Most small businesses are aware that to succeed online, they need to create and publish a steady stream of useful and exciting digital content. A significant challenge for many small business owners is deciding what content to publish! Paralysis by analysis frequently occurs as entrepreneurs opt to post nothing out of fear of wasting their time creating the wrong type of content.
Usually, we solve the problem of deciding what to publish with a well thought out content strategy. However, creating a content strategy is a significant task requiring a considerable investment in time. What’s more, creating an effective content strategy requires an excellent understanding of your audience and the basic principles of content marketing.
Therefore, we have put together this simple blueprint to help any business, irrespective of the resources at their disposal, create a list of compelling content topics that are guaranteed to get results!
The Ultimate Content Topic Hack
Before we get into the details of the blueprint, let me point you towards the path of least resistance. If you’re genuinely looking for the absolute easiest solution to the problem of deciding what content to publish, we recently released an article about the ultimate hack for effective content topics – The Content Marketing Strategy of Answering Questions.
The article explains the story of a struggling pool company who skyrocketed their business growth by answering every conceivable question a customer could have about their business. The surprisingly simple strategy is a proven approach that requires considerably little planning on your part.
Introduction To Our Content Blueprint
Our content topic blueprint is for anyone who wants a steady and reliable bank of content topics but doesn’t have the time, resources or expertise to create a sophisticated content strategy and plan. The activities needed to complete the blueprint are very similar to those of a content strategy. You could call it a ‘content strategy light’.
There are three ingredients in our content topic blueprint:
- Understand your audience via a persona worksheet
- Identify high impact content distribution channels
- Use our ten questions to create content ideas
Step 1 – Understand Your Audience Via A Persona Worksheet
It should come as no surprise that effective content requires an understanding of your audience. This need is why it’s of paramount importance to complete an audience persona worksheet. Many people skip this step thinking “I have a rough idea of my ideal audience, that’s enough for now”. Please do not think like this. Having the sheet completed will be a great asset to your business, and the exercise of doing it is incredibly insightful.
Remember, if you don’t know your audience, you can’t produce engaging content. Your posts are likely to be boring. Your content should be like a conversation between you and your target audience. If they’re a mystery to you, your conversation is going to be pretty one-sided. Understanding your audience is a significant part of creating a content strategy. It is not possible to create a successful strategy without knowing who your audience is! Therefore, it is also an essential part of our blueprint.
An audience persona is simply a composite sketch of the typical person who reads your content. Based on your analytics, you should create an imaginary person, a Mr or Mrs Average, to who you can address all your content. It is much easier to write for a single person than a bunch of statistics. That’s the beauty of a persona; you can come up with endless content ideas when you have a single individual in mind.
Here are the different fields you will need to complete as part of the persona. Create a detailed description for each category for your ideal audience member.
- Demographics
- Work
- Average Day
- Technology
- Values
- Goals
- Dreams
- Pain
- Challenges
- Wants
- Needs
- Common Objections
Ideally, you want to avoid making up your persona. That’s a trap that a lot of beginners fall into. You must create your persona based on real data from surveys, market research, or industry reports. However, if you’re a brand-new business, you may not have any choice. If this is the case, be sure to update the persona later with some real data.
Step 2 – Identify High Impact Content Distribution Channels
Based on your audience persona, you should have figured out where your audience spends their time online and the type of content that they are most likely to engage with. Your high impact distribution channel is where the majority of your audience spends their time. However, you must also take care to ensure it is the best channel for your content. It’s about striking a balance.
For example, Facebook is more popular with a slightly older demographic, while Snapchat is more popular with younger people. YouTube is great if you’re planning to release a lot of videos, and Medium is suitable for written articles.
Write down your top three content types and the top three distribution channels which are likely to have the highest impact. Remember, a blog on a website that you own, and your email newsletter are mandatory channels. Do not count them in the three distribution channels.
Step 3 – Use Our Ten Questions To Create Content Ideas
Our ten questions are a specially made, done for you content template. Take each question in isolation and brainstorm ideas for content topics that would answer that question. Sit down and try to think of at least ten content ideas for each question. This alone would give you 100 content ideas. Some of these content pieces might be in a regular format that can be repeatedly monthly or even weekly. Be sure to note down the content types as well, e.g. article, video, podcast etc.
- What will alleviate my audience’s pain?
- What common customer questions can I answer?
- How can I inspire my audience to achieve their goals?
- What interesting educational content can I release about what my business does?
- How can I speak directly to my audiences’ dreams?
- How can I illustrate an understanding of my audiences’ lives?
- What honest reviews can I publish that my audience will find helpful?
- How can I reaffirm my audience’s values?
- What can I produce purely to entertain my audience?
- How can I make my audience feel good about themselves and the world?
Practice Example
Let’s look at an example for question one. Here we have brainstormed a few ideas for a women’s online fashion brand.
Example Audience Pain Point
– They’re afraid of not looking fashionable
Content Ideas Answering Question One
– A monthly article highlighting fashion trends (12 pieces of content a year)
– Video log explaining how to blend the different styles of the current season (4 pieces of content a year)
– Infographic blending styles of the current season (4 pieces of content a year)*
– Photo-based article – new fashion spotted this week (52 pieces of content a year)
*note it’s ok to create similar content in different formats
This business could repeat the above example with all of the different pain points identified in the audience persona. The first question alone could provide hundreds of yearly content ideas. By completing the exercise for all ten questions, you can quite literally think of thousands of content ideas.
So please give our blueprint a try for yourself and be amazed at how many content topics you can think of!