Creating content day in and day out is exhausting. Constantly coming up with creative ideas and pushing yourself to come up with things you’ve never thought of is incredibly hard. But luckily, TopRank Marketing’s Executive Content Chef, Ashley Zeckman, was in the kitchen to help us cook up strategies for content creation at Digital Summit Minneapolis.
To help set the stage for her session, Ashley asked: who is fried on content marketing? To no one’s surprise, nearly every marketer in the room raised their hands.
As Ashley shared, there are four reasons why content creation and strategy fries our brains:
- Consumers are overloaded
- Audiences are becoming more sophisticated and demanding
- Teams aren’t strategic with their content
- Brands can’t keep up with demand
But even when faced with this problem, content teams still focus too much on brand over audience, care about quality over quantity, and are scared to take risks and fail.
So how can brands and marketing teams rise to the challenge and create and distribute content that is different than anything else out there? Ashley provides three preparations tips and five content ingredients that will help you do just that.
Prepping the Content Kitchen
1. Know Your Audience
Before you create content, you need to discover as much as you possibly can about your audience. You need to know what you’re cooking with! Find out who influences them, what they like to read, where they like to read it, and what type of pieces their reading. Are they reading infographics or eBooks? What captures their attention?
To help you discover some of this information, Ashley swears by the tool Answer the Public to find out what readers want to know and how they search for it.
2. Define Your Content Mission
Before embarking on any life-changing content missions, you need to document your content strategy and goals. Don’t just talk about it–write it down! This includes defining your audience, the message you want to deliver to that audience, and the intended outcome for your audience.
3. Commit to Content Impact
Here, Ashley reminds us that content engagement levels, on average, are super low at only 37 seconds per blog post or article (NewsCred Insights). She points out that if you’re audience isn’t engaged, they don’t care, so stop creating…
