Marketing is an evolving tool and changes frequently. One of the newer aspects of marketing is “content creation”. Having a content creation strategy focuses on determining what type of content you should be creating to align with your business goals, and then using tools like Canva, to create that content. Most people have zero strategy behind their content. They don’t know whether they should be pushing products, pushing services, or educating their audience. When it comes to strategy around content, we should be creating content that gives value to the people who are consuming it, and converts to what we offer. You want to develop a strategy that centers around certain components and then build your content from there.
Four Types of Content You Should Create
There are four main types of content you should be creating to have a cohesive strategy.
Awareness Content
Awareness content focuses on driving more visibility for your brand. While awareness content doesn’t directly drive sales, it does do is create valuable resources for other people to share and link which helps center you (and your business) as an authority figure. Awareness content tends to be data-driven and can be turned into SEO-optimized content. Think of those questions that get asked on Google and create content around answering them.
Thought Leadership Content
Thought leadership content puts you as an expert in your industry or niche. It’s everything from a step-by-step process, thoughts about where your industry is going, or even in-depth
breakdowns into complex topics in your field. This type of content positions you as a leader in what you are doing and helps increase that trust factor While awareness content can increase visibility, thought leadership content shows that you actually know what you’re talking about.
Sales-centric Content
This is the content where you actually start selling. It’s about converting leads into
customers and providing a better customer experience to existing customers to encourage
repeat purchases or testimonials. This type of content shouldn’t be the main content for your site or your business. Remember, nobody really wants to be sold to. Sales-centric content is probably not going to drive new people to your business. But it will help convert those people who have taken in that awareness and thought leadership content and are already primed for your offerings. Sales-centric content can include comparison, i.e “Should I hire a business coach or business strategist; and success stories or testimonials, i.e. “How I helped my client grow her business 430%”. Sales-centric content takes people who are already interested in your business and helps push them into becoming clients or purchasers of your business.
Culture Content
Culture content focuses on showcasing you, or if you one, your team. This is where you can share things about your business such as awards you’ve won, podcasts you’ve been interviewed on, or websites where you’ve been featured. This is where you get to show off and it helps promote you and your brand. This type of content also gives an inside look into what your business is doing.
Create Content Pillars
Content pillars are like buckets of topics that you can consistently speak about. For example, my content pillars are business authenticity, self-care, and organization and structure in business. Create a list of three to five pillars for your business. Within each of these content pillars, you should create content that fits into the awareness, thought leadership, sales-centric, or culture categories. This is where you can start building out your content calendar and actually creating content. Remember, creating content and having a content calendar are different from content strategy. If you don’t have the strategy behind creating content calendars, all you’re doing is creating pretty images or blog posts that aren’t going to help push your brand forward.
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