If you’re a social media marketer or a marketer in general, generating content can be a challenge, especially over the long haul. The internet is a content-hungry beast, and we’ve got to keep feeding it. With all the customers that we work with, we have to always be generating new ideas for content and then implementing them. Here are some thoughts on how you can also generate content in an ongoing manner. The first and most important thing about content generation is understanding who your customers are. Who’s the target market? Every business’s target market is different and without a good understanding of who these customers are, and in the business we call them personas, you’re going to be spitting in the wind. The first step is to take some deep thought or maybe do some persona exercises on who your customers are and what they care about. As we look about what they care about, let’s think about a few things here. One, do they have a relationship with the organization? Or the people at the organization, do they want to see behind the scenes? Do they feel like they’ve got privileged information or are they just there for a deal?
Making a list of what’s important to our customers will give us an opportunity for a starting place when we start to generate ideas for content. In a second vein, we want to think about what we want the customer to know. Most businesses start here, but we put it in second place because what the customer wants is the most important part. When we think about what we want them to know and what are things as a business that we want to make sure they know about, that list is different. Gary Vanderchuk’s methodology of a jab, jab, jab, right hook, the jabs are what the customer cares about, the things that are entertaining, the things that satisfy them. And the right hooks are the things that we want to promote. So what do we want them to know about? Maybe it’s what makes us special, what makes us different than our competition. Maybe it’s some new product for sale or a club or a membership opportunity or some way to contact them like an email list or a text messaging service. The things that we want to promote are many, but we have to understand that they are not necessarily exciting for the customer.
And then when we think about those two things, we also have to think about what is the level of awareness that this customer has of our goods and services. Are they a current customer and a friend of the business? Do they need a little education on who we are and why we’re important? Are they not aware of us or that our service exists? Or maybe they’ve never heard of us and didn’t know that someone sold what we sold. Depending on that level of awareness, we may need to approach the content we’re creating differently. And then we have to think about is it organic social or paid social? Because the platform affects the content as well. But when we think about whether our customers know us or not, we should be trying to think about how that content reaches different segments at different times. We need not just to focus on experienced customers, but we also need to reach out to new customers and introduce ourselves in different ways. Finally, I like to think about a list of emotions that we can evoke. There’s a long list that we use, including things like being interested, happy, sad, and insightful.
These different emotions can help us think about ways that we can interpret the needs of our customers and the things that we want to promote. So instead of just saying we offer X, we want to imply it in an insightful and emotional response. We might say, did you know what X can do for a business and this is what we have done to someone’s business and how we’ve helped them? Or this is why we don’t do this because of X or Y. Pairing the emotions with the content can help you see through a way to make the content more relevant. Having content that can be approached in a different manner can help it be more engaging. Are you producing content? Are you a content producing machine? What’s your favorite piece of content you’ve ever produced? I would love to hear about it. Send me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast and stay tuned for more great episodes. And we’ll see you on the next one.
