There are many ways to convey the goals and values of your business to the public. With the internet and social media, as well as collateral items, there are a variety of mediums in which to tell your story. However, it is how you choose to tell your story that will help define your business. This is where content development, or content marketing, becomes a powerful tool in your businesses marketing plan.

What is Content Development?

Defining content development is crucial to understanding why it is important to your businesses marketing plan. Outside of you or your employee’s interactions with customers, it is your website, social media and collateral items that will be helping guests and future clients make decisions about your products and services. Therefore, you want content that is easy to comprehend, clearly defines your goals, and is an accurate representation of your business’s values and services.

“You want to create content that not only attracts attention but also helps you achieve the goals that prompted you to create online content in the first place.” –Copyblogger

Most importantly, content development is a marketing strategy intended to align your business with its goals by attracting the attention of your target audience.

How to Establish Meaningful Content

Establishing meaningful content is more than posting to social media or adding a blog page to your website. According to an article posted on The Guardian, they state that your overarching content strategy should engage, inform, entertain and hopefully even wow your target audience. So, how does a business go about creating content that doesn’t distract from their brand and helps, rather than hinders, their business strategy? Here are three examples of questions you should know the answer to or be prepared to answer when developing your content.

What kind of content do you want to create?

• Do you want to create light-hearted, personal content? Maybe you’d rather have straightforward, informational content that emphasizes your professionalism? Or perhaps a combination of the two? It’s important to plan how you are going to attract customers with stories and content relevant to your business.

Who are you speaking to?

• You may already have an idea of who your main clientele is. But do you want to expand your businesses reach and attract consumers from outside of your current customer base? It’s important to take a realistic census of who your customers are and from there you can expand it to include new clientele.

Find & define your core values.

• As a business, you should have clearly defined goals but do you know what the root of your company’s values is? Aside from making a profit what is your company’s core values? Do you want to be active in the community? Charitable? Raise the standards of customer service? Clearly defining your core values is setting a foundation for not only your image but the direction you should go with your content. This will also enable you to develop and tweak existing content as need dictates.

Why Content Development is Important

The bottom line is that business is changing. On a whole, the way people are sold on products and services has less to do with salesmanship and more to do with how the company represents themselves. According to Campaignium, people want good content that helps them make good decisions, but they don’t like being sold. Now, most people research products online before they even go to a store. The result is a more informed consumer who has already formed their own opinions.

As more people turn to online search engines for their product research the importance of SEO becomes paramount. With a solid content development plan in place, your online content will not only clearly define your goals and services, but it will also be SEO friendly.

The Bottom Line

The content development process is more than writing a quick company bio or posting trendy topics to your social media. It is a well thought out map of your company’s core values, goals and customer needs. To ensure that your business is putting its best self forward you need to maximize the value of your content. To learn more about developing a content strategy for your business please contact your local Creative Agency today!