It’s the thing I find myself saying most often these days: surround yourself with content.
I realise that could sound like I’m telling every business owner to create more posts, more blogs, more emails and more general stuff to feed the internet with but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
If anything, I think that’s where a lot of people go wrong with content. They get caught up in the idea of producing more, without stopping to ask what any of it is building towards.
For me, surrounding yourself with content is about being strategic.
To become visible, recognised and remembered, every brand needs a connected body of work which consistently communicates a golden thread to help their audience understand who they are, what they do, who they help, what they believe, how they think and why their work matters.
One post or a single, standalone blog can’t do all of that which is why inconsistency rarely builds growth. A strong content strategy takes your wider business strategy and translates it into the messages your audience needs to hear, understand and believe before they are ready to take action.
That might include your positioning, your offers, your proof points, your opinions, your values and the belief shifts that need to happen for someone to move from “I’m not sure this is for me” to “this is exactly what I need.”
How many times do I have to tell them?
Research shows that warm leads take an average of up to 12 touchpoints to convert. Cold outreach can take anything up to 50 touches. Even though you arguably have an easier route to market with social channels and the digital age, you have a lot more noise and competition to fight through so surrounding yourself with consistent, strong messaging is critical to successfully grow your business.
It’s worth remembering this if you’re worried about creating too much content or spamming your audience.
Most of the time, your audience has not heard it nearly as much as you think they have, and providing you are always adding value (another of my favourite mantras) your content will be appreciated.
When it comes to repetition, the trick is to come back to your core messages from different angles. Each step in your audiences’ belief shift can become a blog, a post, an email, a case study question, a webinar topic, a sales page section or a conversation starter. In this way, you take people on a journey along which they discover a new way of seeing their challenge and the possible solutions to it.
Surrounding yourself with content also makes life easier for you. When you have a strong bank of ideas, stories, messages and proof points, you are not starting from scratch every time you need to explain what you do.
You have something to send after a sales call. Something to link to in an outreach message. Something to repurpose when you are busy. Language you can pull into proposals, presentations, emails and website copy.
Good content helps your audience understand your business, but it also helps you understand how to talk about it and that, for me, is the real value of taking a strategic approach.
It’s not easy to achieve this, though, especially if you’re a founder-led business and wearing a lot of hats.
And that’s why the Content Kitchen exists. It’s our flexible monthly outsourced content service where, for a regular fee you can get a range of different pieces of content, in fact five pieces per month.
It takes around three months for my clients to start to experience a real shift in their content assets, have a better understanding of what to say about their business and to start to feel that everything is aligning.
They have a clear strategy and content pillars, their website is more up to date, they are publishing a regular blog, their LinkedIn posts are writing themselves and they haven’t got that nagging feeling that they’re behind, not visible, or sending out confusing messages.
If you’d like to know more, book yourself a call with me to chat about how the Content Kitchen might work for your business. I promise no heavy sell – we only want to work with people we genuinely believe we can help and, because of the time we spend with these clients, we don’t have an unlimited number of them.
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