How to Start Creating Content for Business

Creating content for our business can be one of the easiest ways to share our story, build credibility, and provide value for our prospects and customers.

Here are a few considerations as we dive into where we can post, what types of content to post, and a few key points on how.

Where to post:

It is important to remember that sharing content happens both online and offline in the business world today. While it may be easy to think about content as social media posts, blogs, and YouTube videos, remembering that print flyers, mailers, magazine articles, and billboards can also be effective content mediums.

The most important consideration when determining where to post is being able to properly identify where our ideal prospects spend large portions of their time.

For example - when exploring the many social platforms that we can post content on today, some may be more effective than others for some businesses. If our target prospects are generally high school aged kids, it is more likely that we may find them on TikTok over LinkedIn. Due to this, the content we choose to create that resonates with our target will likely do a bit better on TikTok. Each platform can work well, so long as we understand who (primarily) is on each platform and how they choose to consume information.

Types of Content:

Another consideration as we dive into creating content is understanding what types of content we can create.

We can choose to do long form written (such as a blog post), short form written (such as a LinkedIn post), or even super short form written (such as using Twitter / X). Each can convey the same message in different ways to different people.

We can do the same for video and audio - long form, short form, etc.

Images can come in the form of photos, graphics, GIFs, infographics, artwork, and more. Often, the platform we’ve chosen will dictate the type of content that we produce. For example - short form video is the core of TikTok, but doesn’t tend to play quite as well on LinkedIn.

Taking this back to knowing our target prospects (our ideal audience), when we understand how they best consume information, we can better curate our content to fit their needs. If we know that our audience is a group of avid podcast listeners, it may be most effective for us to choose a podcast platform as our primary content methodology.

Oftentimes, we may want to choose a variety of content types to communicate with our audience where they are. If you are like most humans I know, you likely consume content in a variety of ways depending on where you are and what you are doing. Due to this, I tend to recommend repurposing content for various content mediums.

For example, if we record a long form video (i.e. YouTube video), we can also post this as an audio podcast. We could also transcribe the video and make it a written blog post. It is also possible to then cut the long form written into multiple short form written posts, and take the long form video and cut into several short form video clips. All of a sudden we have several pieces of content from creating a single video. This makes the process a bit easier to manage when starting out.

How to Produce Content:

There are two really important foundations to creating content that we abide by to effectively merge content creation with our marketing plan.

The first is Target —> Offer —> Copy

Simply put, Target is the starting point…and MOST important of the three words. Before we do any content creation, we must first identify our target (our audience). Who, specifically, are we choosing to communicate with? The clearer we can make this, the better. Rather than a broad segment (i.e. business owners in the U.S.), we get specific (i.e. dental practice owners in Austin Texas who have been in business for 3 years, have a staff of 8, and went to dental school at XX university). When we focus on the latter we can create messages that specifically resonate with the person we wish to communicate with.

Once the target is identified, we can determine where to find them and create an offer that is designed with them in mind. Only then, can we work on the Copy (the words we use). The best copy in the world is useless if aimed at the wrong target. That is why target is first.

The second key in producing content is Attention, Interest, Desire, Action (or Hook, Story, Offer - a version of this concept from Russel Brunson).

The key here is that when creating content, the very first thing we must do is Hook the viewer/reader. Grab attention and peaking interest. If we don’t grab attention first, the rest of the post, video, podcast, etc. will ever be consumed. The hook is the MOST important part of the process.

The simple way to look at this process is to remember the following. We have about 3 seconds to earn 30 seconds, and 30 seconds to earn 3 minutes. Once we get them hooked in the first 3 seconds, we have a much stronger ability to get them to 30 seconds. If we can get them interested long enough in 30 seconds, our likelihood of gaining 3 minutes of their time goes up dramatically.

Once we have hooked them, we tell a story (creating desire) and tell them what action to take next (the offer).

Content can be a very rewarding way to express your business’s personality and to boost overall lead flow…not to mention the impact it can have on sales conversion rates. That said, there is a lot more to it than just simply making a post.

Starting with the key points in this article will get your business on the right path. Over the coming weeks, I will continue to dive a bit deeper and share more tactics that you (and your team) can use as you navigate content creation for your business.

See you next week!