***

Want great content? Here are the 6 essentials you must have

World-wandering entrepreneur, content marketing strategist, and Mastermind leader, Valerie McTavish, shares the fundamental keys to great content

Valerie worked in live TV for years and describes it as, “Thrilling and alive. It’s 100% now!” It’s like skiing on a triple black diamond when you’re a skilled skier. “You know there’s danger here, but you also know you can handle it.” You may have started as a terrified beginner on the bunny hill, but you learned through experience. Eventually, you’re confident you’re equipped to handle the issues that inevitably pop up, moment by moment — either when working in live TV, or when skiing. 

In her career, Valerie now focuses on online content marketing. Live TV may be like downhill skiing, but content marketing is like mountaineering. It’s a slow process that requires a plan and steady persistence to reach your destination goal.

As a child, Valerie loved to write stories. And, all her adult life, she has worked in different forms of communication. (She even has a couple of novel manuscripts squirrelled away, which she says are not good enough to see the light of day.) As well as live TV, she also worked in radio and print before shifting to online content marketing. When she eventually turned to content marketing, she began creating content for her clients through her business, VM Creative Content.

She discovered that many clients didn’t understand that content doesn’t work magic by itself. You can’t slap a blog post or a video on your website and simply expect an audience to show up. Content creation is most effective with a plan. That’s why Valerie’s content marketing company evolved from solely content creation towards content strategy. 

Eventually, she began to place more emphasis on helping clients create their own video content and content marketing strategy. She created a new business and teaches her clients through Masterminds, Masterclasses, and individual coaching sessions. 

Over her years of experience in content marketing, she’s learned that these are the 6 key ingredients that are essential for making great content. If your content is missing any one of them, your efforts will likely fall flat.

1. Knowledge of the target market/audience for your content

When Valerie was young and wanted a job working in live TV, she ‘harassed’ (her word) the producer of Breakfast Television daily for two weeks straight. But she understood what her ‘audience of one’ was looking for. Every day, she pitched irresistible ideas that would be great segments for his show. She added appeal to her messages with gifts of fresh Italian cannolis and beer. 

It worked. 

The producer invited Valerie to help out with the show — the beginning of five years of working in live morning news. The key to her successful pursuit was knowing her target audience: knowing what his pain points were, what excited him, and where the gaps were, and how her work could fill them. If she hadn’t had ideas he liked, he wouldn’t have been interested. Perhaps if she’d given gifts of kale and kombucha, she wouldn’t have gotten the job.

Content marketing works the same way. Know who your target audience is (think psychographics as well as basic demographics) and what they want:

• What are their pain points?

• What excites them?

• What do they want or dream of? 

• What is their desired outcome?

• What do they look forward to?

• Where do they consume online content?

• What would make them want to purchase your services or product?

• What’s their decision process when they make a purchase from a business like yours?

How do you find all this out? The best way is to actually talk to your current and past customers. Ask them why they chose you over your competitors (or over doing nothing). Ask them how they discovered you. Ask them how long they had been dealing with the problem that led them to you, and why they put up with it for so long.

If you sell an expensive product or service, I recommend Adele Revella’s book, Buyer Personas: How to Gain Insight into your Customer’s Expectations, Align your Marketing Strategies, and Win More Business. It explains exactly how to interview your customers to get the information you need.

If you don’t yet have any or enough customers to interview, try to find out where your target audience is hanging out online. Read their blog posts and blog comments, their online reviews and testimonials, their social media posts, their questions and answers on Quora — anywhere you can think of where they might be talking about issues relevant to your product or service.

“Listen to the language people are using. Use that language back to them in your content.”

Researching your potential audience will help you come up with great content that not only addresses issues your audience cares about, but that also ‘speaks the same language’ as your customers — which will help your content marketing have more impact. If they want cannolis, don’t give them kale (and vice versa).

2. Intention for your content

Once you’re clear on who your audience is, create content with intention. There are a couple of questions to ask about the content you’re creating: 

• Why are you creating this?

• How does it fit into the plan for your business?

For example, let’s suppose you’re busting your buttocks creating beautiful images and posting multiple times a day on Instagram. People love your images and your follower numbers are increasing.

Valerie would ask you why you’re doing that. How does it fit with your business goals? If you’re a solo service-based entrepreneur who can serve only a few clients at a time, how does having thousands of Instagram followers help you? Is that the best way to spend your time when marketing your business? 

The importance of having an intention behind your content was one of the lessons that Valerie learned by failing to do so. Years ago, she and her partner in life and business, Tim Wohlberg, set up a business and produced great content — but without an intention for how the content was going to help the business put money in the bank.

Even though the business is pretty much defunct now, it still has a website, if you’d like to check it out: Be More Spontaneous. Valerie has left the site up, as an example to her clients of what not to do.

Here’s the back story. Valerie and Tim are huge world travellers. Valerie has visited more than 70 countries, including places that aren’t on the average North American’s itinerary, such as Cambodia, Bosnia, and Mauritania. They’re also fans of spontaneity:

“It all started with a coin toss on the first date – a fun way to decide where we would go. At the time, we were both working in the media as producers and scheduling every micro-detail of our shows down to the second. Planning was the last thing we wanted to do in our leisure time.”

Valerie and Tim founded Be More Spontaneous with the idea of bringing more spontaneity into other people’s lives too. They sold a $2 app and a $10 dice set that helped people have spontaneous adventures. They produced great content and people loved it.

But despite building an enthusiastic audience, they never got clear on how that helped them in their business.

How did avid podcast listeners translate — ultimately — into income? Even if a customer bought the app and the dice set, that was it. There was nothing else for them to buy, no plan for how the content they were happily consuming would help Valerie and Tim’s business grow.

It’s important to create content that your audience loves — but you need to know how it’s going to help your business. Every blog post, every video, every podcast, needs to be created with the intention to serve your ideal customer. In turn, you need to be clear how your content will (eventually) help your ideal customer become a literal, paying customer.

Valerie would be the first to acknowledge that there’s a time to be spontaneous and to head off in any direction, without a map and without a plan. Content marketing (generally speaking) is not one of those times.

3. Connection with your audience

Let’s suppose you’ve taken the time to get to know your market, you understand some of the problems they face, and you’ve got a clear intention for your content.

For your content to help you build a connection with your audience, they need to find it valuable. Your content should help them solve their problems. For example: 

• Does your audience struggle with time management? Produce a 3 minute video with recommendations for a morning routine that will help them get the most out of their day. 

• Are they finding it difficult to decide between two different construction methods for the new hotel they want to build? Create a white paper that shows why they should choose one method over the other. 

• Do they need to build an email list to grow their business, but have no idea how to do that? Record a podcast episode that gives practical advice on how to get more email subscribers. 

• Are they finding it difficult to see how an autonomous robot would help their business? Write a blog post that explains how to calculate the ROI on a robot of the type you sell.

“Get clarity on your why: Get clarity on who you’re serving and how you can help them.”

Once you know your ‘why’ — who you’re serving and how you can help them — it becomes easier to know what content to create. And it’ll also help on the days you don’t feel like doing it. Your knowledge, expertise, and point of view are valuable; share what you know. You don’t need to wait until you feel you’re an expert who knows ‘everything’ (because you’ll never feel like that!).

As Taughnee Stone at Endeavor Creative puts it:

“Think about the people you can help. You are capable of helping others even if you’re only one step ahead of them, so you don’t have to wait until you’re the leading expert in your industry to get out there and help people.”

So, after you’ve learned about your audience, to build connection with them you kick off by producing great content that they find helpful. But one of the wonderful things about online content marketing is that it’s not simply pouring information into silent, receptive vessels. Your customers can talk back!

This engagement itself can be a valuable source of marketing. For example, most social platforms’ algorithms mean that the more comments a social post gets, the more other people get to see it. Your followers’ comments are also useful material for future content marketing efforts because they give you insight into your audience.

Perhaps most importantly, responding to your followers’ comments further develops the connections and relationships you have with them.

Valerie says:

“It’s not enough to post or publish content. This implies a one-way communication. You shouldn't think of content as something you put out there and forget about. In an ideal world, content builds a relationship between you and your customers or fanbase. Good content is a conversation starter.”

As you develop relationships with your audience, you’re building the ‘know, like, trust’ factor. People who consume your content are more likely to become customers when you have an emotional connection with them. And, yes, that goes for B2B businesses too.

A survey of over 2,000 business decision-makers found that: 

“56% of [a] final purchase decision is driven by emotion – with feelings like trust, confidence, optimism and pride emerging as the most influential.”

(The B2B path to purchase: An emotional roadmap by Conor Wilcock, director B2B International)

In sum: Connect with your audience by helping them solve their problems (in a way they find engaging). And foster relationships with them by listening and responding to them.

4. Some SEO knowledge

The best content in the world can’t help your business if nobody sees or hears it. SEO (search engine optimization) is a way to help people find your content.

When you optimize a page on your website, say, it means that you try to make the page rank higher in search results when someone searches for a term relevant to that page. The goal is to increase the number of visitors to your website, and increase the likelihood that those visitors are your target audience/market.

In short, SEO “is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search results.” (What is SEO?)

How much SEO knowledge you need depends on your overall content marketing strategy:

“If the content is primarily on social media then you can definitely get by with just a little SEO knowledge. If the strategy aims to attract people to content on a website or on YouTube then it pays to gain a deeper understanding of SEO.”

SEO can be complex, but the best way to learn is to get started and learn more as you go. You already have social media followers, so even if you don’t yet attract organic search traffic, you can promote your content on your social media accounts. As you learn more about SEO, your content will become more discoverable through organic search and you can always go back to older content to improve its SEO quality.

Although getting found in online searches is part of what makes content marketing valuable. It’s not all there is to it. Creating helpful content and enabling relationships to develop is valuable, even if your audience is small.

Ann Handley agrees:

“One goal of content marketing is search results. But it's not the only goal. (And it's not even the first goal. But that's a comment for another article.) 

Another is to build trust with your audience. So the question becomes: Does your content tell your story in a way that's compelling and builds trust with your audience? Once your customers find you... do they like you? Do they want to do business with you?” 

(From What is content marketing? And what’s the big business benefit?)

If you own a local business and you want to learn about SEO, I recommend this fantastic guide: Local SEO: The Definitive Guide. It’ll keep you going for a while! (Of course, the guide is itself an excellent example of high quality content.)

If video is more your cup of tea, watch this and do as many of the things as you can (it’ll take time!) to gradually improve your website’s SEO:

Brian Dean’s SEO checklist for 2020. This is the same checklist he used to get over 300k monthly visitors from Google.

5. Consistency in creating your content

You need to show up, even when it’s hard. Having an audience is a matter of responsibility. 

Sometimes, you won’t feel like recording a podcast, writing a blog post, or creating a video. Sometimes it’s really hard and you might be hit by self-doubt: Who am I to speak on this topic? Who would want to hear from me? What do I have to say that anyone would pay attention to? 

But it takes time to build an audience; it takes time to reap the benefits of content marketing.

You need to create great content even when it’s hard.

“There’s no rocket to success. It’s about showing up, doing the work, being consistent, serving your audience, and engaging with them.”

Valerie says that despite all her years working in the media — in TV, radio, print, and online — she still sometimes struggles with doubting herself. 

“I’m always working on my self-esteem. It usually comes up when I’m tired. I was raised to judge myself and others. So I have to catch myself. On a good day, I catch myself before it becomes problematic. On a bad day, I second-guess everything.”

How does Valerie deal with these nagging doubts? She has a mantra that she tells herself: 

“The message I have to share today is desperately needed by someone today.” 

She says that most of her clients struggle with the same thing. If Valerie is an example to judge by, the feeling may never go away completely; instead it’s something you need to learn how to manage. Valerie tells her clients:

“Even if it’s only one person, it matters. If you don’t share your message today, someone out there will continue to struggle. You owe it to them to share.”

6. A Call-to-Action in your content

The final fundamental ingredient for great content is a clear and compelling call-to-action (CTA). The exact CTA you use in each piece of content will depend on where in the buyer’s journey your content is targeted. 

“Sometimes, the CTA is for further engagement, such as reading another blog post. Or it could be to take the relationship to the next level, such as with the offer of a lead magnet (something of value like a video course, ebook, or webinar that is given in exchange for an email address). Or, further along in the buyer’s journey, it could be sending them to a sales page or giving them an offer. The sale doesn't happen without you telling people how and where to buy.”

It’s important to make content that your audience finds valuable, but if you don’t tell them what to do when they’re done, then you’ve wasted an opportunity. Don’t assume it’s obvious what you want them to do.

You need to think about how — over time — your content is going to help turn (a subset of) your audience into paying customers for your business.

“There needs to be a clear path from your content to the solution you offer (whether it's a product or service). All of the great content in the world, with on point messaging, effective SEO, and superb engagement will never serve a business unless the audience knows how to become a customer.”

What’s next?

These 6 ingredients are the fundamentals of great content. If you start here, you’ll be on the right track — although of course there are many details we haven’t delved into in this article. We’ve barely touched on promoting your content. And we haven’t looked into the details of exactly how to create great content (such as videos, blog posts, white papers, or podcasts). But don’t let perfection trounce the good — it’s better to start and learn as you go along. You’re never 100% ‘ready’ because there’s always more to learn!

***

If you’d like to market your construction or robotics company with content like blog posts, white papers, and case studies, I can write those for you.

Let’s talk: zena@zenafreelancewriter.com