Business benefits.
Clearly set out your objectives for the framework by defining what you want to achieve and aligning it with your business goals.
- Setting your business objectives will, in turn, guide the rest of the content framework because if your objectives are clear you would know what to focus on when creating content.
- Your content should be helping you achieve those objectives, it should be taking you closer to your achieving your objective and not further away from it.
Objective Examples:
- Position ourselves as experts in Digital Transformation
- Position ourselves as a company that cares about Small businesses
- Increase brand awareness through content that aligns with our brand.
- Educate our target audience
- Drive traffic and engagement.
Define a clear purpose of why your business needs a content framework to act as a guide for content creators.
For example:
- To guide the content creation process
- To align the content creation strategy with the business strategy
Get answers to these important questions to help your team understand what the business is really about at its core.
Who are we? This is generally who you are as a company.
For example, A Digital Transformation company focused on empowering small business through digital transformation.
What is our Vision? The importance of having a clear vision cannot be over-emphasized.
For example, To become the preferred partner for small businesses in North America
What is our Mission?
For example, to provide professional guidance to our clients and enable them to fulfil their potential and achieve their digital transformation objective through strategy and implementation.
What are our values? It will make sense if you are living your values and are able to show that in the content you create, so outlining what the values are will help the responsible teams create content accordingly.
For example Creativity, Innovation, Empathy or Kindness
What is our Brand Promise Your content needs to help your business deliver or over-deliver on your brand promise consistently.
For example, we promise to leave you better than we met you.
Outline what your Value proposition is by answering What does your business have on offer and What do you offer your customers?
For example, Digital Content creation for small businesses.
Define if your service/offering is industry specific or not, what industry you can you find your target audience or what industry you want to target. For example, Small Business owners in the health and wellness industry.
This is important as It helps you tailor your messaging to that industry.
This should be backed by some insights/data from customer research and be in line with the overall business objectives.
Geography is important because different countries have and celebrate different holidays and events. You don’t want to be posting about a holiday that’s not celebrated in your country.
Possible research methods:
Decide how you want to distribute your content, depending on different factors like cost, accessibility and reach. You will have to find out what works best for your business.
For example:
- Website
- Social media
- Business directories
- Third-party platforms (web/social)
- Associations
- Groups
Review your social media presence and decide whether you will use all of the channels or focus on a few.
Continuously research hashtags to identify what make the most sense to use. Use them strategically in your posts on social media.
Determine the content that you will be creating and the format you will be using. This should come from an understanding of your target market and how they like to consume content.
A general rule will be to create a mix of both images and videos. For example:
- Updates - tools/products
- Industry insights / reports
- industry updates
- Content from the content cluster
Content Format examples:
- Slide shows
- reels
- Blog post
- Videos
- Listicles
- Newsletter
- Images
- e-book
- Webinars
- FAQs
- Checklists
- Surveys
Decide on your content distribution frequency across all channels.
For example:
- Core content - 3 times a week (Mon, Wed, Friday)
- Filler content - (off days Tues and Thurs)
This frequency will determine the timeline
- Blog Post - one day
- Slide show - one day
Create a content calendar to guide your content distribution for the year. It is different from the social media calendar.
Establish a content creation flow to make the process consistent.
For example
- Research ideas
- Identify key message(s) for each content
- Discussion
- Design/write
- Review
- Adjustment
- Publish/distribution
- Convert to other formats (video, slide show, reels, audio…etc)
- Promote post/content (when necessary)
Establish content pillars to guide how you create content. For example content to educate people this is what you stand for and what you want to be known for.
An example of content pillars:
-
How we lead
- We are leading with the interest of Small Business Owners.
- Our content should always try to address the benefits of Digital Transformation to Small Business Owners.
-
Our Expertise
- Digital Transformation
- Digital Marketing
- Small Business
- Digital Strategy
-
Our Culture
- Who we are
- What we do
- How we do what we do
-
Others
- Landmark events
- Announcements
You can sources like HubSpot Blog Ideas generator, Google Trends and Answer the Public search listening to come up with different content ideas.
