Content Strategy for Your Audiences
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Get the right content to the right people at the right time by doing audience research through empathy mapping and point-of-view planning. This involves writing point-of-view statements about the user's needs, insights, or contradictions to understand their perspective and determine how content can address these statements by considering implications, environment, and alternative angles. The effectiveness of the content should then be evaluated.
Content Strategy for Your Audiences
- 1. =CONTENT STRATEGY FOR YOUR AUDIENCES
- 2. Get the right content,
- 3. Get the right content to the right people
- 4. Get the right content to the right people at the right time (and place).
- 5. We need to get inside their heads.
- 6. User-centred content planning 1.Audience research 2.Empathy Mapping 3.Point-of-View Planning the process
- 8. Point-of-View Statements: user + need + insight / contradiction / cause
- 9. How might we create content to address these statements? ● Who else is implied in the POV statement? ● Pay special attention to adverbs and adjectives ● Consider the user’s environment ● Is there a another angle there? Some un-blocking prompts:
- 10. Write your own! user + need + insight / contradiction / cause Infer what they need by examining their pains and gains Trouble with insight? Start with “except,” “however,” “because,” “but,” “and,” or other conjunctions.
- 11. But...how will we know if we’re achieving what we’re aiming for?
Editor's Notes
- #2: Speaking on connecting with audiences, I’m hear to dig into that some more. We’ve been talking a lot about how to target and affect users in these different audience groups. We know we need to develop concepts and messaging architectures. But how do we show our audiences they can trust our brand and, better yet, evangelize it and the cause? We don’t just want to persuade people. We want to provide them with genuine value. As is always the case with me, content strategy is your answer. More specifically, the answer is to...
- #5: For this next exercise, we’re going to explore one way of figuring out what, exactly, is the “right” content, place, and time. We’re going to look at how to map content to the audiences you’re already working with. So each group has an audience identified. Perfect. Now, how can we provide them value?
- #6: We need to get inside their heads. And to do this, we start with a plan.
- #7: This is one framework we use with while planning out what content will best suit people’s needs. This stuff takes a while to get right. Too long to get our hands on all of it today. You’ll see in your handouts that you’ve got a matrix with some stuff already populated in it. That’s a reflection of number 3 here, point-of-view planning. The work we’re doing today assumes numbers 1 and 2 in this list here have already been taken care of. Today, we assume we have researched our audiences, probably through surveys, interviews, and observational studies. And with that research, we’ve already created our empathy maps...
- #8: This here is an example of an empathy map, populated with insights from research. They’re essentially scattered personas. This one is for an unrelated audience, so don’t mind the fine print, but you’ll see there are 5 sections, each relaying insights about our audiences Think and Feel - what preoccupies them? What goes on in their heads? See and hear - these reflect the physical environment around the audience member And finally, Pains and Gains. This is the part of the map we’re focusing on today. Pains represent challenges this audience faces, their fears, their struggles, their failings. Gains represents what makes them successful, their hopes, their dreams. You’ll notice that another one of your handouts is all about Pains and Gains for your audience. This is our abridged empathy map, filled in with best guess information that is in no way founded in formal research - the point here isn’t truly understand local bar owners, of course -- it’s to get a feel for the exercise so you can apply it to your own audiences. So these pains and gains, they position us perfectly to make some key, thoughtful assumptions, called point-of view statements
- #9: This is where we start to synthesize research we’ve done. This formula will help you think of your users’ needs first. It’s user (so, a specific audience member), something they need, followed by an insight about that need. This often comes in the form of a conjunctional phrase, like “except, because, when, but,” etc. These aren’t easy to write--especially with pre-populated pains and gains lists, so we’ve given you a head start by providing two already-written statements in order to show you what they look like.
- #10: I would like you to take a look at these pre-written POV statements, and work with your team around what specific types of content would address that statement, and where that content should be published. Note your cheat sheets for channel examples and content type examples. Try be specific about the content - don’t just say “blog post.” Explain what that blog post is about. Try to think of several types of content. And be thoughtful about your channels. Make sure the group you’re targeting is actually in that channel (probably not many teen boys on LinkedIn, for instance). Spend a few minutes on each, and then we’ll move on to actually writing the POV statement. Then as a room, we’ll go over the first half of this exercise, and then move on to writing the POV statement for your particular audience.
- #12: Which is a nice way to segue into Autumn’s activity.