By Zach Watson
The way most marketers create content is all wrong—I know because I used to do it for years.
Earlier in my career, I worked at a B2B company intent on building a large supply of inbound traffic. The site was optimized for conversions, so the more sessions we brought in, the higher our ROI on the channel. Marketing had a team of three to four writers who each churned out four to five articles a week. After several years, we were attracting over 150,000 unique visitors to the site each month.
So what’s wrong with this story? Well, no one knew anything about our audience. We chose topics through keyword research only, and then did our best to write something intelligent about each subject. Sure, people came to the site. But that’s only because we blanketed the front page with content, not because our content answered their most pressing questions. Our strategy was volume over value.
Small businesses can’t afford this approach, and neither can smart marketers. The internet is too saturated with content. Over 4 million blog posts are published every day. This is why you hear experts say there’s not much point in creating good content anymore. If you’re not producing something outstanding, it’s too hard to stand out. And you won’t see a return.
But don’t lose all hope just yet. In the years since I left that job, I’ve continued to work in content (I’m a director now), and I’ve found the secret to generating great media has two parts:
1. Really get to know your audience
These days I work at an agency with a bunch of designers. Like me, they need to get to know their audiences. But instead of just relying on data, they prefer to interview them. This is known as generative research, because it “generates” ideas for the designers. That way, they don’t assume what people think about a design, they learn directly from the source.
Good marketers are using this same approach in their content research and coming up with ideas that directly relate to what their audience wants to read.
A real life example: This is how Timi Olotu builds the content strategy at PatSnap. By having in-depth conversations with customers, he’s able to identify topics that matter to his audience and develop content tailored to those interests.
“We start by really understanding what our audience is trying to achieve in their job, and the surrounding context. Then we ask them about obstacles to achieving those goals,” Oluto explains. “The key is to standardize the kind of questions you want to ask, so you can collect similar kinds of data and find trends. It’s critical to organize information so the content team can ask, ‘Where’s the intersection between all the things that matter to our audience, and all the things that matter to us?’”
And the results of that research? PatSnap’s audience values the company’s content so much people email Olotu when they’re changing jobs (i.e., changing emails) to make sure they stay on the newsletter list.
Olotu’s process has a lot of similarities with the methods UX consultants use in their work, and after only a little while at my new agency, I found myself taking a similar approach. Instead of only relying on my intuition and third party data, I interview customers about what they think is important, build an understanding of their challenges, and write content based on what my customers define as valuable.
And guess what? I’m starting to get messages from readers saying how much they appreciate the content. My blog is doing a lot more with a lot less content, because what I’m creating is worthwhile to my audience.
This is what the vast majority of people get wrong in content marketing. They write about what they think is important, or just look at keyword data and try to write something a little better than what’s already there. If you really want to get an ROI on your content without spending a fortune, you need to prioritize value over volume, which means you need to know what your audience wants.
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2. Educate people with stories
Knowing what your audience really, truly cares about is one thing. Making the content you create about those topics compelling is another. The good news is you have a secret weapon: storytelling.
Stories are the fundamental way humans learn. When we consume information in narrative form, neural activity increases by five times in our brain. When we read, watch, or listen to a story, we make connections, and we remember things better.
This is incredibly news if you’re, say, trying to create educational audience for your customers.
Now, I know a lot of junk has been written about “brand storytelling,” but there’s actually a far simpler way to tell stories in your content: use examples. Think of examples as micro stories. Rather than devote an entire post to one lengthy narrative, you can intersperse educational short stories across your content.
Follow these three steps to creating a good micro story:
- Set up a relatable problem, ideally something your audience is struggling with that your business, or businesses like yours, can solve.
- Create some tension by providing a few details about how the problem was affecting someone or something.
- Make sure the example resolves the problem in a satisfying and educational way.
When you combine these three parts, they form a nice story arc. There’s a problem; it’s painful; and then it’s solved. The reader is entertained and educated.
Even if you’re not a fantastic creative, using story-based examples is an easy way to instantly make your content more engaging and useful. Combine that with your new insight into what matters most to your audience, and you’ve got a two-pronged plan for producing content that actually adds value to people’s lives. Which means it will also deliver greater value for your business.
RELATED: What 10 Years of Content Marketing Did for This Startup
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