Understanding your audience will help you decide which content format is likely to work best for your business. Identify what your listeners already consume and take this as a starting point.
Blogs, newsletters, e-books, video, podcasts, white papers, emails etc. There’s a plethora of ways in which to get your message across. And you'll need to define a mix that works for you.
But you'll be able to spread a body of content across multiple formats. A white paper can be chunked down into a number of blog posts, blog posts can be chunked down into social media messages and so on.
The nitty gritty. This is your story. It needs to be relevant, to educate … to be useful. It also has to have great UX. And importantly it needs to be something that can be amplified.
Go research what’s out there that is working well. Social media can provide a good window into trending topics and competitor activity. Check out industry thought leaders. And don't forget to speak to your customer facing team - they'll be a great resource for highlighting what's important to users of your product / service.
Some things to look out for are:
Now you’ve got the story in hand you need to think about the delivery. It will need to have the' Wow' factor if it’s going to cut through today's content noise. And for that it’s going to have to be:
Incorporating all or even just some of the elements in a piece of content can be a real challenge. There will be issues of time constraints, budgets, skill sets, but look for tools to help. They are out there - and there are plenty that are cost effective, intuitive to use and that require little or no training.
The best way to know whether or not your content is working for you is to gain insight from your readers. Select tools with strong analytics platforms.
The more granular the insight you can obtain the more you can learn. It takes time to build an audience and the more information you can glean about what is valuable to them the better.
But to gain insight you have get started in the first place. Get your feet wet. Don’t spend too long in trying to achieve perfection in the first instance.
Better to get going, analyse, see what works and see what doesn’t. Iterate as you go and amend your strategy and the content itself accordingly.
Being agile and being prepared to consistently improve your content will help you hit the right audience with the right content expediently and effectively.