08/19/2022
Let’s talk about content creation for your personal or company brand. A well-organized strategy can make the difference between growing engagement and quality branding, and seeing those results that are less than thrilling. Consider these steps:
1. Define your objective - What are you trying to achieve? Any content you create should have a clear call to action. Tip: not every call to action should be “buy our product or service”. Consider using the 80/20 rule, where 80% of your content efforts are geared toward branding and providing free, quality content, and only about 20% of efforts are toward direct marketing and sales.
2. Consider your audience - Do you have defined audience segments and/or user personas to hear your content toward? If not, you may be wasting time creating content that doesn’t resonate with the target audience you’re trying to reach. Understanding your audience, such as their values, stage of life, income, barriers, and how you can solve their problems, is a great way to maximize the efficiency of your content.
3. Tell your brand story - Whether you’re emphasizing your company brand story, or building your personal authority in your area of expertise, it’s extremely important that your content tells a compelling story. Consider problems, solutions, and how you or your company have brought real success in order to develop trusting, genuine interest.
4. Define your roll-out strategy - Once you know what you want to create, you need a plan for how you will create it and where it will go. Who will design the content? What tools will be used? Will you create a simple post, a video, a blog article, or be clever and turn once piece of content into multiple mediums? What platforms will be most effective to reach your target audience? Consider creating a 30-day content calendar to plan your content ahead and have strategic campaign plans in place before you’re ready to launch the content.
5. Measure your results - This step is too often overlooked, and is so important when it comes to improving the performance of your content. Developing a solid presence using content takes time, and using analytics tools (such as Hootsuite to measure social media performance, or on-platform tools) allows you to see which pieces are working and which are not. Get rid of things that aren’t working and duplicate things that are.
Comment your thoughts or questions below.
