The Art of Creating and Writing Great Content
All too often we hear ‘we have run out of content’ or we are waiting for the sales team,/management team to give us some content ideas’. All that signifies unfortunately, is that your organisation does not have a clear marketing strategy and matching content plan – as you are never short of content.
Setting your content goals in line with your marketing strategy
Content writing should always be in the context of your wider marketing strategy and business plan and should form an integral part of achieving those agreed objectives and goals.
For example, if you are looking to build market share within your target market, your content goals would all be geared to informing and helping targets prospects understand what makes your products and services a good choice for them if they were to switch over to your organisation away from a competitor. Your content would be demonstrating your values, show casing how you help others and be a source of relevant, useful information to help prospects make informed choices.
Gearing your content to the marketing journey
The marketing journey starts with someone who knows nothing about your organisation right up to being an ambassador for your products and services and the content needs are different throughout. We use an 8 stage marketing journey as part of our marketing planning and the content plan to match:
- Awareness
- Engagement
- Subscription
- Conversion to a client
- Onboarding and building value
- Cross selling
- Becoming a promoter
- Ambassadorial
For example, your content needed to encourage a prospect to sign up for a product demo before they become a customer varies enormously from encouraging that same client to leave a fabulous google review and sign off a case study.
Its not all about you
If your content is all ‘broadcast’ information about your organisation and its products and services you are going to quickly turn off any potential readers. 60% of all decision making is already completed before a prospect contacts you and that means prospects are doing a great deal of research online – so your content needs to help them in their information search.
For example your content needs to include specification details, demonstrations, comparisons, recommendations per industry/sector/usage, testimonials, sign ups for sample packs and free training sessions. The more of your information consumed, the more likely they are to align themselves to your brand, your values, your offerings and to ultimately choose you as their supplier.
Expecting someone to go from Awareness stage of never heard of you to becoming a client in one step is almost impossible and your content planning needs to take them on a journey of knowledge and discovery to build trust.
Your content therefore needs to contain lots of information relevant to their sector – their challenges, plans, aspirations, trends and innovations. Your content needs to show you understand and are aligned with their world, not yours.
Build up the layers and engagement journeys
Each piece of content must have an objective, always to inform, help, build understanding, answer questions and then plan what is it you want to happen next and how you want them to react.
In cross sell for example, this would look like a 12 month plan of the relevant products and services you wish to inform your existing clients about and what assets and media will you need to do this.
So, you are never short of content, in fact it should resemble a multi-faceted, multi-layered matrix designed to achieve your annual strategic aims.
If you need help ideating and constructing a great content plan simply contact the Encompass team and lets get started.