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“Content creation”, “custom content”, “self publishing”, “branded content”…it goes by many names, but simply refers to the process of developing and sharing original content for the purpose of engaging and influencing your target market.

The keywords here are: “original content”, “engaging” and “target market”.

Original Content

Although content curation, the process of sourcing, packaging and sharing relevant content that others have produced, can be effective, original content is king. Why? Original content can help establish your employees and company as thought leaders in your industry. And who would people rather buy from – a company that helps its prospects and customers understand and overcome the issues in the marketplace or one that relentlessly promotes its products and services? It’s fine to retweet great content now and then, but you need to add your own voice to the conversation as well.

Organizations should aim to produce content that is unique, compelling and useful to the reader so that it’s more likely to be used and shared by them.

Engaging and Influencing Your Target Market

Clearly, content needs to be interesting and engage the reader – but it has to get to the reader first. Social media provides many ways to distribute your content. For instance, you can write a blog post, tweet about it or post a link on your Facebook page. If you’re at an industry event, you can shoot a short video, host it on YouTube and link to it from your website to further share it. A recorded seminar can be segmented into bite-sized pieces for on-demand consumption on YouTube. These days, there are countless ways of sharing and distributing content. And don’t forget to integrate more traditional ways of sharing such as your office voicemail message, email signature and your organization’s established communication channels.

You can produce the most compelling content and aggressively promote it, but if it isn’t developed with a clear understanding of your target market, it will fail. Your target market’s needs and pains should drive not only the focus of the content, but its theme, format (written, video, audio, multimedia) and length. There are countless options and many ways of approaching B2B content creation. Stay tuned as we delve into the topics of B2B content strategy for lead generation and the issues surrounding B2B content creation.

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