Content is king and here’s what you should know:
People want to learn before they buy and be educated instead of pitched.
As a coach, consultant, and business owner you need a constant stream of fresh content. However, this is one of the most challenging things that you will face. This is why you need a well thought out content marketing strategy. A system that is designed for planning content creation, distribution, and management.
There are 6 key factors to consider when creating your content strategy.
Produce High-Quality Content
Your audience expects a steady flow of high-quality content. If you post on your blog each week, your readers will be expecting it. If you send emails daily, your subscribers will be looking for those. If you publish new videos weekly, your viewers will be checking in to watch them.
All of your content, no matter where it’s published, needs to be interesting, unique, helpful, and informative in order for you to keep your audience engaged. It’s nearly impossible to create good content consistently without a content strategy in place that emphasizes your standards of quality.
Create Your Magnetic Message
Your overall strategy in content marketing should be to brand yourself as an expert or authority on a certain topic. In order to do this, your content needs to be relevant to that topic. Everything you publish must contribute to your brand story and show why you are the expert. It’s like fitting the pieces of a puzzle together, and it’s only possible to do this if you take the time to define the key message in your content strategy.
Set Goals and Key Metrics
Your content strategy helps you to set goals and determine whether or not you’ve reached them. How do you know if your content marketing is getting results? The only way to know is to create specific goals that are achievable and measurable, and then tailor your strategy to meeting those goals.
Your content marketing goals should be in direct alignment with your overall marketing goals. For example, your broader goals may include driving more visitors from your social media profiles to your website. That may mean that you need to set goals for creating more content that will be shared across your social media profiles.
Identify Your Audience
Part of developing a content strategy is to identify your target market. You need to know who you’re creating content for. Only then can you identify what kind of content they need to help them solve their problems.
A good content strategy will outline as much detail as possible about your target market. That includes demographics, pain points, hopes, dreams, preferences, learning styles, personality, etc. The more information you can use to paint a portrait of your typical customer, the better. Then you’ll be able to speak directly to that “person” when you’re creating content.
Avoid Getting Stuck
A solid content strategy helps you a great deal when you get stuck for ideas or if you have writer’s block. By including an idea bank and previously identifying sources of ideas and information, you can simply go to these sources when you don’t know what to write, or send your content creators there. This is one of the keys for becoming a “content creation machine”.
Know What Resources You’ll Need
As part of your strategy, think about the type of content you’ll create early on so you can assess what resources you need before you need them. For example, if video is part of your strategy, you need video creation and editing software or a video expert on your team. There may be areas where you need to outsource parts of your content creation.
Your content strategy should start with your audience and focus on the problem that you solve for them. As you begin producing and publishing content, pay attention to audience feedback and traffic metrics to help you decide how your strategy should be changed.
Try these 10 tips to create compelling content:
- Use an in-demand topic. Try using Google Trends to find out what’s popular.
- Do your research. Research your topic before you start creating.
- Identify your audience. Who is your target market? What do they like? What is the best way to reach them?
- Tell a story. Try to construct a beginning, middle, and end in whatever format you produce.
- Show up as the expert. Be credible.
- Be unique. Even if you are curating content, present it from your point of view.
- Be dynamic. Be as visual as possible to keep your audience engaged.
- Be personable. Keep your communication style as human as possible.
- Stimulate Conversation. Intriguing + Interesting = Memorable
- Check and double-check. Pay attention to grammatical errors. Always edit your work.
