You’ve likely heard that the 5Ws – who, what, where, when and why – are essential to good journalistic writing. In fact, the 5Ws are worth referencing when you’re creating any sort of professional content.

Knowing that you want to deliver the right message in the right place and at the right time covers what, where and when. But to truly get it right, you need to address the who and why.

In this post we’ll talk about who your content is really for and why you need to make sure you answer that just right.

What is Audience-First Content?

Audience-first content is content that puts the audience first by meeting today’s expectations for intelligent, personalized, targeted and relevant messaging.

There’s a lot behind this simple definition, and technology and data are a big part of that. Let’s first just focus on the basics: creating content for the “who” …

So, when you create content, who is it for? The obvious answer is prospects. But are you creating the content they want, or the content you think they want?

Imagine it like this: When you’re buying birthday or holiday gifts do you buy something you like and think the recipient should also like? Or do you learn what they like and search for a gift that suits their taste?

Most would agree that the latter is a better idea, assuming the goal is to find a gift the recipient will honestly appreciate and keep in their home.

A similar approach can apply to content creation. Rather than developing your content first and trying to build an audience on it, be audience-first. Audience-first content (also called audience-driven content) discovers who the audience is, learns what they like and creates content that caters to said information.

One part of knowing your audience is creating personas, and perhaps you’ve done this. Yet, these snapshots of typical customers can change over time as people’s needs, wants and lives change.

Audience-first content is customized to your target audience by aligning with their needs and keeping their attention at various points in the customer journey. TandemSeven has a nice graphic illustrating this:

To make that happen, you’ll need solid data. One way to do this is interviews with your buyer persona to better understand how they make buying decisions.

As TandemSeven points out (and we agree):

Many enterprises are organized in silos – with each silo focusing on optimizing specific channels, touchpoints, and/or aspects of the end-to-end customer experience. It is not uncommon for each group or function in an enterprise to design and measure customer experiences independently of each other. But customers think of all their interactions with a company as connected.

Today the customer journey is not always linear. This article from McKinsey discusses how the process is actually circular with four phases:

Consumer attention is quite limited because there is so much content to choose from; if yours isn’t crafted to them specifically (fitting seamlessly into how they use content, aligning with their interests and providing value), you’re just going to sound like another marketer, and the audience won’t stick around.

And, of course, this depends a lot on your content channel marketing strategy. For example, if you want to compete, be relevant and show up in the search results, you have to create content for both for your prospects and search engines – ensuring you’re implementing SEO best practices before you publish.

Why is an Audience-Driven Approach So Important?

The numbers don’t lie. According to Demand Metric, content marketing costs 62 percent less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads as traditional marketing.

Audience-first content is part of an audience-driven, or customer-centric content marketing approach. Your content, marketing, product development, customer service, etc. should all operate based on solid data on what your audience and customers need and want.

An audience-driven approach to your content also fits with an inbound marketing style. Unlike an outbound marketing approach, which is interruptive and targets a wide audience (think television commercials and banner ads), inbound marketing strives to attract potential customers with content that interests them – true content marketing.

Further, positions in the customer journey change. People who, at one point, had only visited your website might now be repeat customers, so you’d want to approach them differently and with more familiarity. This will help keep them engaged at every stage.

For example, instead of reaching out to regular buyers with a deal on the product they usually buy, offer them the deal plus an even better deal if they add a product that complements the first. To keep it customer-centric allow them to choose the additional item from a short list, and link the listed products to relevant web pages and blogs to make the most of your content.

If you want to talk bottom line, audience-first content and an audience-driven approach reduce marketing waste. You might spend more time researching and tweaking upfront, but once your content and audience are aligned, you can build relationships and trust with your customers. It’s a long-accepted fact that returning customers bring in more revenue than new ones, so those early time investments are sure to pay off in the long run.

Before you develop your content and determine where and when to share it, know who you’re creating it for and why they want it. It’s going to take some time and energy up front, but audience-first content is an investment that can bring long-term benefits for your brand.

What have you learned about your audience and creating content for them first? Let’s talk about it in the comments! 

Ideally, quality content, much like great art, should never be rushed. After all, it took Leonardo da Vinci four years to complete the Mona Lisa

However, the reality is that most of us are working under deadlines and, even if we aren’t, would prefer to get things done sooner rather than later. I’ll pass on writing the same blog post for four years, thanks.

For times when you need to crank out some content quickly but don’t want to sacrifice quality, try following these guidelines.

Store Ideas for Later

This is something you can do beforehand that will make future time crunches much less stressful.

To start, simply take some time to brainstorm article ideas. If you’re not sure what topics should be covered, ask around your organization to get multiple different takes on what’s important and what might be interesting to readers.

If you want to reduce your future stress even further, you can write a rough outline for the best ideas in advance (check out Jessica’s earlier post to learn how to write a great outline).

Then, the next time you’re scrambling to figure out what in the world to write about, you can thank your past self for assembling such a handy backlog of ideas.

Schedule Time to Write

Writing is one thing which can’t be multitasked. If you’re trying to think of a few sentences at a time in between phone calls and meetings, I can guarantee you’ll create little to no meaningful content.

So, especially if you’re working with a tight deadline, be sure to set aside dedicated time for writing and writing alone.

As soon as you learn when your content will be due, open up your calendar, find a free hour and block it out. Even if you don’t get everything done in one go, you’ll have gotten a lot more accomplished than if you had tried to write on the fly.

Plus, after spending a dedicated chunk of time on content creation, you’ll be able to go about the rest of your business without being constantly distracted.

Use Previous Content as a Template

Contrary to what your initial reaction might tell you, there’s nothing wrong with recycling previous pieces of content. In fact, doing so can help to establish a consistent voice for your brand (you can find out more about that from a previous post of mine).

The key here is not to copy and paste an older article, change around a couple words and click “publish.” Instead, open up a past article in one window and a blank document in another. Then, write the new article while simultaneously making an effort to follow the old article’s general format as you go.

This will make it a lot easier to form an introduction, figure out how to organize your subheadings and think of a compelling call to action. And, most importantly, all your content will be original and well-written while still remaining congruous.

If you could use some help creating high-quality content or making quick turnarounds, check out bizbuzzcontent’s content creation services.

Do you have any tips for getting content created quickly? Feel free to let me know in the comments!

If your content marketing efforts aren’t getting the results you expected, there can be several reasons behind that failure.

Here, I’ll go over some of the most common ones and explain what you can do to fix them. Get ready to bring your content back to life!

You Only Focus on Company News

Want to know what’s even more boring than seeing a bunch of vaguely inspirational quotes on your Facebook feed? Seeing a bunch of brands relentlessly try to promote themselves and their products on your Facebook feed.

The truth is, there’s nothing wrong with getting the word out about a new product or a featured service. However, it’s also important that you make sure people recognize your company for something other than its advertisements and self promotions.

Because of this, it’s up to you to ensure that your content actually contains, well, content.

This means you’ll have to put a little more thought into the content you publish. Instead of just blogging about a product or service you offer, try branching out into topics related to your industry as a whole and writing original thought pieces on them.

After all, people don’t just search for specific products. They also search for information about current events, new innovations and industry trends, all of which you have the ability to cover.

And, once you’ve established yourself with readers as a reliable source for experience-based content, those readers will be much more likely to think of you the next time they’re in the market for a product or service you offer.

To get an idea of what you should write about other than your own company’s news and offerings, try getting a sense of what your ideal readers are searching for. Here at bizbuzzcontent, our favorite tool for this purpose is Answer the Public. When you plug a search term in, you’re presented with an easily understandable visualization of the search queries people are entering with that keyword.

For instance, plug in the term “content writing” and you’re greeted with the following graphic, as well as several others:

Once you have an idea of the types of questions people are asking about your area of expertise, you can start to form ideas for new content around the answers to those questions.

You’re Giving SEO the Cold Shoulder

We all know that content cannot consist of a string of keywords thrown together to vaguely resemble an article. Such content may initially get a few clicks, but it’ll soon be flagged by Google as low-quality, and thus bumped down in search rankings.

What some of us may not be entirely aware of, however, is that SEO (when done right) is still pretty important. Actually, scratch that–it’s very important.

In short, SEO helps search engines do their jobs more effectively and efficiently. That is to say, it allows search engines to figure out whether your site is relevant to a search or not.

One aspect of SEO involves tailoring your backend to help spiders and bots crawl your site. We’re not going to talk about that here.

What we are going to talk about, though, is how you can incorporate SEO into your content.

First of all, you’ll need to ensure that your content is useful. This means your content should accomplish its purpose, whether that’s to answer a question, teach a skill or discuss a timely topic.

Second, you’ll need to seamlessly blend keywords into your content, including the meta description and title. What’s most important during this step is choosing keywords that are actually relevant. In fact, it may be a good idea to limit the number of keywords you’ll allow yourself to use–start with two, and see how it goes from there.

Check out Jessica’s guest post for 3Q Digital to learn more about how you can implement SEO into your content. Or, if you need help identifying keywords to target, try using Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool.

You’re Not Paying Attention to Data

Unlike the latest as-seen-on-TV product, content isn’t something you can simply set and forget. Once your content is published, it’s important that you pay attention to any and all collected data about its performance.

This can involve taking a look at your WordPress stats, Facebook IQ or other similar insight and benchmarking tools.

Once you have a decent amount of stats to analyze, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is there a certain day of the week (or time of day) that my readers are most active?
• Do certain types of posts (how-to articles, lists, etc.) get more engagement than others?
• Are my calls to action (CTAs) effective?
• How many people that read our content follow up by visiting the company website or following us on social media?
• Do specific topics get more clicks than others?

After you’ve answered each of those questions, you’ll be able to form a clearer picture of which content performs best and which content falls behind. Now, simply take the information you’ve gleaned and use it to create a plan for the future. This could be a list of possible topics, a calendar specifying each time of day or a new addition to your company’s style guide.

In essence, learning what types of content worked (or didn’t work) for you in the past will help you devise a smarter and more effective content strategy for the future.

If you’d like help creating content that’s useful, relevant, SEO-friendly, exceptionally high-quality and designed to get results, you might want to consider using bizbuzzcontent’s content creation services.

Why do you think some of your content has been successful or unsuccessful? What’s your go-to trick for making your content get results? Let’s talk about it below!

I don’t know about you, but I can’t get to work amidst clutter – whether it’s on my desk or in my computer.

Your approach to content creation can get cluttered, too. From disconnected ideas to disorganized files, a messy approach can slow and disrupt the writing process. This season, set yourself up for efficiency and success by “spring cleaning” these aspects of your content creation.

Project Management and Content Creation Tools

First, let’s talk about how you’re going to manage content creation with your team. Remember, the tools we use in content creation are as much a part of the process as the content creation itself.

Numerous tools exist for organizing professional tasks. If you’re using one for content project management that doesn’t suit your team, it can create more problems than it solves.

The last thing you need is confusing project management that leads to lost drafts or skipped editing. At bizbuzzcontent we use Asana, which makes us more efficient with:

• Daily, weekly and monthly task views.
• Project subtasks, which can each be assigned to different team members.
• Recurring scheduling for repeated tasks.

Now, for the digital tools and resources we use for actually creating the content. Personally, I like to keep my arsenal slim but powerful; it means I spend more time with the programs and get to know them better. It also keeps my browser’s bookmark menu easily navigable.

Document Creation

Google Drive is great for document collaboration with team members and clients. It also reduces the issues of file incompatibility that can occur when team members use multiple word processors. As you create folders and subfolders for storage, it’s essential that you keep your Drive neat and tidy so everyone can find what they need. Spend some time with Google Drive this season, ensuring:

• Each client/project has the appropriate folders and subfolders.
• Documents are shared with the team members who need them (and not with those who don’t).
• Important documents are in the right folders.
• Unneeded and duplicate files aren’t cluttering the folders.

Image Creation

If image creation is part of your content services, use resources that support a consistent look for your brand. Different stock image resources feature a wide range of collections, and can create specific looks for the blogs and websites they populate.

Rather than grabbing legal-to-use images from wherever you and other team members find them, use one or two stock image sites offering collections that truly reflect your brand. At bizbuzzcontent, one that we like is Pexels, which provides a sizable selection of very professional looking photos.

As with document creation, image creation is more organized and efficient when team members can access and edit the same files. Check out Canva if you’d like to share image content with your colleagues and/or clients (think Google Drive for images).

Editorial Calendars and Outlines

Look at your process for content creation. Do you dive in blindly, or follow a marked path of topics, outlining, writing and editing?

To step back and get a big picture view of your content (and to see if your overall messaging is goal-oriented), maintain an editorial calendar. Imagine a shared spreadsheet that includes:

• Titles/topics/ideas
• Content types (blog, social, e-book, etc.)
• Draft due dates
• Publish dates

Add whatever detail you need to get a snapshot of the company’s content schedule. Store the editorial calendar in a shared file (like the Google Drive files I mentioned earlier) so that everyone who needs to can see and edit it. We use editorial calendars for many clients here at bizbuzzcontent, and I can’t imagine functioning without them!

Goal-Driven Content Creation

Now that you’ve got the tools in place to make the process efficient, it’s ready to start thinking about what type of content you’re going to create. Rule No. 1: Content should be created to help businesses meets their goals, whether those goals are about awareness, engagement or sales.

When content creation stops working toward those goals, it can feel chaotic and directionless. Just because a topic is trendy doesn’t mean it will fit with your brand; at the same time, a conversation you’re not seeing in the headlines might be just the thing that makes you stand out.

If you need some guidance to keep your content aligned with business goals, start by asking if your content addresses:

• Who you want to reach.
• Why they need your content.
• How they’ll use it to interact with your brand.
• What the content says about your brand.

You’ll also want to find ways to measure what the content is doing for your goals. Common key performance indicators (KPIs) include traffic volume, engagement, brand awareness (thought not always easily measurable) and conversions.

Jessica wrote a great piece at the beginning of the year in which she provides a content strategy blueprint for 2018. If your goals and content feel chaotic, it will help you get organized for the months to come.

If blogging is a major part of your content creation, check out my post on creating an organized blog strategy. From time management to metrics, we’ve got you covered.

Thoughtful, Controlled Writing and Editing

You’ve got your tools, you’ve got your goals and you’re ready to write. Even the best of us occasionally feels disorganized at this point. Starting a sentence, let alone an entire article or e-book, can be more daunting than expected. As the author David Levithan says:

“The first sentence of the truth is always the hardest.”

Where to begin?

For individual pieces of content, begin with an outline. Find primary sources and determine what the major sections of the piece will cover. Don’t get overly detailed with the outline, as certain aspects may change as you get deeper into research. But having a starting point and sources to consult make it much easier to get started.

During the actual writing, mental organization is key. For tips on keeping the main point in mind and writing concisely, check out Carrie’s post on writing clear, organized content. Her major pointers include:

• Following the traditional outline format for a 5 paragraph essay.
• Creating working titles to drive the main point as you write.
• Trimming unnecessary words and flowery language.

To keep files organized, and know where content is in the writing-editing-submitting process, name them appropriately. A first version might simply be named with the title:

How to Write Clickable Titles in Just a Few Minutes

If a team member returns it for edits, perhaps add a “V2” at the end to indicate that it’s the second version:

How to Write Clickable Titles V2

Final versions, which are ready to be published, might include “final:”

How to Write Clickable Titles FINAL

During editing, tack editors’ initials onto the file name, so you know how many times the content has been seen and revised:

How to Write Clickable Titles_AB_CD_EF

A finished piece of professional content begins well before the actual writing. If your content creation process feels disorganized, freshen it up with a good spring cleaning. From aligning ideas with business goals to naming files more informatively, you can bring order to the chaos – from start to publish.

Looking for expert guidance as you organize your content? Check out our services and get in touch!