What kind of content should you create for your audience?

Isn’t that the million dollar question? You hear me all the time talking about this topic and how you should be writing content specifically for the audience you serve. But how do you know what they actually want to hear from you?

The key to answering this question is first to identify the goal for that content. What do you hope the content will achieve? The goal determines the type of content you’ll create and how it educates, inspires and move your audience to take action with your brand.

Goal – Raise Awareness of Your Brand

A common goal for content is to raise awareness of your brand, which encompasses who you are, what you do, and who you serve. You put this content out into the world in as many places as possible where your target market hangs out and hope they see it and click the link to find out more about you. The link should be a content upgrade to get these people onto your email list.

The purpose of raising awareness about your company is to expand your reputation, build brand visibility, and start building trust and credibility. Examples of content for this goal include blog posts, podcasts, social media posts, videos, infographics, and images that are public and posted in as many places as possible (think social media, Pinterest, email, etc.). It introduces your company while showing that you know what you’re talking about by offering something helpful or valuable to your target audience.

Goal – Generate and Qualify Leads

You want to create content with the goal of generating and qualifying leads. This content helps you determine which people in your sales funnel are potential buyers you can make offers to later in your marketing plan (we’ll talk about that in a moment).

At this point, the audience member knows who you are and they’re trying to see if you have something more to offer. They’re wondering if you’re worth their time. Content to build trust to eventually buy from you could be reports, cheat sheets, courses, resource lists, email messages, and other content that uniquely solves one of your audience member’s pressing problems.

Goal – Build Strong Relationships

Building strong relationships with your audience is a must, all companies want this because, with loyal fans, you’ll have loyal customers. Creating content for relationship-building should solve problems but also be more personalized. It should be exclusive to your audience and be highly unique.

You’re most likely be using a personal channel for giving them this content, such as email messages, social media content, or webinars. This content not only gets results but gets the best results. Often, your audience is at the point of evaluating the results of what you’ve taught them and wonder how they can get the results, either with you or by themselves.

This is where you’ll position yourself as the expert and if they don’t hire you, they will continue to wonder and stay stuck, stagnant, and frustrated.

Goal – Earn Revenue from Your Content

The whole point of creating content is to lead your future customer to buy from you and invest in themselves with a program of yours. Creating revenue-generating content can be done by selling the content directly (on a webinar, for example), or producing promotional content that sells a product or service (mention it across your social media platforms).

This content needs to be high enough quality that it’s worth the customer paying for. You have to demonstrate well-established authority on your topic and offer unique solutions that they cannot move forward ahead on without knowing from you how to do it. This content needs to explain the benefits of the product and the product should deliver on these benefits.

Revenue-Generating content needs to show testimonials from past customers of personal success and it needs to outline exactly what your audience can expect to get from their purchase with you.

Creating a Comprehensive Content Marketing Strategy

Chances are good that your comprehensive content marketing strategy will include more than one of the above, actually, you should include all of the above into your content calendar plan.

For example, you need content to get people into your sales funnel, and then more content to build relationships, which then leads to paid content. Make sure that each piece of content you create is aligned with a specific goal.

But how do you do that? How do you create an effective, realistic and easy content marketing plan that actually works for your business?

It’s time you stop downloading free content calendars and start investing in a content marketing plan that will guide and execute your content and marketing activities like never before. You can do all of this with the online course from Monica Writes and Social Savvy Geek, How to Create a Realistic Content Marketing Plan.

Be the end of this course, you’ll have learned the following:

• Identify core business goals and the content that will have the most impact
• Describe your ideal customer and the content they prefer 
• Take inventory of existing content to save time
• Consider time and resources you can commit to content creation
• Create a realistic content plan that has your goals in mind and in focus
• Outline the first three months of your content schedule

How to Create a Realistic Content Marketing Plan comes with seven quick and easy video lessons for you to take action steps on right away and every module comes with action guides, cheat sheets, and a workbook. Plus, you’ll receive an editorial calendar, content marketing plan, infographics and more!

If you have NO idea what you’re going to do, say or market in 2019, then your business may suffer from time, energy, lack of knowledge, and resources that could have gotten you to your year-end goal. What you need is a plan of action, content that portrays that, and guidance to pump put content that builds your brand and company into what you desire it to be.

Don’t let another year go by wondering what works and what doesn’t. It’s time to create a plan of action and you can create that by investing in yourself, your business, and your marketing by getting into the course, How to Create a Realistic Content Marketing Plan!