Redemption in the social era: Stop posting randomly, you can generate content strategically and plannedly

For social editors or marketing planners in the company, the thought of “squeezing out” content every day is really a painful task. Day after day, week after week, there is so much to write about? The product features are just that, but the boss always feels that what you write is not exaggerated enough and the importance of the product is not emphasized enough. Friends in charge of marketing work had no choice but to cry every day and squeeze their brains out to move forward. Let me ask, where does it end?

To paraphrase Wen Qingdian, you are actually not alone. (You are not alone by Chicago, teacher, please turn on the music. Everyone should sing along with the chorus and shed tears.)

★Recommended online courses for training content marketing creation skills: Content Power: The superpower of building a brand (Sail at noon on January 3, 2018!)

The goals of media and businesses are different, you can’t just generate traffic

But for reporters and interview editors in the media industry, they have long been accustomed to “finding topics every day and every week.” Through the editorial calendar and editorial outline we mentioned in 2nd Content Hacker Lecture (CHL2), reporters can indeed produce content in an orderly and fixed manner.

But the purpose of the media is actually just to make everyone read the content of the article. The online content editorial director of a major newspaper once told me: “Throw away your moral considerations, we just want to generate traffic, and it doesn’t matter what pornographic topics are. You just have to write this content quickly and let many, many people read it, so that you can earn advertising revenue.”

However, the purpose of corporate marketing and editors is not entirely to generate traffic. Using content to generate traffic is only the first step. The main purpose is to divert and attract potential users to further purchase products and services. This is the difference between “content” and “content marketing”; this is also the key point we have repeatedly emphasized when Interpreting Luo Fat’s 2017 Friends of Time New Year’s Eve Speech.

Care about your target audience and develop your content strategy

In other words, you can’t aimlessly post some traffic-generating posts (be careful not to plagiarize or directly steal other people’s content, which may lead to intellectual property lawsuits), and just hope that readers will obediently click on the hyperlinks inside, or help you forward or repost. The target audience is concerned about:

• What does this content have to do with me?

• Is it good for me? Or will there be an immediate impact?

• Is it interesting? Touching? Is it useful?

• If it is useful or funny, I would like to share it with my friends via LINE or Facebook.

In order to make the target audience interested in your content while also taking into account your performance, you must formulate a content strategy before generating content, so as not to write it in vain and end up generating traffic but not promoting marketing.

To develop a basic content strategy, you’ll need to fill out the following checklist:

• Set purpose: Create company image? Instill new ideas? Introduce product features?

• Set target audience: Who wants to see it? A new female marketer who has just stepped out of society? Or a 40-year-old financial executive?

• Find connections: How does your purpose relate to specific current events? What is the relationship between it and the target object?

• Presentation type: Do you want to use text? photo? illustration? Infographic? Or a video?

• Distribution channels: How do target audiences get information? Want to use E-mail? LINE? Facebook or blog?

The above is just a very brief list to help you get into the situation first. In the future, please use this list as a basis to formulate a detailed content strategy, so that you can go long and long. If you know who your content is for and what purpose it is produced for, you will no longer have the tragic situation of haphazardly producing content that fails to achieve your purpose.

★If you want to know more about how to generate content through content strategy, please refer to Content Power: The Super Power of Building Brands Online course.

Image source: Pixabay, Unsplash

---

Further reading

• [Da Nei Net Excerpt First Issue] Use the power of content to fall in love with consumers!
• Use the content calendar (with template) to find direction for your content strategy
• Former “Health” magazine editor-in-chief Huang Huiru talks about the writing method of long articles

---