Content Creation for Muggles

3 Things to do before making content

I've decided that people who are not proficient artists are muggles (insert Harry Potter reference).

Small business owners, entrepreneurs and marketers (muggles) need awe-inspiring magical content creation to capture their audience's time and pocket. Great content connects insight to a compelling narrative, turning strangers into potential clients. The impact of poor content is equally powerful (and obviously undesirable) in its ability to lead potential clients to abandon a sales funnel they were previously engaging with. 

There cannot be great marketing without great content. Potential clients need to be persuaded into seeing your product/service as a solution to their need/s. This happens through thought-inspiring educational (and many times entertaining) content. Photography, video, audio/podcasts, blog posts carousels, e-books and whitepapers subtly cajole your audience into realising their need for your solution. Marketers, internet/creative entrepreneurs and business owners (all likely handling their own marketing) need quality content in order to achieve their marketing objects and here is where the challenge lies: most marketers are not experienced content creators. 

Audiences have higher expectations. Subpar or average content can jeopardise your marketing efforts and overall brand perception. No one sets out to create crappy content (or at least that's what I hope). So, how then can you create quality content that actually engages and influences your audience without being a professional copywriter or art school graduate? I don't think there's any way to guarantee this, but there are some things muggles can do to increase the likelihood of creating magical content:

01 Define your Target Audience

 Who are you speaking to and what are their most pressing needs? Great content knows its audience and articulates its real needs. You cannot create great content without understanding how your brand delivers value to your target audience. Without this, your content is noise. 

02 Define your Brand's Identity

Audiences are increasingly looking for brands whose values and views align with their own. Authentic content, representative of your brand's unique views and values asks you to define your brand's identity. Cue the Simon Sinek adage - magical content starts with a clearly identified and articulated WHY. Having a well-defined brand identity, from how your brand speaks to what it looks like, allows your brand to create distinctive conversational content.

03 Create a Design System

Interaction designers utilise a collection of reusable components, guided by clear standards to build out any number of applications. This uniformity simplifies decision making and allows for creation without deviation. Where interface designers' design systems may be defined by UI components, you can build a content creation design system informed by your brand identity with centralised workflows, asset management and guided reusable components. that help you create magical content that builds brand consistency.