Content Creation

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Steps in creative process

So, what is content creation? It is the process of creating different creative assets and formats that serve the needs of your content strategy objectives. It engages your campaign personas in such a way to help build authority, credibility, and utility between your target audience and your brand. By creating content that interests your audience and helps them solve a need, you are building your brand in terms of trust, relevance, and credibility.

How important is creativity in your content development? Content development should, of course, be guided by audience, competitor, and keyword research. However, it's important to remember that creativity is also required to add a splash of color to those research findings and bring your content to life.

The creative process involves these steps:

1. Researching and consuming information about the brand and product to get ideas
2. Brainstorming ideas and identifying themes
3. Taking a break to leave the ideas alone for a period
4. Returning to your ideas to critique or validate them in terms of your objectives, audience, and strategy
5. Creating prototypes or content samples (where possible) to explore and test your content in its simplest form before investing further
6. Creating your content

Validating or critiquing content

When validating or critiquing your content, it is helpful to have a checklist that addresses your main goals and objectives for the content created. Verify that you have accomplished what you initially set out to achieve by asking questions such as:

• Is this content useful for my audience?
• Is it fit for the platform I’m publishing on?
• Can I accurately measure the impact of this content on my campaign?
• Is this content consistent in appearance and style with my brand?
• Is this content aligned with my business goals?

It’s also valuable to understand what motivates users to share your content. You can then take these motivations into consideration when creating content, and make it more shareable:

• Incentives: Offer your audience incentives such as competitions they can enter to win a prize, or a loyalty scheme they can join.
• Fame: Give your audience sharing options so they can show their friends and connections on social media that they have donated to a charity, or won an award, for example.
• Utility: Provide your audience with content that will be useful to them or help them in some way. For example, tutorials, toolkits, or templates.
• Topicality and trends: Create content that is topical and based on trending themes that people are likely to want to discuss or find out about.