How to Create Truly Impactful Content

Four Simple Steps to Creating Truly Impactful Content

Emma Baxter 4 years ago

We've found that while brands create content as part of a bigger marketing mix, they don't always know how to bring it to life, in a truly impactful way. We want to ensure that any content creation efforts really resonate with your target audience, so here are out top tips to create content that is impactful and memorable to your users. Watch our video, or read the transcript below!

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Zazzle Media video series - I’m Emma Baxter, Senior Content Editor here at Zazzle. In this video we’re going to use four clear steps to reveal how you can bring content to life in an impactful way.

Step one, for creating impactful content

The first step we’re going to look at is knowing your audience and using an identifiable tone of voice.

If your persona and audience research has been carried out properly then you'll have a clear picture of how your customers act, what they read and how they behave.

Very often brands create vague, passive tone of voice documents and this means they’re falling at a very early hurdle. Writers tasked with creating content find it difficult to translate onto the page.

Here at Zazzle Media, we've come up with a 'six question approach' to help create a useable tone of voice.

These questions are:

1. If your brand were a radio station, which one would you be?

2. Which TV station represents your brand?

4. If your brand were a newspaper or magazine, which one would it be?

5. Is there a famous person that sums up your brand?

6. If your brand was a person, where would it choose to meet us?

7. If your brand were a television programme, which one would you be? A good example for this particular point is asking ‘are you Bake Off or Masterchef?’ These are both extremely popular cookery shows but clearly have different tones.

Using this theme, you can create questions for your brand that really fit and answers that can contribute towards creating incredible content.

Step two, is researching

The second stage we’re going to look into is an extension of the first and that is that it’s so important to do your research.

Creating content that resonates with your audience can be a collaborative effort.

Often whoever is writing the content is relying on the research your strategy team have carried out to create impactful content.

All that hard work put in during the planning and strategy stage contributes to a fantastic end product.

Capacity and planning is key - it’s vital that the person tasked with writing the content is allocated an appropriate amount of time to craft a great piece of work as part of a campaign that appeals to your target audience.

Step three, brainstorm!

Moving through to the third step means you can draw on and use a lot of the hard work carried out previously to ensure your topics are relevant.

Now you’ve nailed the tone of voice and carried out search driven research it’s incredibly important to create the right content for your audience.

Brainstorm and gather ideas from a group of different people so your ideas are varied.

Have your finger firmly on the pulse of current affairs and what’s going on in the world because topical content will rocket you to the top of the tree.

A top tip here is to create a spreadsheet with two tabs - have your brainstorm topics and ideas on one and keep a list of anything topical or in the news. Having these all in one place makes it simple to work these ideas up.

Larger pieces of content such as eBooks, comprehensive reports or detailed interactive pieces give you the chance to build angles to resonate with the audience.

By doing this, it creates fantastic PR opportunities to use these spin off angles to increase your reach.

A good tip when writing these larger pieces of work is to keep a document of bullet pointed key topics and themes. This will then help assist with PR activity when the time comes.

Step four, the human interest angle

The fourth piece of this particular puzzle is ensuring, wherever possible, that you tell a story with your content.

What’s always been clear is the impact of human interest. It’s in our nature as humans to be interested in other humans and that is powerful knowledge to have when writing content, as emotion and curiosity engages an audience and will be more hard hitting.

Angles that evoke emotion are hugely impactful as they are always more memorable.

Once the time has been allocated to create the work, it’s important to use it to full effect. Harness the principles of journalistic writing and use the time to thoroughly research the topic and build your knowledge, talk to people and as much as you possibly can and conduct interviews to unearth stories.

These stories and quotes along with the facts, stats and figures you’ve collected during your research will add real impact and lift the content off the page. Effort put into the work will always shine through.

And that’s it! Our blog is full of further reading to help you create fantastic, impactful content for your brand.

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