Conquer the Clutter - How to Create Content Around Your Niche
Why should your customers care about your newsletters, Tweets, Facebook posts and Snapchat videos?
The challenge is not to create more and more content. The real challenge is creating content that can inspire your audience to take action. Once you succeed in this, anything is possible. However, the key to achieving this ultimate goal is to build a consistent audience.
The truth is that your niche should stand out enough to be noticed by your specific audience. Stephen King suggests that you should think about your readers every time you create content. That’s why creating semi-functional personas and customer journey maps are beyond the buzzwords.
Related article: Customer Journey Mapping
At the end of the day, your content should be findable and valuable. It’s where your keyword research comes in. Once you’ve created your keyword lists using GoogleAdWords, you can use Google Trends to spark a few new word ideas. “Google Trends gives you a glimpse into the topics the world is searching for” (definition from Google). You can even compare up to five terms in popularity at a time, if you’re not sure which words would be on-point. It also enables users to find out which topic is hot in real time, thanks to its Hot Searches feature. Google Trends is also a great tool to explore what the underserved part of your business is and how you could be the leading expert to making a difference. Otherwise, even though your content may be findable, it will fade into the rest of the clutter and be ignored.
Once you’ve niched your audience and found out what they’re seeking, it’s time to look into how to tell your story. Nobody listens to a person who talks about themself especially if it’s not in an appealing way. Why would your audience listen when you continue to communicate in the same way? There are so many guidelines about story telling out there, but the bottom line is to provoke either an emotional or rational response. That will determine if your content is shareable and if it makes your brand recognizable over time. Here are some tricks to inspire your audience to actual engagement:
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A hook: It’s your content’s character which enables your audience to build a unique and consistent relationship with your brand. A hook could be a visual marker, a very unique voice and tone, or you name it. Whatever it is, it should set your content apart from other similar blog posts, YouTube videos, Facebook status, and LinkedIn articles.
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Publish consistently: Consciously or not, when your audience has come to expect your post on a regular basis, and deliberately seek it out, then it’s the time for you to crack open the bubbly to celebrate!
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Five characteristics of the perfect content: According to Jason Calacanis, serial entrepreneur, the perfect content product can be described by these five characteristics: real-time, fact-driven, visual, efficient, and curated.
What does the rest of us lose if you don’t publish?
We often tend to ask ourselves what the value of our content and who our target audience is. Let’s do it again, but with reverse logic this time. Here is a great question asked by Joe Pulizzi, the Founder of the Content Marketing Institute:
If the answer is no, then you should re-consider what your content strategy is or, most importantly, if you have a strategy in place at all.
You may think that you do not have any technical expertise on anything, thus your content existence can never make a big difference. Well, you will probably change your mind after reading this:
Andy Schneider is the Chicken Whisperer. It's not his occupation, yet it’s his own brand that he built to inform people about backyard poultry. It’s as simple as it sounds, but he hosts an online radio show five days a week for 20,000 listeners from truck drivers to school teachers. So far, he has aired 110 episodes.
He started this career out of his enthusiasm about backyard poultry. In the beginning, he couldn’t access any specific knowledge easily, but over time he educated himself and this topic became his expertise. After his effort paid off, his neighbors and friends started to ask for his help in this particular topic. As a result, he has become the go-to guy across the country for anything about chickens. He is the host of the very popular, Backyard Poultry with the Chicken Whisperer web radio show, National Spokesperson for the USDA-APHIS Bio-Security for Birds Program, Editor in Chief of Chicken Whisperer Magazine, and author of The Chicken Whisperer’s Guide to Keeping Chickens. He has been featured on CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS, as well as in TIME Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and countless other publications.
What he did was simply find a niche and start filling the content hole.
Let’s End With These Thoughts
What secret sauce should you use to make your audience ask: “I didn’t receive your latest issue, can you check that I am still on your e-mail list?” In other words, how should you create valuable content that your audience deliberately seeks out?
On our most recent show aired on February 26th, Scott Liewehr, the Industry Analyst & Founder of Digital Clarity Group and host of the CMS-Connected Show, examined where content creation sits in the organizations’ marketing strategy and if it currently works. Here is the web broadcast with deep insight by our expert analysts:
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Venus Tamturk
Venus is the Media Reporter for CMS-Connected, with one of her tasks to write thorough articles by creating the most up-to-date and engaging content using B2B digital marketing. She enjoys increasing brand equity and conversion through the strategic use of social media channels and integrated media marketing plans.