Strategic building blocks of content creation [Part 2]

The first two building blocks marketing strategists need to take note of are the brand essence and market research & personas. The brand essence is a clear and precise summary of a business promise to current and potential customers in a sentence.

Market research on the other hand helps develop a persona which is a description of characteristics of a brand's target audience. These personas are then divided into profiles created by the writer or strategist and is based on motivation.

Customer motivation helps writers develop content effective enough to again attention from the target audience. Other building blocks are:

3. Pillars of content: these are themes linked to the brand essence. These pillars support the creation of content that'll suit the customer's interest. When creating content pillars the themes mustn't convey a different message from the brand essence and it shouldn't be totally tied to making sales.

It should also speak to the areas of interest of the audience. The essence of pillars is for solidifying and crating long standing relationships between brands and consumers.

4. Matching content formats to goals: New information can be presented to current and potential customers through different mediums by content marketers. This can be an advantage and also a disadvantage too. Depending on the brands goals or objectives a format must be created which fully supports the objective to be achieved.

Interactive formats that match your obese gives should be used, from videos to images and any other thing that can gain a customer's attention. It is not just enough for strategists to use only content-based texts as a format to get customers.

If the medium selected doesn't backup a brand's objectives then the right message cannot be passed to your target audience. Understanding the journey your customers go through as you reach your ultimate goal of making sales will help you successfully match content formats to their needs.

5. Content audit: As soon as the first building blocks of content marketing strategy have been established, the next step is to do a content audit.

This involves an audit of the existing content which brand provides i.e. Websites, white papers, videos, social media content and any other form of communication that is being put out by the brand.

After assembling all necessary content, including articles and videos, content marketers can now access each piece of content on how well they match the already laid out marketing strategy of the brand. The goal of an audit is to draw out what is currently on offer with what is necessary.

Apart from a clear understanding of the content you have, it is also necessary to know precisely how this content is being organized and accessed by your target audience.

Marketers often suggest the use of spreadsheets for this purpose. This helps marketers to establish what is missing because it acts as a guide which is very important in creating the right content.

At RDM, we use these strategic building blocks as a guide to provide our clients with the best content that meets their objectives, attracts customers and keep competitors away.

Article by Ogechukwu Okonkwo

This is a feature by RDM