How to break a vicious content cycle

Content teams are small. Content demand is high.

Tell me if this sounds familiar:

• Your content team works overtime to meet the demands of your people: Business development and other departments want to know: “Can you create something for this upcoming event?” “Wouldn’t a video of our process be great for this page on our website?”
• Your content team works overtime to meet the demands of your channels: There are social feeds to fill, newsletters to satisfy, websites that need to be updated.

The needs seem endless. You’re on a treadmill of content creation, solving for everyone’s problems but your audience’s.

Without a strong connection to the audience — and an agreement across your organization to first serve that audience as the #1 stakeholder — you are doomed to stay on this hamster wheel.

But don’t worry – we have six tried-and-true steps to break the cycle:

1. Study your audience. Empower yourself and your team with information about your target audience: What media do they rely on? What information are they already consuming? What are their pain points? What questions remain unanswered? Our analysis always includes an in-depth study of online behavior, along with audience interviews for context.
2. Declare your reason for being. What service is your content offering to your audience based on their needs, your company’s expertise and your team’s goals?
3. Educate your requestors. Become an evangelist for your audience, sharing the data you found, your reason for being, and your plan to adhere to audience needs to improve business performance. Keep at it— a significant shift needs to happen at this step, where your requestors bring you business problems to solve through content (“How can we promote this product?”), not specific, prescribed solutions (“I need a video!”).
4. Eliminate channels. This is one of the hardest steps. During your audience study, pay close attention to where your targets spend their time. You will likely be able to see some channels that can be cut, which will lead to higher quality content production in the ones that remain.
5. Run a pilot. You’ll need to slowly start producing the kind of content your new strategy demands. Be specific about the content type, the channel and the desired outcome. The goal is to pilot to learn, then build scale into your operation for maximum impact.
6. Share the results. If all of the previous steps have been followed, your content will have outperformed the rest of your efforts. Now is the time to take this case study to a wider group, reiterate your process and start over at step 3. Clear communication, coupled with understandable data in the context of business growth, will begin to move your culture forward.

TL;DR: Many of us are caught in a vicious cycle of content production, frustrated by — or unaware of — its performance. To break it, prioritize audience research, internal communication, and pilot projects.

KRYSTLE KOPACZ CEO, Revmade krystle@revmade.com

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P.S. I led a fun Shark Tank-esque workshop for 40 marketers last night at GovExec’s Market Preview event. If you want to chat about how workshops can help your teams more effectively plan for next year, respond back to this email!