Many businesses often wonder what content to publish as part of their digital marketing strategy. This is especially the case when you doubt its purpose or even effectiveness when there’s not much engagement from your audience. However, content creation needn’t be so difficult – if you research and plan your content strategy, you’ll be pushing out content that fits with your brand and its audience in no time.
In today’s world, all businesses are publisher’s in their own right. Every business that occupies the digital space, needs to include creating content in its PR and Marketing strategy. Finding and engaging online with your target audience starts with content; it’s the backbone of inbound marketing. A form of marketing that attracts customers by tailoring content and experience to them.
The three key things you’ll want to research to get started with your content creation are: your ideal audience, what others in your industry are doing (including market leaders), and any brands you admire from other industries. To really engage and connect with your ideal clients, you need to know and understand your audience. Whilst looking at others in your industry – and aspirational brands – helps you identify what others are doing that works, or doesn’t work.
Think about why you’re publishing your content. What do you want it to achieve? You can have multiple reasons why, as these will start to form the strategy behind your content and establish its purpose. Get the most out of your reasons why by turning them into SMART objectives. Make your objectives specific, define exactly what you want to achieve and how you will measure whether it’s been a success. It needs to be relevant and time-based – which means you need to set a time frame to reach your goal.
This may seem like one of the hardest parts, deciding on what type of content to publish. The biggest piece of advice I can give you here is: don’t try to do too much. Select a few content types that suit your brand and be known for the go-to source for that type of content.
Think about what you want your content to do. Should it educate your audience? Entertain or inspire them? Or is its purpose to convince them to buy your service or product? Not all content should be created for the sole purpose of encouraging sales. Sometimes, content that builds brand awareness is what you need. After all attracting buyers to your business is a marathon, not a sprint.
Reading, listening and watching are the main ways people consume content. Ideally, you’ll want to publish your content in different formats to cover the different ways people consume content.
The simplest approach to establishing the topic ideas for your content is to ask three questions: What interests your target audience? Think of the problems your clients have that you solve. Can you offer advice and guidance that enhances your product or service offering? Secondly, what do you feel credible talking about? What topics are you knowledgeable about that are also relevant to your business?
And finally, is there anything happening in the news that is relevant to your industry or business? Can you help your clients navigate a news topic or social situation that relates to your business? Use these questions to create a list of topics you can use to create your content.
Finding content that fits your brand, its ideal clients and is something you can easily create isn’t as difficult to do as you might think. Break down the process and you’ll have a wealth of ideas to use.
This article was first published in the Suffolk Free Press, Thursday 13 May 2021.
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