an oft-talked about, yet little utilized tactic: SEO.
Add search engine flavor to your content with SEO strategies like internal linking and optimized meta descriptions, tags, and headers. But before you start jam packing your content with keywords and links, make sure your internal linking fits naturally and has keyword optimized anchor text. And because engagement and external linking is an increasingly large factor in search rankings, add click to tweets and other easy-to-share links that make it simple for readers to circulate your content.
Need More Ingredients for Your Content Marketing Recipe?
If you’re starving for more content marketing tips, learn how to master the perfect content marketing recipe with these 30 savory and sweet content ingredients.
