When executing on a demanding content strategy, you likely will be faced with creating multiple content assets under each topic umbrella. When you know one topic is hot in the industry and being sought out among your target audience, or you have identified a topic as being central to your brand, you will need to craft many related angles.
For example, suppose a company offers an analytics solution. They know that their prospects always ask about reporting offerings on sales calls, and they know that their target audience is searching for companies with strong reporting capabilities online. They want to create content around their analytics solution, but they know they need a multifaceted content approach rather than writing one blog post and thinking that will suffice. What should they do?
First, start by defining an overarching topic group. You will likely have many of these, but for this exercise, name one.
In our example, this would be reporting.
Next, plot out various elements related to that topic that would be interesting to talk about. This could be a fun exercise to do as a brainstorm alone or with your team.
In our example, we might write that there are three types of reports, there are various ways companies can use the reports, and there are various industry issues that could be solved by using these reports, which are a differentiating factor for the providing company.
Continue creating a web with several tiers containing subtopics and sub-subtopics.
3 types of reports becomes report A, report B, report C; from there, each type of report has different customization options and shows details about different media types. In terms of usage, each report would be used in a different place in the funnel; the reporting suite can be used to equip sales teams with insights about their target accounts that they can use to personalize outreach; audience insights in the reports can be sent to marketing teams to help them send specific messages via various channels such as email and advertising. Lastly, regarding thought leadership in the industry, we might plot out industry gaps, competitors' similar offerings, or problems the report can help solve.
From there, start drafting specific hooks.
So far, one branch of our tree would show:
Reporting > Thought leadership > Industry gap = company-level reporting
We might then add angles such as:
-Report's data transparency fills industry gap
-Insights in report unmatched across industry
Those were written as headlines. You could also word these as CTAs, or calls to action:
-Complement existing marketing efforts with company-level reporting
-Learn about your audience with unparalleled B2B reporting
-Leverage smarter reporting to reach audience more efficiently
At this point, you can begin to evaluate your hooks or CTAs from your audience's perspective. Why should the reader care? How does your message fit into the audience's day-to-day experience? What benefit are you providing, and how are you presenting that value? What is your goal - what do you hope the reader will do as a result of engaging with this content asset?
Then, draft your content.
Remember:
Focus on one clear angle
Short and sweet is better than long and meandering
Answer more questions than you raise
Provide benefit from the audience's perspective
Put the message in the reader's context, using their language, problems, and resources
Cut the fluff - if it doesn't support the main idea, it doesn't belong here
Think about context and the amount of information you are willing to part with. Did you provide just enough context to paint a clear picture but not so much that your reader won't have any reason to talk to a sales rep? If your goal is to increase calls with sales reps, try to hit that sweet spot of "just enough."
Then, test it out. Release your content package and check in each week to evaluate its success. How many pageviews did the blog post get, and how does that compare to your other blog posts? How many clicks did the link in your emails receive, and was that successful or not? Is your sales team booking calls as a result of distributing this content package? Are ads related to this content package generating clicks or form fills? And are you selling the product more now than you were before the content package was released?
If you need to, tweak various elements, such as headlines, formats, messaging, or audience segmentation. Try to keep everything else as it is as you test each change, enabling you to compare the success of one variable against your controlled elements. Continue doing this as long as it makes sense for your budget and bandwidth until you achieve the success you deserve!
Bonus: Share your document with your team or use it as a driving force to empower ideation within content umbrellas. It could even be a fluid document team members can add to or adjust as positioning pivots or products expand. Making the document readily available is a form of communication that will help align your team members on messaging strategy and also convey a possible route to take when proposing new content ideas in the future.