A Content Strategy for your Product
One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is creating a product and then wondering where everyone is. How do you tell people where you are and what you are doing? How do people discover what you are doing? How do they learn about your story?
You can take out adds. And this is, of course, effective, but can be incredibly expensive. You can reach out to influencers, but that takes a great deal of time and research and can also be costly. I think there is a straightforward thing that you should do that is more effective than all of the other options combined. But it’s slow. I’ll address this later.
Tell Your Story
The reason that you are building this thing is a compelling reason enough. If you’ve done all your research and you have connected with the right customers, your story will be what is interesting. You can hit on some of the hot topic.
- Who are you?
- What problem are you solving?
- What has your process been?
- How does your product work?
Just hitting on those topics alone can give you a ton of content. But what do you do with it?
Make a Plan — A Content Strategy
Create a spreadsheet with three sheets, label them Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook
In each sheet, include the following columns — Date to publish, Call to Action, Content
Then fill in each cell, with the dates being one week apart
So, for example. You decide that you want six months of content out on the interwebs. With just those four questions above, you would need to create 72 content objects. That’s a LOT! But it’s not entirely accurate.
Create 1 Facebook post per week. Or Instagram, whatever platform you want that will support long for text. You want indexable words by Google and the space to tell your story. So that’s 24 posts. With those 4 questions, you need six content objects about each one. That’s not that hard! Then, for the other services you can use those to point to your long form. So, something like this might work.
Who Are You?
Week 1: General Introduction about you on Facebook.
Week 2: Discuss what this path will be like. You can let people know that you are going to tell them a story
Week 3: Announce the product, with a short description. You’ll get more detailed later.
Week 4: What kind of training have you had? The school of hard knocks is ok!
Week 5: Why you are passionate about this problem domain. Not the problem YET, but the domain that the problem lives in. Think about transportation as a topic, not the car itself.
Week 6: Why do you think that technology can solve this domain? — Not about YOUR product perse, but about technology in general. The discussion helps create the space for a technical solution.
What problem are you solving?
Week 7: Describe the problem that you specifically want to solve.
Week 8: Describe what you have heard from others about this problem.
Week 9: Describe what you have seen other products do to solve this problem.
Week 10: Describe what you think is the missing unique solution to this problem,
Week 11: Describe how your product solves this problem with the unique solution.
Week 12: Invite feedback and discussion about the product either via email or on Twitter. Email is private and Twitter public. Entirely about your tolerance for risk.
What has your process been?
Week 13: Discuss recruiting the customer advisory panel and what types of people they are. No names needed, but help potential customers understand it’s not just you.
Week 14: Discuss what your testing process was like.
Week 15: Discuss problems you found with your assumptions.
Week16: Discuss how you fixed these problems.
Week 17: Discuss what it felt like to launch the product.
Week 18: Invite feedback as they use the product.
How does your product work?
Week 19: How do customers register?
Week 20: How do customers pick a plan, or explain your pricing.
Week 21: Explain how the product solves the original problem by highlighting your product.
Week 22: Explain how to manage a users account.
Week 23: Explain how to share the product with others.
Week 24: Invite your customers to give you feedback about what they want to see next.
For each of these weeks, you also do the following:
- Include a link to the product.
- Create a Twitter post with a description from post and link to the post.
- Create an Instagram photo with a link to a Facebook post. Include product link in all profiles and a second link to the product.
If you do that, you’ll have 72 pieces of content, the first six months of your product’s life cycle taken care of. Of course, you can tweak it however you want to make it work for you, but this is a good start.
If you want a copy of the spreadsheet that I use, lemme know. I can send it to you next week. Just reply to this email.
This will take forever!
Yes, yes it will. It is a slow process. And that is why no one thinks about it ahead of time. This storytelling will happen for the rest of your product’s existence. It’s called marketing.
Join the Conversation
This is the from the archive of an ongoing series called Making Things That Matter. Each week I will send you an email with another step in the process of building products and launching ideas. Signup here to join the conversation.
