Content alignment: Making every piece of content powerful

Content alignment is a term that I use to refer to how content feels to you, in balance with who you’re creating it for. It’s not something that you usually take to the time to think about, but it’s important in understanding the reason that you’re even taking time out of your busy day to create content.

Here’s the three ways that you can begin to create more powerful content that connects, nurtures and converts.

Know the purpose of your content

Content has two main purposes:

To showcase who you are and what your brand stands for
To move your ideal client through the client journey

In essence, any piece of content should fit one of the following purposes:

Connect: Your ideal client has just become aware of you. This is the getting-to-know-you phase where you have the opportunity to start meaningful conversations.

Subscribe: Your ideal client resonates with your lead magnet and signs up to receive it. This is your opportunity to provide deeper connection and begin to show how you can solve their challenges.

Nurture: Your ideal client is on your email list and ready to learn more about you and your services. You aim to wow with value, offers and solutions.

Convert: Your ideal client is making the decision to buy from you. Your job is to help them make a confident and informed decision to purchase.

Once you understand where the piece of content that you’re creating fits in this puzzle, then it becomes purposeful. And when it’s purposeful, it’s powerful!

Then the next step is aligning your content with your business and content goals (which is something that we do inside The Content Effect each quarter) will lead to more impactful results (ie more clients and more revenue).

Have an intention with your content

When we set out with an intention, we’re telling ourselves how we visualise the outcome or feeling of an event.

It helps you to create a conscious focus to bring your values to the forefront of your actions. And we can definitely do this with our content. And when you set and talk about your intentions, it helps you to raise your emotional energy.

When you set an intention, it’s like a pathway you’re mapping for yourself, so when you veer off that path, refocusing on your intention and what you set out to do helps bring you back on course. It clarifies who you want to be and what you want to be to others as well, whilst guiding all of your actions.

And that’s exactly what we want for our content. We want our intention to give us focus, guide us to bring our values to the table and raise our emotional energy within the creation process. It’s going to bring us back to who we are when we feel as though things are feeling a little off or out of alignment and help us channel our content creation for our ideal client because we know how we want to make them feel.

Build a content plan

Two of the most common challenges I hear from my community are not having any ideas for content, and not knowing where to start when it comes to creating content.

Over the years there’s been plenty of methodologies that I’ve seen on how to create content, especially when it comes to social media. But the problem with most of them is that it focuses on creating social media content first.

This is so backwards!

You need to think about creating your core content and then all your other content flows from this.

When you know all of the things that you can talk about, and that powerful content starts with your binge-worthy core content, then you can quickly and easily align your content with what you’re trying to achieve.

By using these three elements you can begin to create aligned content. When it feels good to create, it becomes easier and creates a reason or purpose for each piece of content. This is a huge return on energy, wasting less time on creating content that doesn’t have a purpose.

If you’d like to know more about creating aligned content and ditching the mainstream ‘shoulds’ when it comes to content strategy, then head on over to become part of the movement for impact-entrepreneurs to embrace their uniqueness when it comes to content.

You can purchase an advance copy of my book The Power of Content here or snap up one of the packages available through the Kickstarter project.