So you’ve spent the last week cultivating the perfect piece for your audience. You’ve researched the topic thoroughly and have all of your sources cited.
That’s all well and good, but what you want is to be able to reach your audience. Here are 7 content creation tips that can help you get your stories heard across the content channels.
1. Be Active Online
If you want your content to reach the broadest audience possible, you need to be active across all of the social media channels. It’s unreasonable to expect people to stumble across your blog without an active online presence.
Reaching your audience is also going to be an uphill battle if you’re releasing content infrequently to each channel.
So begin by gathering emails and creating accounts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and adopt any new platforms that seem to be taking off. Then begin posting.
While you want to distribute frequently, you don’t want to bombard your audience with ads and promotions. With a survey stating 19% of users will unfollow a brand on Facebook if it posts too frequently.
In terms of content creation tips, you want to post daily on all of your channels, but not excessively.
2. Research Your Target Market
You may have a basic understanding of who your target demographic is, but unless you put some time and effort into researching the specifics, you may find yourself wasting effort.
So, research your target market; that way, you know which platform will have the most influence over them. You can do that by using google analytics, or social media analytics to find out all the details you want, including what works and what doesn’t, where is your traffic coming from and who are most likely to engage with you the longest.
Once you start understanding your audience, you can start targeting your marketing campaigns more effectively.
Keeping in mind that each age demographic has certain predilections in the way they consume content.
While you will put more energy into certain platforms than others, that doesn’t mean you should neglect the less popular ones.
Quick Hints:
Use the platform the way it was designed to be used.
Facebook: Share links, original content, and do your best to engage people in comments.
Instagram: Share photos, and use your brand styling, colors, etc consistently.
Twitter: Share a quippy headline to garner interest, and do not forget your hashtags.
3. Plan Your Content Distribution
So far, we’ve covered content creation tips related to how active you should be on social media, and how to understand your audience.
Now it’s time to decide when to post on social platforms.
While you can bombard all of your channels at once, this is not the most effective way. You may have a target audience in mind, but within that group, there are subdivisions that consume content differently.
While there will be some overlap, you want to avoid your followers from getting a message for the same post on all of their platforms at the same time.
Now that you’ve narrowed down who your target market is look up some statistics on what time each group tends to be more active on these platforms. There is a whole science behind timing.
If you’re targeting middle-aged women, then you will want to post to Facebook.
Quick hints for Facebook:
Prime posting time is Wednesday at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.
Wednesday has the most traffic
Post during working hours
Avoid posting on Sunday.
4. Produce Target Market Specific Content
Let’s imagine you’ve just seen a panda give birth despite all of the obstacles placed before her. Life in captivity has been hard for the panda, as it’s been secluded from others of her kind to make sure she’s ready to be in estrus (heat) for the two weeks she is in the entire year… and I lost you.
As I can probably guess, you came here to learn content creation tips, not the mating habits of pandas.
You want to avoid creating content that has the potential to be overlooked or disregarded due to its irrelevancy.
Your audience is following you for a reason. If you are a make-up specialist, then maybe avoid putting out content relating to the political instability of a foreign nation.
Lack of mission and consistency can hurt your credibility.
5. Invest in Time-Saving Marketing Tools
As far as content creation tips go, this one may save you the most time, so that way you can get back to writing.
There are plenty of automated tools that can save you valuable time by posting to social media platforms for you based on a preset schedule.
If your main target is on Instagram, you can use Later.com, to create a calendar as to which day and what time to post your content. While that is just one of many options, the majority of these automated programs will also come with tools on how to measure the metrics and performance of your post.
Unless you have a time-sensitive piece, it’s best to make a block of time in the week to schedule when your post should go out, and let these tools do the rest.
This way you can preset everything over the weekend, and let it run, ensuring that your stories will post according to your plan across all the relevant content channels.
6. Create Modular Content
So you’re living the life of your dreams, and writing content daily. Even for the most avid writers this can become a daunting task.
That’s why number 6 in this list of content creation tips, might make your life a little easier.
When we say modular content, we simply mean recycled content.
Let’s say you wrote an e-book a few years ago. You may get a few hits on it every now and then, but for the most part, it’s collecting dust. Well, not anymore!
You can use that hard-earned material and break it down into smaller articles.
Then you can those articles and break them down into bite-sized social media snippets!
Basically, creating modular content is just dissecting a larger piece of content and repurposing its components. This tactic can be helpful for those who have chosen to maintain a daily presence by giving you enough material to post across your chosen content channels.
7. Make Shareable Content
In closing, out of all of these content creation tips, this is the most important one for reaching across different channels.
Even before you post your first piece of content, you want to make sure you’ve set it up to be shared.
Do you have buttons to share it to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc? If not, then that should be your priority.
Your content must be shareable.
You can enhance this by asking your audience to contribute, either by commenting or retweeting.
You can even offer promotions or incentives if they share your post.
Conclusion
By following these content creation tips from the start, you stand a higher chance of having your stories heard across the different channels.
Remember that without an audience to read your content, then it might as well have stayed in your head.