Create content that would make a snowman melt
Do you wanna build a snowman….
You might recognize that line. It’s from a catchy tune (in the movie Frozen) and it is one of those songs that sticks in your head the moment you hear it. Like forever (you’re welcome).
Brilliantly written copy can do that.
Don’t believe me? Can you tell me what Tony the Tiger says (well, if you are of the age to remember him)? If I say “Toy-R-Us kid” does the jingle immediately run through your brain?
It’s not just music. What do you see when I say “just do it” or any other of the many, many advertising slogans that exist in our minds?
It turns out that content can have the same effect — it’s what brand building is all about.
Creating a content strategy
Content strategy is the creation of a plan of attack for building your brand, increasing your website traffic, converting more leads, and growing your bottom line.
Content marketing on the other hand is the implementation of the strategic plan you made for your content.
Well, what does that mean?
It means blogs, social posts, articles, white papers, videos….all the things that you do for reputation management online.
After all, brand building is really reputation management in many ways. You create content, optimize it for SEO, post it on your blog or social media in an effort to attract (and sales) from your ideal client.
It looks like this:
Follow this path each week and soon you will have a library of content that you can use to build an audience, create courses or ebooks. It will help you get found by real, actual humans and search engine crawlers.
Make it easier with a content calendar
Most people get bogged down at this point. They feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content that is needed for success in content marketing. I get that. There is some truth to the fact that it can be a challenge to create content for your business every week…every day (for social posting).
That’s where tools like a content calendar or professional help comes in. A content calendar is helpful because it takes away the “deer in the headlights” feeling of having to come up with a topic each week.
I create (by which I mean my team creates) a 16-week calendar that outlines the topic to be written about each week. We target the keywords to use, the length to be written (sometimes we create longer and more informative work that is “cornerstone content” meant to be more of a definitive guide to a topic than a short blog), and even pre-create title tags and headlines.
This exercise can be hard at the moment that it is done, but is so worth it when the morning comes to write your blog.
I like to start with writing a blog post. Then, the content for the blog can be repurposed as social posts, articles on sites such as Medium, and even bunched together to become an ebook or course.
You should be able to repurpose each blog into 8 additional pieces of content.
This, at least to me, makes the writing process feel productive..even on days when I struggle to come up with the words I want to say.
So, do you wanna build a snowman?
Your goal is to create content that is memorable (or at least interesting enough to be read and acted on), consistently, that is posted online and optimized, and that gets read.
Layer each action on top of each other, and soon you will have a creative content strategy.