Content Production: Why It’s Crucial For Growth

Conventional marketing is becoming less and less effective day by day. As a forward-thinking individual, you know there has to be a better way, and there is. Enter content production.

In this post, we’ll introduce you to content production and what it can do for your business, including a deeper look at its benefits. You’ll learn the four types of content production you can implement immediately to boost your brand’s awareness.

Let’s get started! 

What is Content Marketing?

Perhaps more important than understanding what content marketing is, is understanding why it is important to your business. There are four steps of buying cycle you need to know and understand:

  • Awareness. Before awareness, a customer may have a need, but they may not be aware that a solution exists.
  • Research. Once a customer is aware there exists a solution, they will educate themselves by researching the topic.
  • Consideration. The customer starts comparing products from different vendors to make sure they are getting not only the solution for their “problem” but also the value of their investment.
  • Buy. Finally, the customer buys the product.

Traditional advertising is great when it comes to the second two steps.

Content marketing works for all four stages of the buying process because it helps the customer by raising awareness and giving a series of solutions to a problem by offering a product that they didn’t even know existed or may have never chosen before. 

Content marketing is a great way to get people talking and exchanging opinions about your products, services, or company and is a good technique to engage with customers and create a community.

Now that you understand the importance of content marketing the definition is simple. Content marketing is a marketing technique that creates and gives the audience valuable, relevant, and consistent content with the ultimate goal of driving profitable customer action. 

What Is Content Production?

Now let’s get on the same wavelength about what content production means. 

I’d like to define content production like this: “Content production is the creation of information using one or more media formats for an audience in a specific context”. 

It is a type of system or process that you take to create information in a visual or a text format that is appealing to your audience. 

This process includes what message you want people to understand and how you want them to use that knowledge. 

Content production will help your business on multiple fronts at a time. It’s not a coincidence that it’s the most used strategy by digital marketing companies. 

Content production is the key to bringing your brand closer to the customers and getting to their emotional side.

The Four Types Of Content

content production types

Four main types of content are important and relevant to content production.

Cornerstone Content

Cornerstone content is content whose main goal is to give the customer a positive and memorable first impression of your brand by increasing website traffic and brand awareness also showing the audience the products and services you have to offer them. Therefore this type of content should be free and easy to access. Potential customers need to know that you are an expert in your industry.

Gated Content 

Gated content is content that requires users to complete a form or subscribe to a website to gain access to information. This is where the name “gated” comes from. 

Ungated Content

There is also ungated content that has a form available to fill out or a task to perform by the customer like subscribing to a website or giving contact information but none of this is mandatory to access the content. Businesses often choose to publish gated content to gain user information so they can reach out to them in the future. However, sometimes people do not want to give out personal information or they find filling out forms to be a hassle which is why the ungated content may be a slightly better option.

Evolving Content 

Evolving Content is content that is published on a routine basis. Examples include video series with multiple episodes, series of blog posts that are related in some way, or routine news reports. 

How Much Content Should You Produce?

The amount of content you need to produce varies from company to company. It may be easier to think of how much content you should produce for each content type. 

You shouldn’t try to produce too much cornerstone content as it takes a long time to produce and would be a large drain on resources. 

Gated content aims to establish a connection between the company and the customer so more pieces of less detailed content could serve this purpose. 

Evolving content requires regular production. 

The Purpose Of Content Production

Creating and distributing new content regularly creates awareness so the potential audience may become curious to find out more about your brand. Content marketing aims to create an audience and convince them to use your service or buy your product, but the aim of content production is much narrower.

Content production aims to connect with an individual audience member by addressing the interests and problems of each individual in the audience. 

The individual you are addressing is represented by your marketing personas. You need to create enough of them to reach your targets, but not so many that you fragment your message. 

Creating marketing personas is a way to show empathy to the customers. Once you have an empathic understanding of their problem, you can offer your products or services as a solution to those problems. 

The easiest way to connect to an individual is to create content that is either informative, entertaining, educational or a mix of all three.

Informative / Attentional Content

News is one example of informative content, this type of content gets the reader’s attention because of relevance, novelty, and currency.

If you can deliver informative content that is relevant to your targeted audience you’ll be rewarded with their attention. 

The content needs to make a promise to the audience and deliver on it.

Emotional / Entertaining Content

If you want to connect with the audience emotionally, you should be producing content about people. It’s often some kind of a story that helps people experience and express emotion. 

Educational / Intellectual content

If you aim to educate the audience, your best bet is to produce content describing processes or analysis of data. 

Evidence, data, and facts differentiate educational content from opinion pieces where you write from your personal or professional experience. 

A Few Suggestions & Tips To Keep In Mind

Planning your content production will make creating and sharing content easy to do. It helps you establish a strong and effective workflow, which will help you manage all the content you want to make public to the audience.

Here are some tips for content production planning that can help you and your team grow your business:

Prioritize your content. 

Content is the foundation of every type of digital marketing. Content can have multiple uses such as being entertaining, informative, or educational. 

Regardless of its meaning, your content also needs to be easily digestible and understandable for your audience. Let your expertise and uniqueness shine through by creating content to attract, engage and sell. When creating new content and wondering how to better meet your goals, ask yourself these questions:

  • What problems are my potential clients facing right now?
  • Why does my audience care about this topic?
  • How can my brand relate to this topic?

Create a content production schedule.

This type of schedule tells you when you will be publishing each bit of content you produce. 

This is also something called an editorial calendar and it’s very useful as it sets each piece of content you produce on a timeline. You are making it easy for your customers to build a trusting relationship with you if you are engaging with them and publishing regularly.

This is why magazines come out on the same date every month and TV programs are at the same time each week.

Choose the right format. 

The format you choose may be a blog, video, post, ebook, graphic, or whatever you want it to be as long as it serves your persona. If you can’t decide, let us know and we can help you. 

Use social media.

Facebook, Linked In, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and many more platforms. This is a proven way to promote your content and engage people. 

The best social media outlets are the ones used by your audience.

Managing content production problems.

Even the best laid content plans can run up against some problems. Some of these problems may be out of your control but luckily most of them aren’t.

Documenting and tracking your content production allows you to minimize the consequences of these problems.

If you’re having trouble or just lack the time to document and track your current processes, we can help. Our urgent slack-based exec VA service can help you move tasks down the funnel and clear out your backlog faster.

Assemble the right team.

It takes a great deal of care to build a team of talented writers, they are the foundation of a scalable content strategy. You should always prioritize quality before quantity. 

Figure out your audience.

Your audience is a group of people who have overlapping interests. If you’re having trouble finding your audience, we can help. But first, read this here.

Create a content workflow.

A content workflow has these steps: research, write, review, revise, approve, upload, and publish. If you don’t have time to do it, just know you’re not alone. We can help create your workflow in a matter of hours and save you days of work. 

Creating A Content Production Workflow

Your content production workflow makes your production plan and your schedule work together.

Research is always a good place to start as you want to be highly informed on the topic you are writing about before you start forming a plan. When you do the research first you will have a better idea of how to achieve your goals. 

You can start by asking the question: “What do I want people to be able to take away from this new information”.

After the research stage is complete you can use the information you have collected and start producing content.

In this stage, it might take you some time to decide what direction you want to go towards and develop creative and interesting ideas. Ideally, most of your content will be unique and original to your brand. 

Good content production is one written for a specific kind of audience, that’s why the first step you should take when you start writing is asking who you are writing for.

You don’t want to send your work for publishing until you review it and make sure you are happy with the result and it is just how you envisioned it to be. This is when you show your work to other people and hear their opinion. Everyone has to offer a different piece of advice.

Once you get other people to review your content you need to make adjustments based on the feedback you received.

After you are finished with the review and revision processes you can send your content to your superiors and wait for their approval.

Now that your content has been approved by your superiors you can upload it to the web page where you want to review the content once again. Make sure the format is the way that you intended it to be, check if the links work, and look over anything else that might have gotten messed up in the upload process. 

Here’s how we helped a client shell out 500k words of content in just 2 months using the above approach.

Finally, you’ve done your job and it’s time to publish the content to the live website.

Conclusion

We’ve concluded that your content is the foundation of your content marketing and production. Without it, it’s likely for you to struggle to attract potential customers and turn them into paying customers.

The secret to great content lies in a few key factors. It’s all about the timing of the message you want to send, its channels, how it is represented and it all comes down to knowing your audience. 

Content production is an iterative process that pays off tremendously with your audience as you use your creative work not only to delight your audience and potential clients but also to grow your business. 

As you can see, creating a great and interesting content strategy isn’t that hard but it can be quite challenging to implement.

Expect to encounter roadblocks and go through lots of trials and errors, but once you have the recipe for success and the learning period is over you will see the kind of audience growth you have always dreamed of.

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