You’ve created a business strategy listing a summary of how you want to achieve the objectives and plans you have for your business. But it’s the content you create that will help you reach those goals – so how do you ensure you’re creating content that will actually help achieve them?
Who are you aiming content at?
The first step is to establish who you will be creating content for. You should already have most of this in place as your ideal client profile, but really laser in on your ideal clients, including:
- Hobbies
- Likes and dislikes
- Buzzwords or keywords
- Demographics (gender, age, income)
What content do they prefer?
Next you’ll want to establish what type of content they prefer. Do they like emails, blog posts or videos? Do they prefer printed newsletters or online ones? If they prefer social media posts – what ones are they liking and sharing? Are they more image based or text and links? Really drill down on this, as this will enable you to establish what type of content you’ll need to create.
What do you want your content to achieve?
Are you looking to create brand awareness or page likes and followers? Are you looking to get visitors to your website or increase the SEO on your pages? Do you want people to share your content with their social media friends and encourage people to check out your site? If this is the case, you’ll want snappy and attractive image-based creations for social media and informative, entertaining blog posts they’ll want to read and share.
Ideally you really need to include a range of both SEO-based content and attractive/informative content.
What content will you publish?
You can now brainstorm the type of content you want to create, based on what content your ideal target share and what you want it to achieve. Will you be creating a series of blog posts, videos or emails? How about infographics, photographs and memes?
When will you publish them?
A crucial part in your strategy is to ascertain when you will be publishing content. Not only will this help maintain consistency on the different platforms, it also enables you to establish time needed. You can use this information to create a content schedule, clarifying what you will be creating and the timescale needed to complete it – making it super easy to both batch similar content creation together and establish how far in advance you can forward plan and schedule.
Creating content to match your business strategy really boils down to getting crystal clear on your overall objectives – and then establishing which type of content will best help you achieve that end goal.
How do you plan out your content? Do you have a clear idea of your overall objectives or do you tend to go with what’s popular at any given day? How far in advance do you plan and schedule your content? Why not share your thoughts on content creation in the comments box below.
Images © Tananchka, bevangoldswain & vetkit/Dollar Photo Club
