The Business of Writing: Content Creation

by Monique Campbell

Content creation

Content creation is a marketing and sales tool for any product or service, books are no different. I won’t pretend to know the intricacies of the most effective content strategy from a marketing lens. Maybe I’ll develop this knowledge over time. For now, I think it’s useful to consider content creation from the lens I’ve considered for the last 12 plus years selling software as a service (SaaS) products:

Marketing – the idea of marketing in whatever form it emerges itself in, is to drive a behaviour. An action. Content marketing is no different. The consumption of content needs to lead to an intended outcome: generate a lead that ultimately leads to a sale. And to do that it first needs to do something for the consumer of content to enable them to do something for the producer of content and product owner. This is a value exchange.

Provide value: content that is useful, engaging, informative, meaningful, helpful.

Create value: content that is consumed, shared, liked, viewed, clicked through to site, a purchase is made.

Sales – this is the end goal. There are a bunch of activities and performance metrics to measure along the way. But when we get here, to the sale, we should know that it’s the increments of value provided throughout the journey, from content pieces on thought leadership and how to’s, webinars, demo’s, to personal growth stories and celebrating wins, that contributed to the final win.

But don’t just take my word for it. In an article by Forbes Advisor, 74% of companies said that content marketing increased their lead generation. For more effective strategies on content creation, I found this Hubspot blog useful.