What’s the difference between a laser and a flash light?
It’s focus - the laser beam is coherent and focussed where as the flash light is divergent and made of incoherent light particles. One can just illuminate while the other can cut through rock. goals are such. They help business to have clear focus
#1. What are your online business‘ content related goals?
> Is it to increase your sales
> Build a List, create lead lists
> Improve brand awareness
> Promote your new services/ products
> Acquire new users/ sign ups
> Gather market feedback
Maybe one of this is your content goals, clarify that goals helps you to sharpen your message, align to your offerings and build a better content strategy. Hence It always starts with goals.
Without them goals do you know what to expect from your content?
Good content strategy covers each of those goals and has a clear vision of how to measure their outcomes.
Does your business have clear goals?
Do you know what are the outcomes you’re expecting out of your content?
This is so understated but over implied in every business. In reality all suffering businesses should start here.
#2 knowing your business‘ ideal target customer.
> Every solopreneur must know without a doubt who their products and services are made for. You must know their demographics like - location, age, gender, patterns, their pain points, where they spend time online etc.
> Knowing your ideal customer, helps you to craft your intent clearly and articulate a very specific message to engage your ideal customer for your business.
> Every good strategy is made up of these elements. Enabling the business to be precise and intentional about their messages which are passed on the internet world in the form of content. Content without the right target is just wasted effort. Who your content is made for is more important than how it looks!
Do you know your business‘ ideal target customer?
Do you Segment your content for your ideal customer?
Does your content articulate your brand‘s messages to that ideal customer?
Every successful business which exist today is solving a very important problem for their customers. Breakthrough innovation is always about solving customer problems.
#3 knowing exactly what problems your business solve for your customers. Is pivotal to your strategy.
For eg. We as a content agency know what is means to be a #solopreneur - a business owner who lacks the focus, expertise, time and resources to create a strategic content marketing plan and the skills and tools to create content and the people to manage the content on specific platforms. Therefore that’s our big why?
The above statement clarifies three things for us as a content agency:
- Our audience is small online business owners or Solopreneurs
- The problem we solve is the lack of content strategy
- The skills, expertise and the people to Create and manage content for our ideal customers.
Do you wish to have this level of clarity for your business?
Do you want to know your business‘ big Why?
#4 Aligning your messages to your brand:
Every business has a story to tell, a cause they care about, a purpose for which they exist, the values they believe in, th
e people they care about, the interests for their customers, the stories of their success and so on…
And If you don’t tell those stories, your audience will infer what they want about unit business and form their own opinions. The choice of changing the narrative is in your hands, in your content - in fact that’s the purpose of all content. To clearly articulate your messages and clearly align you audience to your brand.
Such a thing doesn’t happen by chance. It comes from a intentional strategy planning. Having a documented content strategy can help you define exactly who you are and what you do, keeping that message the same across every channel.
Sharpening your messages, aligning them to your brand and articulating your stories is not every entrepreneur‘s speciality.
#5 how to choose the right platforms for your business’s content?
Should online businesses focus on every platform there is or should they focus on what is relevant? The answer is not so obvious isn’t it?
Don't let the endless amo
unt of social media platforms overwhelm your business. We believes businesses should choose only platforms which is relevant to their business. Platforms where their audience exists and where their content is relevant, However this is specific to each business.
Building up a good base of content on your brand's website is a good start. That content can be shared across social media to reach as wide an audience as possible.
Good content strategy should be capable of assessing the right platforms for your business and help you reach your content marketing goals.
#6 Formats and Templates accelerate your content creation process:
Content Strategy is no excuse to rinse and repeat, however it’s always useful when your content strategy leads you to a place of creating formats and templates so that there is a simplified approach to content creation.
While this is easier done than said.
The first thing to think about is what content formats you want to focus on - while there are many formats that exist today - A good place to start would be to look at either your historical content or competitor content.
> Study formats which have higher success ratio, which have better reach and engagement, which makes a business claim authority over their offerings and stand out.
> Analyse your options and possibilities to create similar formats for your business e.g. how to incorporate a blog style behind the scenes - what’s cooking weekly news format for your business.
> Researching formats should lead to creating templates for content creation, this way creating easy access tools and templates could go
a long way to helping your business process content creation or curation much faster.
> Finally document guidelines, document process so when things get over the top. You have ready made tools to outsource to content agencies.
> Successful businesses thrive on extended capabilities from agencies to make their content convert. Because in house, DIY and organic can only take your business to a certain level of progress.
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