Content Creation

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is it?

Content creation is the process of creating varying formats that help interest your audience, help get them excited, and help solve a potential content need for them to help build you up in terms of trust, relevance, and credibility in the space. When creating content, there's a number of key stakeholders you have to have in mind.

Key stakeholders

You need to know your key stakeholders.

Online community

Your online community comes first. Looking towards what your online community is already currently creating, or what we call user-generated content, so you can assess the types of content that they feel most comfortable with, and indeed, what resonates with them best. Examples include product reviews, customer testimonials, and indeed, what they're sharing on social media to determine what really floats their boat in terms of great content.

Industry influencers

Secondly would be industry influencers. What are influencers in your particular industry or your business space saying about businesses like yours and your competitors, and how you might leverage them by working with influencers to help amplify your content? We have information on influencer marketing coming a little bit later.

Third-party sources

So what content is being created outside of your own content marketing efforts but are still relevant to your business or your industry? This content can be used in what we call content curation to effectively drive your credibility and your thought leadership, once there is context, insight, and opinion added to it from your perspective.

Online community

We touched on your own online community and your own fans and followers are an invaluable content inspiration source. Look to see how they create content about your brand or your business, how you may amplify this, and how you may actually potentially engage with user-generated content to hear of their content creations and create a platform that really shows true value to your audience.

Collaborating with your audience will only serve to increase the resonance of your content with a wider audience segment. We also touched on influencers. Every industry on the planet has influential figures. These figures potentially could have networks that you could leverage to get your brand or business message out. Associating your business or your brand with these high-ranking influencers within a particular industry will only serve to add credibility and thought leadership to your service or your product offering.

Industry influencers

You can identify these influencers by using social listening, looking at the likes of tweet reach, which we discussed earlier on, and also BuzzSumo to see who the key contributors are for particular topics. You can work with them in an earned way by negotiating content deals or indeed through a paid way once there is disclosure and transparency about the partnership if money changes hands.

But ultimately, influencer marketing has become a really exciting and really prominent aspect of the content marketing mix for a lot of brands and businesses.

Third parties

In terms of third parties, don't discount searching keywords or hashtags to see what other content is being created by people in a similar space to you. There may be a great opportunity to engage with them around potential link-up, whether it'd be through guest blogging or a content curation exchange. This particular example here from SEMrush shows an ongoing conversation that the brand has online through Twitter conversations. They unify the conversation from their audience responses around one particular hashtag that owns a brand where they ask people for their honest input and their honest answers.

Being able to utilize third-party inputs and insights from the conversation that they generate allows them to create even more content with learnings and adaptations of what they get back from their audience influence. So, do not discount the ability to reach out to the likes of third parties like SEMrush, to be able to learn from them but also work with them as a third-party contributor towards your content marketing mix.