“Ask lots of questions so you can get a vivid picture in your head of your target customer/client/audience member.”
Content is King!
That’s the conventional wisdom anyway. Sounds good too. You can practically see a town crier walking out to the middle of the Digital Marketing Land and proclaiming it. Plus it’s simple. We like simple wisdom because it’s easy to retain and seems easy enough to execute.
But is it?
One of the most common conversations I have with people is about how hard it is to create effective content. Many people find the process of designing effective content really difficult. How do you get the results you want? What type of content should you create? Where should you put it?
Relax.
Designing effective content isn’t that difficult. It just takes some preparatory time at the start to consider the framework for the content. In order to help make that a bit easier, here are three things to consider when getting started designing effective content.
Define Your Audience
Let’s start with the basics.
You can’t speak to everyone at the same time. That’s just a basic fact. Someone out there won’t like what you do. Others won’t have any need for you. There are people who will cheer everything you do, but never buy anything. There are others who will take anything you create and look for any way they can tear it apart.
But among all those different groups are people that are looking for you. That’s who you should be speaking to. Take some time right now and define your audience. Ask questions. Ask lots of questions so you can get a vivid picture in your head of your target customer/client/audience member.
Who is your customer? Who will benefit from your content? What do they do? What do they need? Where do they work? Do they have families? What’s their level of education? How much time do they have for your content? Where will they find your content?
Ask all of those questions and more. Know who your audience is so you can speak to them.
Define Your Purpose
In addition to defining your audience, you need to define the purpose of the content. Why? Because the purpose will dictate the methods you will use to communicate.
If you’re creating content specifically for the SEO benefit to your website then you need to heavily focus on keyword strategy, H tags, and alt text for images. On the other hand, if you’re creating an informative blog for social media distribution you should make sure the concepts are effective and even think about infographics to help with illustration. A video for social media is a very different animal from a video for YouTube.
Take a few minutes when thinking about content and decide what the purpose is. Are you looking to inform? To persuade and generate sales? To update your site’s SEO? None of these are bad purposes. There really isn’t such a thing as a bad purpose for content. But these purposes are very different in execution and you need to understand that.
Figuring out your content’s purpose will help you design much more effective content.
Design Better
Designing a brand can be intimidating. A lot of work, talent, and skill goes into developing great aesthetic and content brands as well as the strategies for implementation. You don’t need to do it alone. Our team at Bear Paw Creative are passionate design and marketing pros that come together to bring your brand vision to life. Contact us today to learn how we can help you.
Bear Paw Creative is a creative branding agency specializing in human connections. We help businesses and nonprofits reach the communities they serve in a way that resonates and ignites new relationships. Our nonprofit work provides incredible organizations with the marketing support they need to connect with their community. We offer brand development, website design and strategy services in Charleston, South Carolina and throughout the U.S.
Bear Paw Creative has been recongized as one of Top 30 Charleston Web Designers by DesignRush.