Jenesis | Creating content that works for you
You’re a financial adviser, no-one told you that as part of your business and marketing plan you would need to be creating content that builds relationships and helps you to grow your community. Given the intensity of the industry right now, I’ve provided a process to help you.
One of the most challenging components in a digital marketing program is building your content funnel and creating engaging content. To help you I’ve been looking at the key areas that can make this task a little less overwhelming. Like everything, it is about the process but also recognising when to do things yourself or seek support to get things done. Whatever your decision is, it’s important to explore what works for you when building your content.
As a creative, I enjoy building concepts and messages, but it isn’t always as easy to implement for myself as it is for my clients so it’s important to have a process. There is no hidden secret to creating content but let me help you with the key areas, so it can work for you.
The Content Creating Process:
- Who are you creating content for? Make sure that you can clearly articulate who is your audience beyond a demographic.
- Why are you creating content? Understanding the purpose of your content is key to the style and nature of the content you produce.
- Decide how you will proceed in producing your content. Consider, if you or a team member are producing the content or whether you are out-sourcing to a team to support you.
- Champion who you are. Now, this is where you get to stand out and be the expert that you are in what you do. Your community relies on you to champion what you know and be a positive influence on them.
- Where will your content be published? Be clear if your content is being used for social media, website, your email newsletter, blog, client communication or lead campaign.
- Style of content. What type of content are you creating?
- Video
- Blog
- Podcast
- Infographic
- Images – original and real-time images can act as a great engagement tool when building out your content. Whilst these may not allow in-depth conversation on a topic. They do provide an opportunity to build and strengthen relationships through emotional engagement.
- Ensure your images are customised to where your content is being published. Your images are often seen before a single word has been read so you want to be sure they reflect the message you want to convey.
Making your content happen
Your content calendar is telling you that your next article is due by Friday so what do you do. With so much demand on our time, gone are the days when we can simply drop everything and quickly put a piece of content together. To prevent increasing levels of anxiety of content creation, it’s important to put a content calendar together that reflects your marketing strategy and so you know what’s happening and when.
Your content calendar does not need to include all the minute details, but it should at the very least include:
- Publishing Date – date of actual release or publication.
- Title or topic – the focus of your content.
- Resource – who is authoring your content, in-house or external
- Due date – this is relevant for both you and an external provider to ensure you have your content prior to your publishing date.
- Task Owner – this is the person responsible for ensuring that the above is managed from beginning to end and maintaining the content status.
- Content Status – from idea to working in progress to complete, what stage is your content at.
There are many examples of content calendars or editorial calendars available. To make it easier, you can use everything from a simple excel spreadsheet to apps like Slack, Trello, Asana and iMeet Central. These can help you to varying degrees to manage out this stage of content development. Try the free versions of each of these to see if they can work for you. Use your calendar as a tool to manage your time commitment to get your content done. Start with the basics first and work up to the more complex project management tools.
Get as much value out of the content you create as you can but repurposing it through different platforms and in different content styles.
Once you have these important steps done the next biggest priority is to keep your content focused, consistent and ensure it is in line with your overall marketing strategy.
How can I help? Book a chat and walk me through what you are doing with your content creation; together we can work out what your next step should be.