How to Create Content That Attracts Customers

Do you need a better content marketing plan? Wondering how to improve your content strategy?

To explore creative ways to regularly create content, I interview Melanie Deziel. Melanie is a former journalist, storytelling expert, and founder of StoryFuel, a company that helps marketers become better storytellers.

Discover different ways to create content both on and off of social media. You'll also get tips on what type of content to create and more.

Read a summary of the interview below. To listen to the interview, scroll to the end of this article.

Getting Into Content Marketing

Melanie began her career by studying investigative reporting and arts and cultural criticism. She dreamed of being a journalist who reports hard-hitting stuff and uncovers injustice. But she quickly discovered that her two interests, arts and investigative journalism, are the first cut when downsizing in the digital age.

Melanie’s talent for deep storytelling and interviewing people led her to the role of building the brand storytelling team for Huffington Post, which became HuffPost Partner Studio. Her team created the branded content that lives on Huffington Post. This entailed ghost-writing or co-authoring blog posts with companies like Goldman Sachs for the HuffPost Business section or crafting recipes that featured brands like Betty Crocker for HuffPost Food.

Melanie left Huffington Post after a year to pursue the chance to be the first editor of brand content for the New York Times. The position was a golden opportunity to return to journalism and create native content for a highly respected publication.

It was 2014 and pioneering this new role meant creating an entirely new set of guidelines for developing native content for brands. What do you do with brands? Where do you draw the lines around branded content? What's allowed with brand content?

To answer these questions, Melanie examined the quality, reporting, and accountability that audiences already liked and expected from the New York Times editorial content. Then she adopted these standards for this new type of storytelling. The result was a set of content products the publication could offer brands.

Within a year, Melanie had grown the brand content team from 5 people to more than 40. She then moved to Time Incorporated to grow their branded content program in the same way, but at the corporate level and across 35 different magazines in the U.S. These included big names like Time, People, Fortune, Entertainment Weekly, and more.

While managing content for a variety of publications was a significant professional leap for Melanie, she discovered that her real value and passion wasn't necessarily in content creation. Instead, it's in setting up an infrastructure and training teams for consistently developing brand content.

At each role at these companies, Melanie succeeded in setting up newsrooms, re-educating sales teams on how to talk about content, and establishing processes for creating high volumes of quality content.

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In early 2016, Melanie decided to go out on her own, so she founded StoryFuel. She now uses speaking engagements, workshops, and consulting to help brands, marketers, and publishers set up their own content teams, generate ideas, and learn how to create content.

Why Content Still Matters

Storytelling is the way we communicate no matter what platform we're on. Whether through a conversation in person or in an email, on another social media platform, onstage, or on a podcast, creating good content still matters. It's only through producing content that people will understand your values, care about your origin story, or know anything about your products.

The Message Matters More Than the Medium

With Facebook actively repressing content from reaching intended audiences, many marketers and publishers are understandably questioning the value of producing content. While this might be frustrating, Melanie reminds us that Facebook isn't the only game in town.

Not only are there other social media platforms, but there are also many ways to convey ideas about your brand and keep your name top-of-mind. We discuss several of them in this interview. Ultimately, the message matters more than the medium.

Consumers Prefer Content to Ads

On an instinctive level, people don't particularly like ads. Ads either interrupt or interfere with the things people actually want to see or hear. Studies show that two-thirds of consumers trust brand content more than traditional advertising.

Ninety percent of people polled say that they actually prefer brands to engage them with content rather than ads.

Reaching any sort of audience with your marketing message means creating content that people truly trust and believe.

A 2017 study by Time Inc. reveals that 92% of those surveyed believe that “brands have expertise on topics and add value to content.” In other words, people believe brands are knowledgeable about certain topics and want to learn more through content, not ads.

The Four Fundamental Questions of Content Creation

There are four fundamental questions at the core of any messaging strategy: What to say? How to say it? To whom are you saying it and why?

Melanie cautions that content isn't a silver bullet that solves all of your marketing problems. Nor is it a fit for every campaign or product. Content in any format should be a smart, strategic part of a larger marketing mix. Then, it should be combined with wise advertising spending and placements.

Content can take the form of blog posts, white papers, eBooks, videos, or just about anything else. Figure out where your audience is gathering and what kind of content formats resonate with them. Once you do, continue to produce content that highlights your products and the things you care about in a way that makes consumers care about them too.

Listen to the show to hear me describe the variety of content we produce at Social Media Examiner and how it allows us to reach a multimillion-person audience.

What: Generate Content Ideas

Coming up with content ideas and knowing what to say are the two biggest challenges people face when it comes to creating content. They're the primary things Melanie hears when working with brands on developing a content strategy. She reveals that the process actually isn't some big mystery or a stroke of genius that happens in the shower.

Consistently generating content ideas comes down to two basic things: focus and format.

The focus asks, “What am I talking about?” and the format is simply, “How am I bringing it to life?” Every piece of content you've ever consumed in your life—films, books, podcasts, or articles—has a focus. It's about something. And it's presented to you in some way. That's the format.

StoryFuel has synthesized this concept into the Content Idea Matrix, a framework for finding the intersections between content focuses and content formats. Along the top of the matrix are 10 examples of focuses met with 10 examples of formats down the left of the chart. Put them together and you have 100 content ideas based on things you already know and with which you are already familiar.

Combining all of the possible intersections and structuring them in this format shows that you probably already have the ingredients to create the content ideas in your head. The beauty of the Content Idea Matrix is that it's an organized way to approach the development process.

Listen to the show to hear how to go beyond the one focus, one format approach to content creation and explore how to tell a story about your brand through multiple combinations.

How: Explore Content Formats

You may find that you have what Melanie calls a “first content language,” a format that most naturally suits you. Lean into it, especially if you're just getting started developing content. Develop multiple topics through this one format.

Once you feel more comfortable and confident with creating content, allow yourself to branch out and try something different. It could be a new format that you hadn't previously considered like plotting your content on a map or using a quiz.

In my conversation with Melanie, we examine how to leverage three unique content formats mentioned in her matrix: research, opinion pieces, and history.

Leverage Original Data and Research

What data do you have as a company? What data could you send out as a survey and collect that tells a story about your brand or industry? Original research requires a bit of an investment in time and resources, but it offers endless possibilities for generating multiple types of content.

How-to articles for marketers is our main focus at Social Media Examiner. But once a year, we publish the Social Media Marketing Industry Report, an almost 50-page analysis of how marketers are using social media which features 70 charts and graphs. With this one piece of research, we generate podcast episodes, special articles with key takeaways, and much more.

Melanie suggests creating guides or eBooks, gathering lists and roundups, and curating reactions from different experts about your reports. You can discuss your findings on other people's podcasts or spin the data into a video series with a combination of recorded and live video, webinars, or courses.

Gating the content allows your research to generate leads and emails. To give perspective on this, Social Media Examiner collects more than 200,000 emails each year from our annual report. It's also referenced by every major publication on the planet. So not only is it the main opt-in that we use on all of our websites, it's also a huge source of inbound traffic and SEO value.

For long-running studies like ours, you can show your observations within the context of changes and adaptations over time. Timelines are an underutilized format.

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Share Opinion Content as Curation

Opinion content as a business or brand can be tricky, but only because it's often misunderstood as taking a stance in a heated debate. Having an opinion simply means putting some sort of value on an idea or object and applying a curator's mindset to it.

This can take the form of surfacing the most relevant things for your audience. For example, provide recommendations on the top five books. Be sure to qualify them as being your brand's recommendations. Then present them in a way that shows you've specifically put thought and value into selecting each title, rather than throwing together some random links.

Product reviews, awards, and rankings are another way to handle opinion content. On some level, this content is another way to express preference or opinion but in a way that can elevate your brand as being trustworthy and relevant.

Craft Your Origin Story and History

Whether your company has been around for 200, 20, or just 5 years, it's always tied to a larger story of the past. The past can be as intimate as the career path that led you to where you are today, where you come from, or why you have the perspective that you do. Perhaps your company has an interesting background or founder's journey.

While all of these things can be fascinating, these stories can only be told in so many ways. Researching and creating content around the past doesn't always have to be a history of you or your business. Melanie suggests looking to the history of others or the local community around you for content inspiration.

If you own a small business, you can talk about your building and the other companies that have previously occupied your storefront. Tell the history of your town. Give people a glimpse into the history of your industry: What have been the key trends? Who were the pioneers? Where are they now? Share elements of their history that reflect your own values as a company or an individual.

Who: Understand the Audience

Once you've used the Content Idea Matrix to determine what to say and how to say it, the next step in the content creation process is to ask “to whom” you're speaking. This means identifying your intended audience, which in turn determines how you tell your story.

Melanie illustrates this point by asking, “Do you tell your friends about your weekend in the same way you tell your boss and your grandmother?” The information might be the same, but it's probably presented differently based on who's listening. The same concept applies to the content you create for your business.

There are a number of ways to learn about your audience. There are experts at creating customer profiles and segmenting audiences on social media. However, Melanie has always found that the best way to get to know your audience is to talk to them. Not everyone is a local business owner who could strike up face-to-face conversations with their customers. So if this isn't possible, Melanie suggests having office hours in your Facebook group or hosting a live broadcast on Instagram.

Your biggest source of audience data can be found in your social media insights and analytics. Pay attention to who's engaging with you on social media and find common ground within their profiles.

I add that conducting a simple survey among your customer base or readers can get at this data. Ask questions about their demographic or employment details, which of your products or content they consume, how they heard about you, and what else they would like to learn from you.

It might surprise you to discover that your audience isn't who you expected or that it reaches several very different demographics. This means that one piece of content won't fit all. But there's no reason you can't create multiple versions of a piece of content and strategically use each to target different parts of your audience.

Listen to the show to hear us brainstorm more questions to ask your audiences.

Why

After establishing the what, how, and who of content creation, the last and most important piece is asking why you're creating this content. What's the goal and intent of what you're saying? How does a particular video, blog post, or any other material you've produced bring the story to life?

It's common to fall into a rut of doing what you've always done because it suits a routine or a schedule. Perhaps you're only doing a blog post because you always do blog posts on Wednesdays, but this type of format may no longer suit your audience. It serves no purpose to force a format.

What we most often end up with is content that isn't going to do what we want because we're shoehorning some sort of story that could shine so brightly in one format into some other format that just isn't the right fit. Always gut-check yourself and ask if your efforts are serving anyone from a business standpoint.

Content Creation Tools and Resources

Lack of time and lack of resources are two legitimate barriers and objections to creating content on a consistent basis. Melanie offers tips, tools, and tricks for overcoming these concerns.

Start Small and Repurpose

As Melanie previously advised, start by creating the content format that's most comfortable for you. Then expand your efforts over time or simply repurpose what you already have into different formats.

It's very easy to generate show notes, such as this article, from a podcast interview using Rev or a similar audio transcription tool. You can then post dialogue or highlights to a website as a blog post. Another way to repurpose audio content is to take key soundbites or quotes and reformat them as social media graphics.

Hire Writers and Designers

If you're looking for writers in particular, check out Contently. This service provides writers and editors on demand for one-off and long-term projects. Contently provides a system for managing editorial services, which removes the hassle of communicating back and forth with whomever you've contracted.

Similarly, companies like Fiverr offer freelance services for businesses.

You post a project or job listing that explains what you need and who you're looking to hire, and then you can select one of the Fiverr's who respond. Melanie recommends focusing on the specific skill set you need to supplement rather than a job title when you put up a job listing. This will help you find someone uniquely qualified for what you need.

Seek Personal Recommendations

For outsourcing any other content creation, there isn't a better pool for talent than the personal recommendations of your own network. Reach out to fellow business owners and marketers for names of who they like and trust.

If you like their logo, don't be bashful about asking who designed it for them. Ask if that person can make yours!

Discovery of the Week

Speechify is a tool that allows you to use your phone to scan physical text from the web, saved to your phone, and anywhere else in the world using optical character recognition. Then Speechify will read it to you in high-quality, natural-sounding voices using AI-based text to speech.

Speechify was created by a college student who was struggling with school because of his dyslexia. While reading was challenging, he found that consuming the content through audio was easier, faster, and more accurate for him. Perhaps it is for you too.

With Speechify, you can speed up playback or slow it down, select different voices, and much more. Each word is highlighted as it's read and shown on the screen. This tool is available as both a desktop app and a mobile app, which allows you to sync files among all of your devices for great flexibility and mobility.

Speechify is available for free as a desktop app for Mac and Chrome. It is also a mobile app for iOS or Android.

Listen to the show to hear more about Speechify.

Key Takeaways in This Episode

• Learn more about StoryFuel.
• Explore the StoryFuel Content Idea Matrix.
• Connect with Melanie Deziel on Facebook.
• Check out Speechify.
• Tune into The Journey, our video documentary.
• Watch our weekly Social Media Marketing Talk Show on Fridays at 10 AM Pacific on Crowdcast or tune in on Facebook Live.

Listen to the Interview Now

The Social Media Marketing podcast is designed to help busy marketers, business owners, and creators discover what works with social media marketing.

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What do you think? What are your thoughts on the StoryFuel Content Idea Matrix? Please share your comments below.

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