Tips that will help you with your content creation journey

It doesn’t matter what type of content you’re creating these tips will help you on your journey:

Before you create any content, you need to know who your audience is and what they want to see. You can spend hours creating a cooking video for an audience that expects marketing tips. It doesn’t matter how great that video is, it will probably be received poorly because it's going to be seen by the wrong audience. 

To know who your target audience is, you need to do a bit of research: 

1. Create your buyer persona; a buyer persona is a profile you create to know little details of the person like their educational background, age, gender. You can even assign it a personality and a name. Having your buyer persona clear will help you know the tone and language you should use to communicate with your audience. 
2. Certain Apps have features that allow you to reach out directly to your audience. For instance, Instagram allows you to do surveys through polls, or you can ask questions on your Stories. 
3. Identify your niche and your competitors. 

Just like you need to know who your audience is, you need to know what you want to accomplish. Do you want more traffic? Do you want to grow your brand?. Your content needs to be a translation of your goals. 

Whatever goal you set, your content needs to align with it. Take into consideration that these goals need to be measurable, you need to be able to track them and see if they’re working. 

You should be auditing your content constantly, see if it's 

As Benjamin Franklin once said: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.” You don't start building a house without an architectural plan: the same thing with content creation. 

Content creation requires more than great ideas; even the greatest ideas will fail if they aren't backed by strategy and planning to set them into action. 

Your content plan comprises all your marketing tools, the software you'll be using to gather data, creative ideas, and more. 

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Things to take into account when creating your content plan: 

Budget: while there are great free apps, software, and more tools out there, you should set a budget for it.

Content calendar: setting a content calendar allows you to work ahead of time. Is the Superbowl an important date for your business? If so, then you need to know the exact date to start creating quality content for the day. 

The same way your content strategy will change according to your goals, your content plan won't be static, you should be monitoring it and adjusting it accordingly.

1. Trello: is a software that will help you organize your plan into a board, where every person on your team can collaborate in. You'll know who's working on what, in what process it is, set deadlines, and more.  
2. Online Forums: when creating written content, you need to know what people are wondering, what words they are using, and how many people are using those words. The best source of information will always be the people themselves: sites like Quora or Reddit can help you with all of that. 
3. Portent’s Content Idea Generator: this tool will give you a variety of topic ideas that you can turn into whatever you want to. 
4. Buffer: it will help you schedule, manage, and track your social media accounts. Buffer offers free and paid plans.

Jayme Washington is the CEO of WashTone Media, she is passionate about marketing and helping people reach their goals.