Results from our 2019 national survey  are now out, and once again they offer insight into the national pulse when it comes to communications. We surveyed organisations from around the country and found that 45% of them place the most value on traditional media coverage — broadcast and print. From this we have created, ‘four tips on creating content for your business’.

Interestingly, our survey shows that 72% of organisations regularly create social media posts. Compare this to the 30% that value social media posts the most.  This shows a disconnect between organisations’ objectives and their daily activities.

Keep reading for our four tips on creating content for your business, that aligns with your business objectives and speaks to your target audience.

Know your audience

Know who you are targeting and keep that person/people in mind when creating content. Where are they getting their content from? What platforms do they use? Identify the right media by looking at the platform’s demographics (e.g. readership, listenership, users etc.). Make sure you are generating content for where your audience is — otherwise you might as well be speaking to an empty room. If it isn’t relevant, they are not listening. 

Create content your audience craves

What’s their “sweet spot”? Identify pain points (specific problems) that your audience has and create content that addresses them.

It is important to analyse the conversations your audience are having. Join in on social media by following hashtags and incorporating them into your social media posts. Remember, it is a dialogue not a monologue.

The key takeaway is to show that your product or service will add value to their lives.

Analyse your performance

Once you have created your content, it is important to analyse its performance but you first have to determine what success means to you.

For example, if you are hosting an event and want 50 people to sign up, you may run a social media campaign, posting a link to your event. Those 50 sign-ups are your Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and is what you base your content and call-to-actions on. If you don’t build your campaign around your KPIs you won’t succeed.  At the end of your campaign, if your Facebook post has 300 likes and 50 comments but your event page only has 25 sign ups; you then only achieved 50% of your campaign objective.

To determine what went wrong you can review your campaign by using online measuring tools. We have a useful guide to these tools here.

Recycle ‘old’ content

Many organisations overlook the versatility of one piece of content. A YouTube tutorial that you spent hours editing and posting to your social media channels can become a written version in blog format. From there, a paragraph from that blog can become a Facebook or LinkedIn post and then a sentence from that post can become a tweet.

This is known as Evergreen Content and offers limitless opportunities for communicating your messages in different ways. We have a blog post dedicated to Evergreen Content, which you can find here.

So remember: know your audience, go where your audience is, and speak to them in language they care about.

For more about how to align your marketing objectives with your business objectives, email info@springboardcommunications.ie