by Content Strategy
By: Taylor Lancaster, Alyssa Newsom, Brea Bechelli, Paul Espey, Lauren Cheever
Carmen Hill came to talk to us about brand content strategy on February 26,2020. She is the principal strategist and writer at Chill Content. Carmen started her lecture by introducing us to the 5-W’s and H (who, what, when, where, why and how) and how they should drive content strategy.
With so much content in the media, brands must be able to set themselves apart. They need to know who their audience is, why they should care, and how to reach them. Brands need to take time to do research on their target audience. Gauge what they care about, look at competitors and gain audience insights. Without audience insights, their attempt to engage with their audience will not be worth it.
Brands should make measurable goals for their company in order to reach a great audience and gain more engagement. They do this by coming up with specific media plans. This was an example of carmen’s dietary food chart being similar to media content. By giving our specific types of content for specific times and not having too much at once.
Creating content comes down to quality over quantity. Content must serve a purpose in order for it to be useful. In order to ensure that the content being produced is useful, it’s important to have a content mission statement guide. Carmen gave us a template to use for the future.
While creating quality content is important, it also needs to be relevant. With that being said, how do we know what content is relevant to our audiences? Carmen outlined a variety of tactics in order to assure that our content is relatable and relevant to our target audiences. Through the use of social media we can monitor what our audiences are interested in online. By following thought leaders, engaging in twitter chats, sifting through blog feeds and doing some basic social listening, we can get an idea of what our audiences are talking about online and how we can add to that conversation or create content that is relevant to their interests.
Carmen finished her lecture giving us some inspiration that can drive our content creation in the future. She noted that it’s important to build relationships with influencers and think beyond just the business transaction being made. Overall, we must experiment before becoming successful. We must try things, fail fast, and move on.
