Built up a loyal community of 75,000 people across its website and social media channels.

For many businesses today, publishing content is a key part of building a brand and attracting customers. But how do you help ensure that what you produce is effective, and that your efforts don’t go unrewarded?

Founders Niamh Tallon and Mohammed Mahomed

Digital publishing company Her Sport – which was a 2021 FedEx Small Business Grant winner – has been producing high-quality content since its launch in 2019 and has built up a loyal community of 75,000 people across its website and social media channels.

Here, co-founder Niamh Tallon shares her lessons for creating content to engage an audience – whether it’s your main product or a marketing strategy.

There is a lot of online content competing for readers’ attention. So to make sure they are reading yours, it’s important to give them something they won’t find elsewhere. That could be simply finding a unique angle or distinctive tone of voice for your brand’s content. Or it could be content about a subject that isn’t being covered, as Her Sport does.

Over 40% of sports participants in Ireland are women, yet women’s sport only receives around 6% of sports media coverage. Globally, women’s sport only receives 4% of sports media coverage.

“The reason it was founded was because of the lack of coverage and visibility for girls and women in sport. We launched the website to fill that gap, and to give match and competition reports and share the stories of the athletes competing,” explains Tallon, adding that Her Sport is now preparing to expand its coverage to the UK.

Top tip

To create content that really engages your audience, put yourself in their shoes and think about what they would find useful, interesting or relatable. Telling human stories is often a more effective way of engaging people than telling people about products, for example.¹

Tallon and her team are committed to covering a wide-variety of women’s sports and female athletes. But for a resource-strapped small team, it can be a challenge to cover everything. That requires the Her Sport team to be creative and find efficient ways to report on stories.

Top tip

Think about other sources of content that you could look to. For example, you could consider guest contributors or relevant industry associations. Or look to your own customers for user-generated content.

If no one is reading or watching or listening to your content then the time spent producing it is wasted. Keep a record of data points such as number of views each piece of content receives and monitor the data over time, to get an idea of which topics and formats are most appealing to your audience.

Consistently delivering quality content that the audience values has been key to growing Her Sport, Tallon explains. “We analyse the performance of our content and look to what is performing well, so we can continue to learn and improve.”

Don’t just track the performance of content on your website; aim to do the same thing for the content you publish on social media channels. Bear in mind that different platforms will have slightly different metric for success; for example, the open rate is an important indicator of success for an email newsletter, whereas for Facebook, aim to keep an eye on metrics such as shares and comments, as well as the click-through rate to your own website. The Content Marketing Institute has a handy guide of which metrics you could look to track.

Working out what performs well on each social media platform often requires experimenting with different types of content. “We’ve had great success with Instagram takeovers which gives the audience insight into behind the scenes with teams and athletes, and allows them to ask questions and engage,” Tallon says.

Top tip

When it comes to content performance, what “good” looks like will vary from business to business, so it’s a good idea to define your overall goal.² Maybe your aim for your content strategy is simply to attract more people to your website. Or perhaps it’s to convert leads into paying subscribers.

For Her Sport, social media is a core part of the publishing strategy. The brand has a presence on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube – even LinkedIn. The largest following is on Instagram, where Her Sport has 45,000 followers, but it also has 12,000 on Twitter and almost 11,000 on TikTok.

As social media is an essential part of distributing content and growing the readership, it’s important to stay on top of the algorithm updates to each platform and tweak the strategy accordingly.

For example, Tallon says it has become increasingly tough to grow Her Sport’s following on Facebook, although the high click-through rate means that it’s still an important platform for the brand. “LinkedIn actually started to naturally and organically grow itself,” explains Tallon. “So we’re now shifting our focus more to LinkedIn than Facebook; that’s something that’s been good for us. You do have to be able to adjust as required because there’s always things changing.”

Top tip

Sometimes platforms’ algorithms change to prioritise certain types of content. For example, Instagram now prioritises Reels posts (videos) over image posts³, so it could be worth changing the type of content you make in order to reach new users there.