The Compelling Content Framework

A Framework for rapidly developing better content that your prospects will love

At a prior company that was recently acquired, we developed a secret weapon for generating leads: rapid development of extremely high quality content. Not the stuff that Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools produce – really solid content that piqued curiosity and delivered value to our prospects. It was the backbone of our lead generation strategy. As a data and analytics firm, we knew our content performed because we measured it and tracked performance on a real-time dashboard. We saw the number of leads and value of opportunities grow as we iterated on the process. As our numbers grew over time, we realized we had something special.

But It Was a Heavy Lift.

Unfortunately, generating great content isn’t always easy. In full transparency, it was a very heavy lift in the early stages. Creating great content often takes a long time, even for the most experienced writers. And, great content is usually expensive to develop when you look at the time commitment from the folks that contribute the knowledge.?

We knew that the investment in great content was core to our marketing strategy, so we doubled down and created a system to help us simplify the process and pull some of the cost out of it. I call this process the Compelling Content framework.?

We Built a Framework for Creating Compelling Content.

This framework helped us create amazing content at half the cost and half the time that we used to spend developing it. We created a significant competitive advantage leveraging a combination of AI tools, like Chat GPT and good old fashioned human intelligence. But, to be clear, the most important part of our process is the latter.

This article provides an overview of the Compelling Content Framework and explains how you can leverage it to gain your own competitive advantage.

What is Compelling Content?

First, let’s define Compelling Content. For our Marketing team, Compelling Content was anything that delivered marketing qualified leads (MQL), or leads that met our target market personas. These leads typically required long-term nurture but often moved into sales qualified leads (SQL) within a few months.? Our Compelling Content took on many different forms: Blog posts, social downloads, white papers, lead magnets and articles. While we also created video and podcast content as well, the Compelling Content process focuses on the written vehicles that tend to consume more time and cost to develop. We knew that our prospects consumed written content in various forms, so we focused on the ones that performed best.

Creating this type of content isn’t a novel concept. Most mature marketing groups include content development as a staple of their marketing plans. However, creating exceptional content takes most organizations a long time.

Think About the Process.

First, you have to find a Subject Matter Expert (SME). This is typically someone who possesses an exceptional amount of knowledge about the topic at hand. They typically have a unique viewpoint, have spent years doing it and have a very high level of competency. Finding this person is the arguably the most important step in the entire process.

These types of people are critical to the process and, very often, they don’t like to write or just don’t have the time to write. And this is where the challenge lies for most organizations – getting the brilliance that SMEs posses from “noggin to screen" as quickly and effectively as possible.

But Don’t AI tools like Chat GPT Write the Content for You?

Not really. AI can help you clean up and augment your content. In fact, AI is included at a later stage in the framework. But AI tools fall way short on creating content that is compelling.?

Try using Chat GPT or your favorite AI software to help you write an article. Now look at the output and ask yourself these questions:

1. Did the AI come back with a response that is unique and different from what others out there are already saying? If not, the content is not compelling.
2. Did the AI response match the tone and voice that is used across other content that your organization has published? If not, you’ve got more work to do.
3. Does the AI response deliver something truly valuable to your audience? Again, if not, the content is not compelling and probably won’t perform well.

Here’s the response I received when I asked my favorite AI tool to write this article:

For our team, AI tools weren’t helpful for initial ideation. Instead, we created the Compelling Content framework to help us provide more valuable content. We then layered in AI to help us refine and speed time to completion.

The Compelling Content Framework

Here’s the framework that we used to create Compelling Content …?

Step 1: Find your Subject Matter Expert (SME). This is without a doubt the most important step in the process. Without original thinking, proven expertise and real value, your content will not deliver and is not worth the time invested to create it.?

Don’t expect your SME to want to write or even have the time to commit to writing your compelling content. Instead, ask them to have a discussion, an interview, that will take 30 to 45 minutes.

Spend some time with your SME and brainstorm together on what the compelling content is going to look like. Answer some basic questions:

• Who is your audience? Who will find value in this content?
• What form will it take? Article, Blog, Lead Magnet, etc.
• What’s the value to your audience? What will they learn?
• What will it deliver? A guide, how to, examples, useful info, etc.
• What are the internal objectives for the content? (Leads, Sign ups, etc)

Step 2: Prepare an Outline. Take on the heavy lifting by thinking through what you want the structure of the piece to look like. Put together a list of questions that you will ask your SME so that you can collect all of the information needed to form your first draft of the compelling content.

Consider using a tool like Miro to help you mindmap. I love using this tool during a meeting to jot down notes and ideas in real time with my SMEs.

This is the ideation process, and it’s critical to your success. Make sure that you are capturing more than you will actually use …?

Step 3: Interview Your SME. Don’t ask your SME to write a single word. Schedule a meeting using your online meeting platform. Use a platform like Zoom that allows you to record your meeting.??

While you can make this informal, it’s often helpful to capture it with a professional background, good sound quality and appropriate attire so that you can potentially leverage video clips as digital assets to supplement your content.

Step 4: Transcribe the audio from your interview. If your conferencing platform supports it, download the transcription of your interview. If a transcription is not available, tools like Sonix.ai are very good at transcribing the audio files that can be downloaded directly from your conference platform. The transcriptions from clean audio are usually quite high with 95% or better accuracy.

Step 5: Create your first draft. Using your transcription, drop your SMEs answers into each section. Don’t worry about grammar or even complete sentences at this point. We’re focused on the first draft at this stage.

Step 6: Leverage AI. Armed with your draft, go into your favorite AI tool and ask it to help you reword the content. The goal here is to clean up obvious errors, complete sentences and get to your second draft. This is where AI shines and can save you a ton of time.

Step 7: Clean It Up. At this stage, you’ll want a human in the loop. You’ll need to align the piece so that it is consistent with your style, voice and tone. Some of the words that your AI chooses may not be on brand. Here, consider using a writer that knows your style. Or consider a service like Draft that can quickly clean up and turn your pieces. Typically, the hours required for this work are pretty low given that the backbone and main value points are already present.

Step 8: Add Some Sizzle. You’ll want to visualize some of the elements in your compelling content to make it easier to consume. Leverage a graphic artist that is familiar with your look and feel. I’ve leveraged services like Upwork with a lot of success.

Step 9: Put It All Together. This is the fun part. Once the content is in place, drop in your images, tables and graphics. We leveraged a designer for this step, but it’s also fairly simple to use tools like Google Docs, Word or even InDesign to get professional looking documents.

Step 10: Measure and Benchmark. Based on the goals identified in Step 1, measure the results and compare them to your goals or existing benchmarks. Continue to refine your ideation process described in Step 2. The more that you know about your prospects and clients, the better your compelling content will perform.?

How to Use Compelling Content

Creating useful, informative content was critical to our marketing efforts. Following the general framework above will help you get there. Once your content is ready to go, offer this content at no charge to your target audience. Gate it, behind a form on your website, to ensure that you are getting return in the form of email addresses. For your existing prospects, leverage your Compelling Content in nurture campaigns to help move marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads at a faster pace.

Next Steps

If you’d like some help getting your own compelling content program started, drop me a line, and let’s talk about how this process might work for your organization.