How to develop content for marketing
Even as an expert at what you do, creating content for marketing is tough. Although you have ideas, when you try to actually write them you find yourself blocked, distracted, and unmotivated. Here are four ways I’ve found that make content development easier for busy business owners and subject matter experts.
First, having purpose provides motivation.
What is the point of creating content for marketing? Do people even read this stuff? How does it make an impact on my bottom line?
The purpose of marketing is to demonstrate an understanding of your ideal customer’s perspective and by doing so build rapport and ultimately gain trust.
Chris Voss, a Former FBI lead hostage negotiator, calls this “tactical empathy.”
He says, “empathy is becoming completely aware of the other side's perspective, their point of view, and how they see it and what they feel. It’s not compassion and not sympathy. It’s tactically taking what we know to be the case and applying it in our interactions.” [from his Masterclass The Art of Negotiation]
If you can get at what is driving someone you can get their attention. If you can also illustrate how you provide unique value in that specific context then you will have successfully positioned your brand as relevant in the mind of the reader. This is how you create interest to learn more. This is what you want your content to do.
If it’s relevant then people consume it.
It makes an impact on the bottom line by moving a potential customer one step forward in their buying journey and one step closer to becoming a customer.
Second, the right lens provides focus.
Having the ability to look at things from multiple perspectives helps you sort out what you think from what know and what just sounds good.
Just like switching out different lenses on your camera can drastically change the content of your picture, so can switching out the mental lens by which you are viewing your ideas.
For example, the lens of a marketer is different than the lens of an operator.
How you get someone interested in what you do is not the same as providing the service.
People with expertise can easily get caught up in technicalities that are lost on their actual customers when they are stuck in their operator lens.
The lens of a marketer is a look at the exact same scenario from the customer’s perspective.
Start to identify which lens you’re looking through. That will make it easier to edit your ideas so that they are both compelling for marketing and aligned to your actual business.
Third, structured brainstorming provides relevant ideas.
Here’s an exercise to generate and organize your ideas so that they are interesting and compelling for marketing and headed in the right direction for the brand.
Brainstorm session 1: Customer Context - 30 Mins
Come up with 3-5 ideas for each of these contexts
Common problems your customer's faces
Common solutions you prescribe
Common goals of customers
Common fears or pitfalls of customers
Brainstorm session 2: Brand Stories - 30 Mins
Come up with 5-10 story ideas to draw from. You might focus this brainstorm even further into:
Personal stories - identify a time when you were once walking in similar shoes as your customer and what you learned that gave you a paradigm shift.
Business stories - identify times when someone in your business or a customer exemplified your values.
Fourth, discipline provided by a regular schedule creates results.
There are only so many things you can accomplish in a day. Setting aside time on a regular basis is key to becoming good at content creation. I recommend 30-45 mins once a week and posting on Linkedin as a starting point. Here is a basic plan for what to accomplish.
Writing sessions - 30 Min
Use your ideas from brainstorming sessions to create a list of 10 ideas.
Schedule them into 30-minute sessions.
Write 1300 characters on one of your ten ideas. Starting with the 1300 character framework will help you build the muscle and the discipline to write your ideas and get feedback sooner rather than later in the development. This way you won’t find yourself spending too much time on a dead-end idea.
Here are two ways to develop your ideas into actual pieces of content:
Personal story anecdotes (a story that has a point).
Identifying customer context and providing insight into how to maneuver.
Publish on Linkedin.
Other text-based platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Medium work as well. I prefer Linkedin as a starting place for most experts. Choose a platform where you are likely to get engagement.
Make sure to put some effort into promoting your content so that you get comments. Stick around and engage with people who are commenting. Don’t worry if they are the right people. The engagement will boost your post in your feed. Meaning, the more engagement your post has, the more likely your connections will see it.
Review sessions - 30 Min
Once you’ve posted all 10, review your work and engagement. Ask yourself:
What worked?
What didn’t?
Are any of these worthy of further development?
Repeat or Develop Further
Start back over at brainstorm or move to the second level of development with your idea.
Second-level development is when you take a good content idea and dive deeper or take a series of good content ideas and create a longer-form piece of content. This is what we call pillar content and will provide you with endless additional options for moving beyond the written word to illustrate your ideas.