Creating content could be just what you need to do to boost your business further. Content marketing is a powerful marketing strategy. In this post we are going to go into further detail regarding the planning and development steps you must take.
Who Are You Creating Content For?
When creating content, it is important to know your audience. This greatly depends on your brand, and who your audience is already. For example, if your company sells inexpensive, high quality jewelry, you already have a set audience that you send your product to. There are a few different categories to think of for this stage of development, being age, gender, occupation, interests, etc.
This planning step is one of the most important steps of planning. The best way to ensure that you are catering to your audience, create three buyer profiles. For example, the first buyer of your jewelry is a 22 year old female who works as a waitress. She can’t wear too much jewelry while working, because it breaks dress code. She is interested in sports and activities that require a lot of movement, and she values simplicity.
The next buyer is a 60 year old woman who loves to stand out. She does not have a specific occupation or hobbies that cause her to limit the amount of jewelry she wears. And your last buyer is a 16 year old boy who values uniqueness and being who you want to be. He likes to wear cross necklaces and different types of rings on his fingers. His hobbies include skating and social media, and he does not have a job.
These three profiles can be as detailed and story like as you want them to be, but they need to go along with your real audience. You can make up the professions and the values of your profiles, being that you don’t know too much about your actual consumers. But, your profiles must make sense for your brand.
Why Are You Creating Content?
The next step of planning for content marketing is to know why you are creating content. What is your goal? Are you looking to increase your brand awareness? Gain more customers? Increase brand loyalty?
Whatever your main goal is will effect what type of content you will post and where you will be posting it. Another thing that affects that is your audience, which is why it is smart to create your buyer profiles before doing anything else.
So, going back to our jewelry company. Say you are looking to increase your brand loyalty. What kind of content are you going to create in order to do that? This question can and probably will always have multiple answers. You can create written content and videos, or you can post photos of your products along with a written piece of content. Or you can create all three along with some social ads. It is up to you and what goals you are trying to achieve.
Going back to our example, we want to build brand loyalty for our jewelry company. We are going to create written content and photos where we present the one month option for our customers to purchase $50 worth of jewelry, send in a photo of them wearing it, and we will post them on our social accounts. This will increase brand loyalty in multiple ways. First, their jewelry will come with a ‘Congratulations’ or something in the packaging. Next, we will keep our promise and post them to our social accounts. And finally, we will be able to interact with them through this promotion.
Where Will You Post Your Content?
Knowing where you want to post your content is one of the last important steps to content creation. This is something that goes along with where your consumer profiles will most likely see your content, and what type of content you are looking to post.
For our example, being that we are posting a series of photos and written content, the first platform that comes to mind is Instagram. This is a great platform to reach our 14 and 22 year old customers, but another place, especially for the 14 year old is TikTok. Thinking about TikTok being a potential platform for this campaign brings up the question of adding video. What if, for that platform, we turn the written content into a spoken explanation, and one of our content creators can record a TikTok explaining the campaign. And for our older consumer profile, Facebook would be an awesome additional place to post this campaign.
As you can see, all of these steps go hand in hand, and following them step by step to the end will continue to raise other ideas. Your content strategy can continue to grow and develop as you are creating it.
Actually Creating Content
After planning out your content marketing campaign, you can move on to actually creating your content. Of course, you may want to think of what you might need to create this content. Most of the time, there is not too much involved, especially if it is just written content that you are producing. With our example, you are going to utilize the social platforms a lot, with DMing and commenting to your consumers.
Conclusion
There is a lot that goes into content creation and content marketing, yet it can be an amazing thing to boost your business. In the example that we used for this blog post, our content was more of a fun advertisement, promotion strategy to build the trust of our audience. Most of the time, your content is going to be unrelated to your brand and more so about the product of service that you are providing. But, your content can be whatever you want it to be.
We hope to have helped you further understand the planning and steps that go into content marketing. If you have any questions,