(1) The Character of the Target Audience: No communication is effective if you do not keep your particular audience in mind while designing it. You also have to understand the characteristics and behavior of the members of your particular audience, like their age group, gender, geographical location, their likes and dislikes, their culture and beliefs as well as their online behavior (if possible).

(2) Tonality and Purpose: Next thing to keep in mind is the purpose of your content. What do you want ‘your’ content to do? Do you want to inform your audience about something? Do you want to persuade your audience to take a particular step through your content, like say buy something, inoculate their children against polio or register for a forum, and so on? Or do you simply want to entertain your audience?  The tone of the content should complement your purpose of communication. However, it has been found that a friendly, conversational tone is suitable for most purposes.

(3) Choice of Words and Articulation: Right words articulated in the right context and in the right tone are very important for the content to be effective. Balance is the key here. Overdoing anything can be very harmful for the content.

(4) Structure: A simple structure makes it easier for your audience to grasp your content. You may follow the 4Ws and 1H structure to keep things uncomplicated. The 4Ws stand for ‘What’, ‘Why’, ‘When’ and ‘Where’ while the H stands for ‘How’. Answering these questions would roughly cover the topic from all angles.

(5) Visual Accompaniment: Since a picture always attracts more attention than a written text, always put a relevant picture along with your written content. And your content will never go unnoticed.

The ecosystem of Social with its different components like the platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on), the users who use the platforms, the content or the communication and the intelligence and analytical tools is very developed.

In the ecosystem of Social, today we can say that the ecosystem of Analytics is the most developed and is evolving constantly to become better and better. Analytics without doubt gives us an understanding of the success of the campaign running on the platforms and the ROI. To the layman the most recognizable sign of a content being accepted is the use of “like” or “share”. Besides “like” and “share” each and every channel provides a set of statistics independently to the publisher of content as to how the campaign is going. On top of that, there is a plethora of tools to help us demystify the acceptability of the content at the granular level.

There are social listening and analytics tools which provide a general perspective on how the communication is performing overall across channels. There are analytical tools and again some more analytical tools. The situation is such that the ecosystem of intelligence and analytics seems to be more developed than the ecosystem of the social as a whole.

But the important question here is that can intelligent analytics ever replace the need for generating the right content? Content still remains and will remain the basis for engagement with customers. Content is still the King.

1) Define the Topic: This is the first step to a great blog. Establish your topic and its scope properly at the beginning of the blog to create the right expectations in the mind of the readers. Then fulfill those expectations or surpass them but never let them down.

2) Contextualize with 4Ws and 1H: Explore your topic from all angles by following the simple structure of 4Ws and 1H. The 4Ws stand for ‘What’, ‘Why’, ‘Where’ and ‘When’, while the 1H stands for ‘How’. Answering these questions would put the topic in its proper context and make the readers grasp the topic well.

3) Tell a Story: People love to hear stories. Personalize your content with human touches and emotions. Your blog should touch your readers’ hearts. A blog that tells a story is always more interesting to read than a blog which is a dry statement of facts.

4) Design Roadmap: Design a compact structure for your blog. Haphazardly written, sloppy lines, unnecessary digressions or length make blogs uninteresting. Blogs are meant to be read fast. Help your readers by putting sub-topics. Be to the point and concise.

5) Conclude with an Invigorating PoV: The conclusion of your blog should reflect your unique point of view about the topic. This gives your blog its unique flavor. Simply repeating what others say or following run-of-the-mill trends will make your blog very ordinary. Blogs become great when you lend your unique perspectives to them.

Nowadays every company, organization or institution has a website. It is the minimum requirement. This is so because technological advancements like availability of internet everywhere and the advent of mobile phones with net connections has changed our behavior of searching for information. For example, if you wish to enroll your son into a school, the first thing you will do is to search for the names of good schools in your town or city. Even if you know the names of the schools, you would visit the websites of those schools one by one to gather authentic information about them. Next you will search for opinions of students or parents of students studying in a particular school, search for blogs about the school, and go through the news available about that school in the media and so on. Then you will compare the information gathered about different schools and decide to get your son admitted into a particular school.

This behavior is true while buying things too, be it a house, a car, an electronic gadget or even clothes. The same is true before availing services too like buying air or rail tickets, booking hotels, going to a restaurant, hiring a music teacher, looking for a dentist and what not.

So you can understand that having good content and helpful creative is very important nowadays to attract the right customers. If a company does not have any digital property, like a website, blogs about it, social pages, and so on, people will not be able to find out or know about that company and its products and services. The more a company has digital content uploaded on the net, the more are its chances of being found out by prospective customers. Again bad content can make customers go away. So good digital content with interesting creative help companies to attract customers and grow.

There is a view current nowadays that content is not the king anymore.  However as things stand today content is much more than just being a king. It is at the crux of all online marketing (for products and services available both online and offline) as well as all online commerce.

Content acts as a bridge. Content provides shape to the abstract ideas and aspirations of customers captured through psychographics. It understands and expresses the untold hidden needs and desires of the consumers and leads them to the product or service like a true friend, philosopher or guide.

The usual structure of marketing content, the popular AIDA (an acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action) structure does nothing more than tap the innate desires and wishes of ordinary people to look, feel or behave in a particular way at the subconscious level and articulate them in a customer friendly language.

Actually, content does exactly what a savvy salesman does. The only difference is that the salesman here does not have the glib tongue. Content earns your trust by talking to you like a true friend, guiding you to buy just the thing you need, comparing the feature benefits and value delivery promises of different products and services, giving you an expert’s opinion, helping you to make up your mind. Again, User Generated Content (UGC) like feedback and product reviews by customers acts as the online version of the highly reliable word of mouth.

Thus in the context of web and advertising, content and commerce are still inseparable. Whenever content fulfils the aspiration of the customer, commerce takes place.