Marketing content is like an emissary for your company. In the digital world, companies rely on content to produce a variety of results. The best result is, of course, sales. However, that's only one job at the end of a long list of responsibilities. It's up to marketers to make sure the marketing content they produce is shouldering the load well.
Take a look at some of the expectations we heap upon our content and then assess your own to determine if you've prepared said content to deliver.
- Attention - your content needs to get noticed - and not just by anyone - by the audience you've targeted. You did target your content to appeal to a specific niche or persona, right?
- Awareness - once people have engaged with your content, they should have some thoughts about your company - preferably favorable ones worth remembering.
- Mindshare - it's not good enough to just get attention, we need people to spend enough time with our content to actually "get" the ideas it's sharing.
- Anchor - once people have ingested the ideas, your content needs to work to make sure that those ideas take precedence in forming how your audience thinks about the topic.
- Action - your content is sent out on a mission to get people to DO something. Is it?
- Conversation - beyond the action your content requests, it needs to ensure that the audience has a clear enough understanding that they can now talk with others and share your ideas with them in their own words. You know there's more than one person involved in the purchase to influence, don't you?
- Confidence - the learning your content provides needs to help people feel certain that they know what they need to take the next step...and just what that might be.
- Competence - your content must provide evidence that your company can actually do what it says it can.
- Invitation - content must entice people to spend more time with your company - whether through opting in for a newsletter, attending a webinar, subscribing to an RSS feed, reading multiple articles or web pages and interacting with your sales people.
- Authority - content must inspire reliance on your company for consistently valuable insights. In fact, they should be looking for them on a regular basis.
These are only a few of the expectations marketers have piled onto their content with more and more reliance on content marketing to fill their pipelines. The challenge now is make sure that your content is actually designed to multi-task across the many jobs piled on its plate.
What would you add?
If you had to give your content a job performance review, would it earn a promotion?
