What I Know About Content
It’s been said that ‘content is king’. It’s also been said that ‘content isn’t king, it’s kingdom’. Whichever metaphor you choose to go with, there’s a lot of content out there and most of it is bad.
I’m not one to bother with slick metaphors, but having spent four years as a digital producer, I know a thing or two about content, the bad kind and the good.
In my opinion, what separates the two is a series of relatively straightforward questions. With that in mind, I’ve penned this quick cheatsheet so you can ensure you’re always asking yourself the right questions.
Setting Your Goals
Before you determine what shape your content will take, you must begin by asking yourself what it is you want to achieve with your content.
Set clear and definable goals and develop a detailed content strategy that will help you achieve those goals. Only once you understand what your KPIs look like will you be able to define what successful content looks like for your particular channel.
Ask yourself: ‘What is the nature of my business?’
Are you a digital agency looking to attract more clients? Are you a SaaS company hoping to add more subscribers? Are you a media publication looking to generate impressions for advertisers?
What is it that you ultimately want your content to do for you? Are you looking to increase your presence on social media, yield page impressions, or generate leads and/or conversions? If it’s the latter, what does a conversion look like?
Once you’ve answered these questions, you can get to work on actually producing your content.
Start With The Audience
A channel is only as good as its content, and the content is only as good as the producer makes it.
What separates exceptional content from simply more megabytes flowing through the internet vacuum is a clear and definable vision of your target audience and an understanding of what that audience finds relevant and interesting.
The onus is then on you, the producer, to effectively communicate that interest and relevance to the audience.
Understanding your audience is key. An author who writes mystery novels must understand the audience who read mystery novels if he or she hopes to create a gripping and suspenseful book. They must have an intimate knowledge of the genre and its conventions in order to successfully subvert them and keep their writing fresh and engrossing.
Ask yourself: ‘What is my audience is interested in? What do they value, and what they believe in?’
Your answers, paired with your clearly defined goals, will guide your content to success.
Appealing To Your Audience
It’s important not only to understand what your audience is interested in, but why they maintain the interests they do and why they hold their particular set of beliefs and values. It’s imperative that you establish relevance.
It goes without saying that a music festival ticket-holder is more likely to click on a story to do with that festival than someone who won’t be attending and doesn’t plan on doing so — they have a vested interest in the subject matter.
Think of it like this: Why do we seemingly become more interested in politics and the nightly news the older we get?
It’s because the older we get, the more these things have a direct impact on us. Changes in tax legislation don’t hold much relevance to a teenager who doesn’t have an income, but they’re life-altering to a 40-something adult with an established career and a considerable wage who may be about to gain or lose money as a result of such changes.
Sparking Interest
Before hitting ‘publish’ on any piece of content, you must ask yourself: ‘Why is this interesting to my audience?’ Therein lies your pitch and your approach to the content.
There’s no sense simply making content for content’s sake. You don’t launch a company blog because your competitors have one, you do it because you believe your can create content that is better and more relevant than theirs.
In sales they say, ‘Always be closing’. Well in content production you must always be asking yourself why whatever it is you’re working on is going to be of interest to your audience. Ask yourself and let the answer guide you.
Successful content is content that is not only communicated in an interesting and engrossing way, but content that appeals to the interests of its intended audience and preferably affirms their values and beliefs.
Their engagement with your content then effectively becomes an endorsement of its sentiment and approach.
Optimising Your Content
Just as you must consider the audience you’re producing your content for, you must consider the channel on which it will be shared.
Is this particular piece of content being made for Google, Facebook, Tumblr, Medium, or something else altogether?
Ensure all of your content reflects well on your business but take into consideration how you can optimise it for success on different platforms. For example, a headline that looks good on your blog is not necessarily a headline that will work well on social media or in an email newsletter.
Once again, consider the respective audience that will be exposed to your content across different channels. Are the readers of your company blog the same readers who follow you on Facebook or Twitter? Are they the same readers subscribed to your weekly newsletter?
WordPress and Facebook alone offer lots of ways to change, amend, and optimise your content for different channels and it’s important to avail yourself of these tools and employ them as best you can.
Consider that the ‘funnel’ for Facebook content is different to that of Google Search. On Facebook it often goes Image -> Headline -> Social post -> Click/Engagement, as opposed to Google Search where you have only a headline and some text to go on.
Clickbait
Clickbait is a term that gets thrown around a lot these days and most consumers have a rather skewed and frankly inaccurate definition of what the term means.
For the sake of argument, let’s think of your headlines as like trailers for your content.
Have you noticed how movie trailers nowadays no longer tease the film and build anticipation, they simply show you a condensed version of the movie, establishing the characters and showing you their obstacles and how they overcome them? That’s not what a trailer is supposed to be.
By the same token, headlines aren’t supposed to give you the whole story, but some readers believe any headline that doesn’t is ‘clickbait’.
Let’s be clear about just what clickbait is — a lacklustre piece of content with a sensationalised, intentionally misleading headline intended to snag a click-through to a story that is either totally unrelated or not as salacious as advertised in the headline.
Not giving all the information in your headline isn’t clickbait, so long as your content delivers what was promised.
Analysis and Insight
So you’ve published your content and shared it with your audience. What’s next? The post-game analysis, of course.
Any good content producer should have one foot in the creative world and one foot in the highly technical world of data and analytics. A good producer should be fluent in Google Analytics and Facebook Insights, and be able to extract relevant insights from each of these tools.
Ask yourself: ‘How did my content go?’
Did it achieve the goals you’d originally set for it? Did it gather a lot of impressions on your site? Did it inspire significant social engagement? What was the reach? Did it generate leads or result in conversions for your business? How well did it achieve your KPIs?
Each piece of content is like a mini-marketing campaign unto itself and like any marketing campaign, the job isn’t done once you’ve presented the assets to your target demo. It’s important to gather insights and data in order to understand what worked, what didn’t, and why.
If a blog post generated a lot of commentary, try to figure out what it was that inspired your readers to share their thoughts or why they might be vocal about that particular subject.
If it resulted in a significant amount of impressions, analyse the formula behind the post that made it work so well. How did the headline read? What was the social post? What did the header image look like?
Ask yourself whether the content can be followed-up in some way, with a ‘Part Two’ for example, or by touching on the same topic with a different kind of content, such as turning a successful blog post into a Facebook video.
Remember: your job isn’t over once you’ve hit ‘Publish’, and always align your strategy with your goals and your audience in mind.
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