The more content that gets created, the harder it is for the right piece of content to reach the right person. It starts to look like a vast wasteland of useless communication.
Is your brand becoming irrelevant?
According to a recent study, 58% of brand content is not meaningful and people wouldn’t care if 77% of brands disappeared. If you want you brand to matter, it has to create a meaningful connection with it’s customers. One great way to do that is content, but only if that content is meaningful.
Creating content and making it meaningful is not a perfect science. In fact, it’s not scientific at all!
It’s an art form. Yes we can measure it and we can create best practices but it’s still a combination of intention, empathy, and execution that can make or break the effectiveness of a piece of content.
My top tips for creating content are:
1. Breathe life into your content
2. Build a window, not a wall
3. Create with intention
4. Adapt to your environment
Breathe life into your content
Content should be built to live and evolve. You may only create it once, but once it’s created it will be interpreted, interacted with, extrapolated on, and shared. The conversation that you start with your content will continue on beyond its creation. If and when it’s found, the content is alive. Now the first person to find it may not interact with it directly, but they may take that knowledge with them or they may dismiss it. But it has the potential to carry on indefinitely.
The key word here is potential. In the same way that many of the words we say today can be forgotten tomorrow, much of the content we create will be forgotten, or worse remain unfound. But if it lives up to it’s potential, the content should take on a life of its own. As a content creator, you have the option to create and walk away, or create and stay involved in the conversation. It’s much more meaningful if you stay and engage with the community that interacts with your content.
Build a window not a wall
Your content is more than a demonstration, it should reveal something. If you build something for the sake of people seeing it, they are going to have trouble connecting with it. But if you build something that let’s people in and reveals something about your thoughts, values, or beliefs, you give them the chance to relate and connect with you.
The best way to create relatable content, is to make it personal. Even if you are creating content for a business, that business was founded on principles that are personal in nature.
Your mission and the values of your business are personal. When you talk about the things you are trying to accomplish and why, you open the door up for people who want to support you.
As Mark Schaefer wrote in his latest book Marketing Rebellion, “Only one consideration is far and away the primary driver of customer loyalty, shared meaning. A shared meaning is a belief that both the brand and the consumer have about a brands values or broad philosophy.”
If you want to matter to customers and keep them coming back, they need to find some common ground with your brand.
Create with intention
Before building content, have a goal. Not just a business goal, but a specific idea or takeaway that you want the audience to leave with. Have a reason for creating content. It should tie back to providing value for your audience. When you create with intention, you can measure your success. Maybe you didn’t create something as good as you wanted it to be. That’s measurable if you had a goal or an intention.
Some of the common roles of content are to inspire, entertain, educate, inform, help and reward. Content created with any of these intentions create some type of value for the reader. Even if it’s an intangible value, a lot of content provides value in how it makes a person think or feel after reading or watching or listening.
If you are having trouble figuring out what content to build or judging if the content you are providing is meaningful, it’s always good to look back at your intention. If you know why you built the content and see how it aligns with the values of your business, and you know what you want the audience to gain by engaging with it, you’ll find it much easier to create with purpose and intention.
Adapt to the environment
Context is key. Content can be very confusing when it’s taken out of context. It’s your job to either find the right environments to deliver the content or to create the appropriate context.
If you want to sell diapers, it’s better if you sell them to parents when they are thinking about parenting. If you throw a diaper ad on the jumbotron at a baseball game, you may reach a lot of parents, but you are not reaching them when they are thinking about changing diapers. You can create the context by featuring a celebrity baseball player in the ad talking about what diapers they use for their kids. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than not having any context at all.
The more contextual and timely you can be, the more meaningful the content will be for the audience.
Stay relevant. Create content with intention, tell your story, find your audience, and make real connections. Build a brand that matters today, so you can thrive tomorrow.
Check out my Free Online Branding Checklist Branding Checklist to get tips on how to get your business found online!
Brandon Birkmeyer is the host of the Brands on Brands on Brands Podcast. I believe that building brands that matter today is the only way for a business to thrive tomorrow. Brands that are true to a purpose. Brands that put people first. Brands that build real connections.