Does your Marketing Content have a purpose?
Or are you just doing to be doing? Are you rolling with this (overused) strategy:
Throw spaghetti on the wall to see what sticks!
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The #1 Most Used (and Unsuccessful) Content Marketing Strategy
One of the reasons many people claim that they have trouble creating content is that they don’t understand why they’re creating it.
Every piece of content you create needs a reason for being, otherwise, you’re wasting your efforts.
To narrow down the purpose of any type of content you’re creating you want to ask yourself a few questions.
1. Who Are You Creating the Content For?
Use your audience persona, or an ideal customer profile, to help you focus yourself on the content you’re creating.
The content you create for people on your list will depend on how they signed up for the list, which freebie they downloaded, which product they purchased, and what your goals are for that list segment.
The content you create for the audience you have that has never purchased or converted in any way will be different.
2. Where is The Content Going?
Where you’re publishing the content makes a big difference too.
If you’re publishing it on your blog it will be different than if you’re sending it via email.
A blog post can be very long, while an email shouldn’t be.
And social posts are different than sales pages, emails, and blog posts too.
(Though remember you can repurpose your blog post into your email, your social posts, and several other ways!) Repurposing content is EASY with 9 different formats
3. What Are You Trying to Communicate?
When you sit down to create the content ask yourself this question and start brainstorming the answers.
Try to keep it to one topic instead of spreading it too thin.
You should have one overarching message you want the viewer to take away from the content you’ve created.
4. How Does the Content Fit with What You Have?
Before creating any new content, you should always go through the content you already have so that you can find out what you’ve already published about that topic.
You may be able to take bits and pieces of content you’ve already created to make it into something new.
If it’s totally new content with a totally new angle how does it fit in with what you have and make it better?
5. What is The Goal of the Content?
Every bit of content you publish needs a point.
Do you want to educate, inform, inspire or engage with your audience or a combination of these options?
When you think about the goal of the content you will have an easier time creating it to do what you want it to do.
6. What Do You Want Viewers to Do?
Finally, you want to know exactly what you want your viewer to do once they’ve consumed the content.
You need to remember the call to action throughout the content, especially at the end by directing them via telling them what to do.
Don’t hint, don’t just put a sign-up box at the end, instead tell them what you want them to do.
Once these questions are answered you’ll have a much better idea about the direction to go with every piece of content you create because it’s going to fit in with your overall goal as well as the goal you have for the individual piece of content such as list building for example.
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