Content Strategy: Coping with the Attention Deficit

This post serves as a contextualized directory for the many tools and resources I use and recommend. If you see a link, it is there for a reason.

2007 was a great year to be a blogger.

I had a Wordpress.com hosted blog on an obscure subdomain, and marketing it consisted of occasionally dropping a link into a forum or IRC channel and cross-linking with other bloggers in the same subject area.

With this approach, without any of the tools and practices I employ today, it did well.

‘If you build it, they will come’ had a certain amount of truth to it, with few enough people blogging about niche subjects for anyone to have a shot. Unfortunately it wasn’t to last. Content production soon outpaced consumer appetite, due in part to content becoming a significant player in search engine optimisation. Everyone wanted in on the game.

Now brands looking to benefit from content are faced with a tougher question: How to create content that people enjoy enough to share?

Adding value gets better long-term results than extracting it.

Understanding this statement as your top-level motivation is the key to the success of content strategy today.

Your #1 goal should be providing enough value to your readers that they think it’s worth the time of others in their network. Aim to solve problems and provide opportunities. Brand exposure and conversions are not healthy top-level motivations for content.

How this shapes your approach can be summarised by answering the following questions:

Who is your audience?

In terms of demographics, interests, professions…

Who can you provide value for, and who can provide the value that you are looking for? What are the unifying interests and themes in that group? Can you validate that this market exists as a cohesive group with avenues to share your content?

Do some brainstorming and analysis to evaluate your potential audience. Look at who is mentioning your brand online and find out what other content sources they’re using. Do some analysis on the performance of content from those sources to see what gets traction. Look at what kind of(and how many) questions the your people in your target group are asking, and whether you can address them.

Are there already websites out there that cater to your theoretical audience profile? What do they offer, and how is it performing? How big is their reach, and how fast are they growing? Does it prove or disprove your assumptions for market potential?

The answer to this question is found in the identification of an easily definable and validated interest group, for example:

• People who work in social media marketing.
• People interested in entrepreneurship for social good.
• People looking for to learn more about data related technology.

What problem are you solving?

In terms of value, opportunity, resources…

Depending on your market, you may be facing a state of content shock, where your audience is already presented with more content than it is capable of consuming. Competition for that limited attention is intense, which is why you need a clear value proposition.

Content is a product, and should be resourced, supported and scrutinised as such. The number one priority is to find product/market fit. Where is the value for your audience? How do you differentiate yourself from others? How do you become something they rely on?

That value proposition can simply be producing the highest quality content for your market, if you are qualified and capable of that. However, there may be easier problems to solve that are more valuable to your audience. If you are familiar enough with your audience you may already have some opportunities in mind, otherwise come up with some informed assumptions to test.

This value will become the keystone of your brand, it’s what you become known for — if, indeed, you become known. You are not restricted to this one area for content, but it should be central to your overall strategy.

Applying your value add to the audience examples would provide your market definition and vision statement:

• Helping people who work in social media marketing find the right tools through offering expert reviews.
• Helping people who are looking to find or present opportunities at entrepreneurial projects for social good.
• Providing resources for people looking to move their skill set and career in the direction of data related technology.

Did you get it right?

In terms of vision, value, market…

You’ve done your research, and you’re confident that you’ve got a vision that’s a good fit with your audience. The next step is validating your assumptions with data.

Pure traffic is the most intuitive way to measure the quality of your content — and often will be the KPI your higher-ups push for because of the simplicity. If people enjoy the content they’ll keep coming back and they’ll share links, and traffic will grow. Increased traffic equals brand exposure, increased conversions, more revenue… all that good stuff. Right?

Sure, but perhaps your content marketing just isn’t effective enough? What’s your baseline? Perhaps you need to work harder, do more link building, post to more social networks, post more frequently, post at different times, use different keywords?

There are far too many factors that impact traffic for it to ever be a good metric for success. In the best case you hamper your content marketing efforts because you don’t want to skew the numbers, in the worst case you’re digging your way out of a hole — marketing poor content to try and establish its quality. The chicken and egg dilemma.

The most valuable data will tell you how the content categories on your blog are performing, how effective your social media strategy is, whether changes to your website have had a positive or negative response. You need data that gives you insights into the specifics that will allow you to steer your content in the right direction.

Metrics should be quality focused, and inform decisions:

• How many people share your content?
• Which content is performing the best?
• How many people subscribe?
• How many people engage with you on social media?

Curation

Someone asked me the other day what blogs I read on a regular basis, and I struggled to name many. I simply don’t have to time to follow individual blogs anymore.

I still consume a lot of content, I just don’t go out and find it myself. I rely on personal recommendations, social curation, crowd curation and expert curation to do the leg-work for me. If I read a blog regularly it’s because it consistently finds its way into those channels with outstanding content.

Providing an effective curation service is sometimes the greatest value you can offer as a content platform, and might be an option for you to consider. Curation within individual markets is going to become more and more important as those markets hit content shock.

At the least you want to consider what curators operate within your market, and how you can target them with your content.

The roundup

• Aim to add value, not extract it.
• Know your audience and their needs.
• Rely on actionable metrics, not vanity metrics.
• Curate, or be curated!

Did I miss anything? Disagree? Leave a comment.