To reach your target audience—no matter what their role—think of them as humans first. Learn three ways to create human-centric content for your brand.
With the advent of new tools and platforms, it’s becoming cheaper and easier to produce marketing content, and isn’t cheaper and easier every marketer’s dream?
The problem is that all businesses have access to the same tools. Creating content may be getting easier, but creating content that stands out is more difficult than ever. Content strategists are responsible for overcoming this challenge, but they can’t do it alone.
A good content marketing practice is like a living ecosystem. In addition to the content strategists themselves, you’ve got subject matter experts, product marketing, public relations and other business roles that all impact content in some way. Most importantly, your target audiences are part of the ecosystem as well.
What’s the common trait that unites everyone in the ecosystem? They’re all human beings. Content is ultimately produced by humans, for humans, with the help of other humans. Basic empathy and respect are the glue that holds your content ecosystem together, leading to better content that meets everyone’s needs.
Let’s look at three key steps you can take to drive your human-centric content strategy forward.
1. Start with purpose
When you start working on a new piece of content, ask yourself one important question about your audience:
Why should they care?
If you don’t have a good answer for why the piece is relevant to your audience, then maybe you need to target a different audience. If you can’t find the right audience, then maybe you shouldn’t be producing the piece in the first place.
If you can answer this question, then you know you’re on track to create a piece of content that resonates with your readers’ goals and priorities. Throughout the production process, revisit this question to make sure you aren’t straying too far from your original purpose.
2. Focus on the message—not the statistics.
Content analytics tools are important, but they can be a double-edged sword. They make it easy to think of your audience as just another part of a formula. We’d all love it if there were a simple equation that determined content success:
Making headline 10% edgier + Dialing up humor by 5% = 15% more readers
But that’s not the way things work in the real world. Analytics tools may treat readers as statistics, but that doesn’t mean you should.
Instead, think about what your audience wants and how you can give it to them. Try to identify if people in your target audience are frequently facing a particular problem, or if there’s something specific that they want to learn. You can turn to others in your content ecosystem for help figuring this out, particularly those who work directly with existing customers.
3. Write person-to-person content
When writing on behalf of a business, it’s only natural to want to play it safe. That’s why we’ve ended up with reams of polished corporate content that all…sounds…exactly…the…same.
Even if your readers are also representing a business, as in the case of B2B marketing content, they’re still human beings, and they still want to be spoken to as such. That’s why your goal should be to create a direct, person-to-person connection with readers.
Connecting with readers is about letting your personality shine through, and there’s no reason you can’t do that while staying within your brand guidelines. This could mean using humor, but only if it’s not forced. If the joke feels too robotic or irrelevant, it may have the opposite effect of what you intended.
Using storytelling can also help. It’s basic human nature: We all use stories to better understand the world and the situations we face every day. The right story can help create an immediate connection between you and the reader—and by extension, between your brand and the reader. From then on, they’ll be more likely to listen to everything else you say.
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At CXO, one of our secrets to branding success is that you have to get the words right first, and the rest will follow. Figuring out who you are as a brand starts with figuring out what you want to say, and who needs to hear it. This is exactly what we do for our clients, and it’s what we’d like to do for you.
Take 10 minutes on us to learn what your human-centric content strategy might look like.
