Strategic Content Creation for Brand Optimization
Content creation is essential for any campaign, but not all content is created equally. Your content needs to have a purpose and needs to work in line with your brand. Every single piece of content you release should contribute to the overall strategy behind your brand and your campaign.
Even the most mundane content contributes to the process when done right. You shouldn’t twist the facts and lie; if you feel you have to, there’s a bigger issue at play. A feature sheet doesn’t need to be twisted to serve your agenda, something as subtle as rearranging the key features to be at the top can be enough to help push your agenda.
A brand is a summation of the campaigns, reputation, established offerings, expectations, etc. behind your company and what they do. Each marketing campaign can impact the other factors as long as the product itself meets a certain baseline and you have a plan. You just have to know how to break down your campaign and turn it into something with clear goals so that you can bolster each element of the brand.
Campaign Agendas
A campaign needs to have a purpose. Is your campaign for information and awareness, or is it there to sell? This purpose feeds into a set of goals which lead to success. You just have to know what they are, what they’re for, and why they matter.
You have to have something which makes you more than just a me-too product or else you have to run the same rat race with everyone else. Why would someone pay more for the same thing? How you can differentiate yourself into something the market is missing? Make them have to compare apples and oranges to shop; offer something different.
Your campaign’s purpose is compounded with the nature of your business and what it offers. Each of these discrete threads can become an agenda to push, but the overlap and general goals for a marketing campaign remain at play too. Each element needs to be self-contained, but it needs to factor in the whole just as it is factored into the whole. The deeper you dive in breaking down your goals into smaller and smaller tasks, the more agendas you have, and the more likely elements can work together, but don’t lose the forest for the trees.
Targeting Overlaps
You need to know where you get an overlap in agendas with specific tasks. By batching these specific tasks, or including elements in things you’re doing anyway, you can save effort down the line. Don’t shoot from the hip, you need to know what feeds into what.
You can think of it like cooking in a line. If over half of your dishes rely on diced onions early in the cooking process, shouldn’t you prioritize them unless something else is more universal and more pressing? Of course, the same onions don’t do much if the only orders left are for dessert.
Certain tasks will be more universal and impact more campaigns or agendas than others, but some tasks are necessary even if they only affect one thing. You have to know what your focus is and where you are in the process. Just because two customers ordered the same dish doesn’t mean you can prepare them together if each came in with different parties.
How can you tie this into your campaigns though? You have to know the order of operations things need to occur for each campaign, and where certain content can be inserted into a process. Some overlaps can persist throughout both campaigns while others only work with the right timing.
Creating Better Content
Many people do all of this at a higher level, but don’t dig deeper. What is your brand and your campaign trying to push most now and how can you strategically target it? You have to work that into your other outreaches in a way which forwards their independent agendas as well.
Knowing what is needed at each step means you can focus on creating better content for the brand. If you’re about to run a campaign for your new, all-in-one service, wouldn’t it help to have the specifications and details for each product or offering contained in it? If the other campaigns are still running, this task benefits both your newest campaign and your other running campaigns. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel if you know that this task can be reused with minor adjustment.
If you have multiple offerings which share many characteristics for the audience, how can you work each one in? You can’t just copy and paste, but you can take large pieces and reduce the time and effort required to make content targeting different angles. By batching the principle task, you can make sure that there aren’t contradictions at a later date by writing one primary work and splitting it out.
What is each step in your campaign aiming to do, and how can it help the brand overall? Do you have a series of agendas each piece needs to be pushing and what do they have in common? A single piece of content doesn’t need to “accomplish something” every time, it just needs to create or assist with movement in the right direction overall. Even the most mundane language in a password reset email can contribute to the brand if you just let it. Don’t just make content for a campaign, make it for a brand strategy.
