Just as important as deciding ‘what’ content to create, is stepping back to consider ‘why’ and ‘how’ this will help your business right now. Here’s a quick guide to sharpening up your strategy so your content is less finger-in-the-air and more on track with your business goals.
Keep the passion alive
All of your content (i.e. your assets, marketing materials, copy, images, etc.) will have one of these three elements at its core:
- Brand – who are you and how are you perceived by your customers?
- Passion – what topics are you and your audience passionate about?
- Product – what are you providing and what are you saying about it?
To start building your content strategy, try to marry the ‘Passion’ point with one of the other two elements. That way, the common emotional ground that connects you to your audience will underlie all your communications.
Pin down these fundamentals to find your ‘pillars’
Consider where you are with your business, and ask yourself:
1. What are my current objectives? Do I want to increase my audience size? Sell more event tickets? Sell more products?
2. Who will help me achieve that goal? Who am I trying to target?
3. What is my brand’s purpose?
Now establish four or five categories of content in response to the questions above. These will form the pillars that support your business – by strategically aligning your content to your objectives, goals and purpose.
That takes care of the ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘how’. Now for the ‘where’…
When planning your content calendar, mix things up. Spread the pillars across your various media platforms in a way that upholds your overarching brand message.
Finally, keep an eye on your core competitors and see if you can identify the pillars they’re trying to hit. Do you want to compete with theirs, or focus on the ones they’ve missed?
This article was inspired by one of our Zoom Dives with journalist and content creator, Kim Willis. Zoom Dives are deep-delving discussions between our founder, Carolyn Dailey and handpicked business experts from the creative world. You can listen to Carolyn’s and Kim’s full discussion here.
Fancy catching our next Zoom Dive, live? See our Events calendar and sign up for free. Meanwhile, feel free to plunder our Knowledge bank if you’d like to learn more about content marketing.