Marketing is all about business storytelling, so creating a winning content strategy is crucial to the success of any small or medium business. And great content helps you hit all three corners of the Know, Like, and Trust triad that propels marketing success. You know that, but do you know how to create a winning strategy and the content that goes along with it?

Providing great content starts with understanding your audience and what they want – or need – to hear from you. There are four topical “content pillars” you need to focus on as the foundation of your strategy. If you can master these four pillars, your content will perform much better.

So what are the four pillars and how do you incorporate them into your strategy? Here they are (in no specific order):

Education

Your content should be focused on educating your audience. Create a strategy that helps prospects to clearly understand when they should call you, what they can expect when they do, what your (general) process is, and who is a best fit for your company (whether product or service based).

Engagement

Make sure your strategy includes a way to start and increase engagement. Be strategic about how to get the audience to the next level of engagement. Make your communications active, consistent, and responsive, and don’t leave your personality out.

Emotion

Think about the emotion(s) you need to elicit to encourage the prospect to continue their journey toward the “buy now” button. If a prospect is allowed to walk away with a negative impression – such as “it’s too expensive” or “it won’t be easy to use” – you’ve lost not only the sale, but likely any future sales with that prospect as well.

Empathy

Make sure your content strategy is developed through the eyes of your ideal customer. To be truly customer-centric, you must have a deep understanding of who your ideal customers are, the challenges they’re facing, and what motivates them to act.

These four pillars are equally important. Incorporate all of them in your content strategy and your content will help convert more often. If you have already incorporated these into your content marketing and the content is still not converting, you need to look at how you are writing your content. In other words, are you writing content that drives the decision process, or are you writing content that only develops the relationship to a certain point in the journey, such as awareness or education?

Before I end this blog, I wanted to include a brief piece of advice about AI-enabled content development tools. These are becoming more and more popular, and they can be terrific additions to your marketing technology. They can also, sadly, become the source of some significant headaches and damaging to your reputation if you’re not careful. Before you use them, please investigate them and educate yourself on them. I’ll write more about these this in an upcoming blog.

For now, feel free to check out our other Content Strategy related blogs or schedule a limited consultation and let us help you figure out how to make your content marketing perform better.