Content strategy- Are you posting with a purpose and providing value?
Katie Batchelor
Content marketing can be a useful tool, as long as you’re setting objectives for each post. Whether it’s an email newsletter, blog post, YouTube video, social media post, eBook, lead magnet etc, every piece of content created by your business needs an objective.
Sure, it’s important to be producing content regularly, but it’s not always about the quantity. Posting valuable content a few times a week is far better for brand building than posting irrelevant and uninteresting content every day.
So, are you posting content online because you feel you have to, or are you posting to provide value and influence your audience?
Ask yourself and your team these questions before your business creates and posts content online.
1. What's the purpose of your content?
What are your reasons for posting this photo, video, blog or eBook?
Are you creating content to entertain, inform, advise or promote?
What do you want your audience to think and feel when they consume your content?
For example, as a social media marketing agency, one of our main purposes for posting #MondayMarketingTips or #SocialMediaTips on Instagram, is to help advise small businesses improve their social media management.
Our content is designed and published to be informative and useful for the reader. Each time we create content and post, we decide who our post is aimed at and how we want the post to be perceived.
2. Is your content relevant to your brand and industry?
For content to be an effective marketing tool it needs to be somehow relevant to your brand or business.
When you’re planning content, ask yourself “how does this help my brand?”
Perhaps it raises awareness of a specific issue in your industry or promotes your amazing deals. Great! If it does nothing to build your brand, raise awareness or increase your brand’s credibility, then your content strategy and tactics need rethinking. Read our post on “why your business needs to create content & how to formulate a strategy in 3 easy steps”.
3. Does your content provide value to your audience?
Providing value means posting thought-provoking content which creates an emotional response.
For example, our informative marketing tips will make viewers feel more informed and knowledgeable. Similarly, if you post an instructional video for your product/service, this will make your audience feel more confident in your brand.
There are lots of ways to provide value to your audience via your content, but this should be aligned with the purpose of your post.
For example, if you want to inspire people to take up fitness and enquire for your personal training service, which content do you think will be more thought-provoking, an image of a dumbbell on the floor or… An image of a dumbbell on the floor with a motivational quote overlayed?
For the majority of people, seeing the dumbbell and motivational quote will instantly inform them of what your service is and make them feel like they should be training in the gym which aligns with the purpose of the post. Whereas the dumbbell image, it doesn’t say as much or provoke much of a response from the viewer.
Stepout Buffalo Business says “you should be creating content that’s made for and marketed to” your target audience. If your content is purposeful and relevant to your business but dull as beige paint, you will inevitably lose their attention and worse, possibly their custom too.
If you’re stuck on what content to write or create, think for a moment about what your ideal customer wants to know or learn about.
Be as creative, informative and interesting as you can be to captivate your audience’s attention and encourage them to engage with your post.
Call-to-actions (CTA’s) are a great way to get your audience to engage with your content after they’ve consumed it. For example, if you’ve written an informative caption on Instagram or Facebook, at the end of the caption you could add a CTA such as “contact me for more info”, “learn more at”, “follow us for more tips” etc.
SEJ makes the point that “there’s a good chance that producing content without a clear goal is doing very little for your brand.”
Remember: If you’re aimlessly posting images and videos on social media which A) don’t have a key purpose, B) aren’t remotely relevant to your business and brand and C) don’t make your audience pause to consume your content, your content marketing strategy is probably not helping to build your brand.
Concerned your content strategy isn’t working? We can help!
