5 Questions to Improve Your Content Creation Strategy

Sixty percent of consumers feel more positively towards a brand after reading its content. But that doesn’t mean if you share your content, they’ll automatically read it. Audiences want to be in control of what they receive, read and ignore.
To successfully meet audiences’ needs, brands must know who they are talking to and targeting with their messaging. Trust cannot be built with a haphazard content creation strategy. Earn new followers, build relationships and win more sales by asking yourself these questions before diving into your next content marketing campaign.

Who is the audience?           
Leave guesswork and vague descriptions behind. The right content starts with understanding who makes up your audience. Start by dividing audiences into broader groups like prospects, influencers and customers. Then, do your homework and listen to their current conversations using media monitoring tools.
With a better understanding of audiences’ psychography, you’ll know what platforms they’re on, what actions they take on those platforms and how you can further filter your audiences. Majority of customers find custom content to be useful. By segmenting audiences, you’ll have a much easier time giving them what they want.
What’s the best format?
First thing’s first: make it shareable! All brands want their audiences to talk about their content. Make it easy for them by ensuring social sharing buttons are prevalent on your website.
Depending on your industry, you’ll likely want to use a variety of formats. Timing and length are dependent on audiences, departmental goals and in-house data and research.
Whatever combination your brand chooses, avoid getting into the “one-and-done” mentality. A white paper can easily be split up into blog articles and social media posts to give it more momentum. Using the consumer insights referenced above, plan out a lifecycle for your campaigns.
What value do you provide?
Content should go beyond a sales pitch. Think back to your audiences’ needs, then determine how your brand meets them. Brand content should provide a solution, educate, drive action, or ideally, all three.
Need to promote a new product? Focus on how the audience might miss out if they don’t try it. In need of new donors or volunteers? Use a success story to explore the benefits of getting involved or the impact a new member can have on others.
What keywords will boost visibility?
Keywords are key to getting indexed on search engines like Google. But, they should not be the sole focus of your writing. Keyword stuffing makes your content read awkwardly and negatively impacts your reputation.
Determine which words your audiences are already searching for to determine which words to use. Then, try to use those words naturally in your content.
What kind of multimedia can we add?
More than half of the journalists surveyed in this year’s State of the Media report named multimedia as one of the top three media trends. Follow their lead by including image- and video-based content in your content marketing plan.
Use images to break up text in blog posts and design unique graphics for social media channels. Or take the most important statistics from your research to build an infographic.
Buyer 2.0 has higher expectations on content quality than any customer who has come before, requiring brands to drastically adapt their communications style to new buyer behaviors.