3 things to know before you start creating content

You’re now reading a piece of content that teaches you to create better content, and this content is created by a guy who creates content for his clients. Sounds familiar? This is called inbound marketing, where businesses attract customers by creating content that gives value.

You and a lot of people like you want to create great content for whatever reason, be it expanding brand awareness, increasing organic search traffic, or improving conversion rates.

The question is, what makes great content great? Well, I suppose one blog isn’t going to be able to explain it all but keep reading if you want to understand why you should have a clear understanding of your audience’s wants, needs, and preferences in your pursuit to creating great content that provides great value to its viewers.

CONTENT CREATORS NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ADVERTISING AND BRANDED CONTENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Let me ask you a simple question – why do you use social media? I’ve asked this question from many people, and some of the most common answers I got were:

- To message people

- To entertain or to be entertained

- To upload pictures and videos of great memories

… amongst many similar responses.

Never have I heard anyone say: “To view Dialog or Coca Cola’s (or any other brand’s) latest ad”.

It is high time for marketers to realize that the future of marketing is less and less about advertising. Never expect your followers to share your ads on social media, because that’s just not going to work. Instead, understand the difference between advertising and branded content, and carry out your marketing activities with the following concept in mind:

As the diagram above illustrates, branded content is where advertising and content overlap – a mixture of both.

Another element to keep in mind before learning the importance of understanding your audience’s wants, needs, and preferences is “the purpose driven content for social channels framework”

The content you create can be placed into four main categories:

1. Conversations (highly shareable, low interest) – where you initiate conversations on social channels.

2. Viral content (highly shareable, high interest) – There is no guarantee that any piece of content will go viral, but you can try.

3. Announcements (low shareable, low interest) – where you try to promote and sell the products/services you offer.

4. Engaging content (high interest, low shareable) – content that keeps your audience engaged.

Here’s a diagram to give you a better understanding:

Now that you have a clear understanding of these concepts (which are very general), you can dive further into learning the importance of understanding your audience’s wants, needs, and preferences.

WHO IS YOUR READER/VIEWER?

All marketers and content creators want to captivate people, but who are these people? Your readers are real people with busy lives and problems to solve. Try to find out what concerns them, because knowing your audience well can take you a long way in creating the sort of content that matters the most to them. What do they want a solution to? What do they want to overcome? Creating audience personas can help you in better understanding who your reader is.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional character. It’s a face and a name given to a target audience (a group of people amongst your audience with similar characteristics). Your audience persona is a hypothetical individual who belongs to your target audience. Here’s an example:

You can create your very own audience persona by analyzing data from:

- Google Analytics

- HubSpot or a similar CRM tool

- Facebook Insights

- LinkedIn Campaign Manager

- Focus group interviews of existing customers

- Dipstick surveys

Your audience persona doesn’t have to have the same details as the one displayed above. It differs from business to business.

When you have created a set of accurate audience personas for each of your target audiences, you know very well the type of content each of the target audiences will be interested in. Hence, you can create content that fits their interests, thereby leading to great engagement rates.

Creating highly accurate buyer personas is not an easy task, but you can make life easier by, for example, by:

- Conducting Market research

- Getting to know your customers personally

- Conducting surveys

- Analyzing other habits and preferences (we’ll get to that later)

Conduct Effective Market Research

To understand your target audience better, you can create audience research prior to creating your content. Audience research can be carried out by paying attention to three things:

1. Social Monitoring

2. Social Listening

3. Keyword research

Social Monitoring

Simply, Social Monitoring is where you monitor social conversations centered around your brand, identify potential threats and opportunities, and recommend actions. For example, you could identify potential trigger key words and categorize them into the classifications below using a tool like the Media Tool Kit. Use your social monitoring tool to monitor these keywords carefully on the web to know what your audience is up to. Based on these observations, you can create content that can keep your audience interested.

Social Listening

Social Listening tells you why your audience is saying certain things centered around your brand on social media. It involves monitoring things like customer feedback, conversations and news about your industry, direct mentions of your brands and so on. You analyze this information to determine the content you should be producing. This proves effective since the content you create is based on a comprehensive understanding of the content your audience is craving for.

Social listening can be done through a number of tools such as BuzzSumo, Mention, HootSuite, Google Alerts and many more.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the best sources of ideas for engaging content. Since people on search engines generally have a high level of intent, creating content with the aid of keyword research can help your target audience to find exactly what they’re looking for.

LOOKING TO CREATE GREAT CONTENT FOR YOUR BUSINESS, BUT STRUGGLING TO FIND TIME AND EXPERTISE?

Drop me a message to find out how we can work together.

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