They say content is king, but what goes into the making of kings?
Osagie Alonge is currently the Director of Marketing at OPay. He’s also got a decade of experience in media and marketing with an emphasis on content creation, content strategy, content marketing, communications, and multimedia production.
On Friday, May 22, 2020, he shared a Zoom session with the IDA team where he talked about content marketing and the process of creating epic content.
Now that’s a session you would love to listen to, right?
On Content Marketing
First of all, Osagie Alonge let us know that content marketing isn’t only about making creative content. It is actually a strategic marketing approach done to attract and retain a defined audience and to ultimately drive profitable customer action.
For brands, content marketing is a way of making your customers come naturally to you instead of the long process of going to look for them and catch their attention.
And here’s the moment you’ve been waiting for. Drum roll, please….
How to Create Epic Content
Set Your Content Goals
Of course you can randomly set out to create content, but why would you want to do so?
For maximum impact and ROI, your content strategy should be centered on your marketing goals and what you want to achieve through content marketing. This could range from goals like building brand awareness to lead generation.
Know your audience
Knowing your audience determines several other things like how you will speak to them, where you will speak to them, and even the kinds of things you will speak to them.
Sometimes, content marketers visualize their audience as a sea of faceless humans, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Your audience are real people with dreams, hopes, fears, frustrations, etc. Draw on available data to create a buyer persona so that your audience becomes even more real to you, and then proceed to create content that speaks to their needs.
Use the right format
As Osagie reminded us, content is king, but distribution is queen. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan said something similar when he said ‘the medium is the message’.
Your content must be useful and published in the right format for your target audience. Does your particular audience love podcasts? Are they Facebook fiends or irreverent Instagrammers? Do they prefer long or short-form content? Discover this, and then drill down on creating content for your audience.
Share it well
As Osagie jokingly said, ‘What will it profit a man to create great content and not distribute it properly?’ And truly, we have got no response. If you have gone through the rigour of defining your audience, studying them, creating epic content that they will love, in formats that they will love, it is your solemn responsibility to ensure that the content goes as far as it can.
Who’s ready to create some epic content and crush those marketing goals?