When people come to me for help with the content strategy, the first thing I ask them seemingly has nothing to do with content. 

I don’t ask them about platforms or marketing channels. 
I ask this: who are you and what do you do? 

Pretty basic. Yet you’d be surprised how often that doesn’t come through their marketing.

That’s because brand voice is one of the most IMPORTANT yet difficult things for people to nail.

Why? It’s hard to talk about yourself. It’s challenging to know what to say about what you do. But aside from the visual representation of your brand —  the logo, the colors, the style — brand voice is what defines you.

The words, the tone, all of these things matter. And when the brand voice doesn’t match your personality as a business owner, it’s tough for your prospective clients to figure you out.

And when someone can’t figure you out, they move along. It’s not personal. It’s how our brains work—brains like easy. Brains are very efficient organs that don’t want to waste energy on things that are not immediately obvious.
So when someone lands on your website or your content, they’re scanning for words that confirm to them who you are.

So those words better line up.

On March 26th, I’ll be hosting a FREE live stream series on brand voice. This is the first step to having a content strategy that is aligned, strategic, and easy to execute.

If you need to get your content strategy in shape, you’re going to want to join. In 4 days, you’ll go from brand confusion to brand clarity. I’m sharing my exact approach for content strategy, the same one I used to launch 30+ brands during my media career.

This method will make your content work for you, instead of being yet another task that you put off for “later.” While your content is busy, you can get back to more pressing things in your business.

We’ll be covering:

1. The secret to a content strategy that expresses your authority
2. The reason you sound like everyone else out there and why your content is falling flat
3. A new approach to determining brand voice to create instant trust
4. How to make your content a magnet for prospective clients

Come hang out on the 26th! You can sign up here

I’d like to share something I learned this week and how it applies to the way we sell and communicate with our audience. I learned this from Jason Fladlien; he’s an entrepreneur and an expert on webinars.

Most people provide way too much information, and they overwhelm their target. It’s not your fault, you know a lot about what you know, and that makes it easy for you to go overboard.

There are two things people consider when they’re looking for a solution to their problems: 
1. The outcome matters more than the process
2. Relief

Because you are an expert in your area, it means you can unintentionally overwhelm people with what you know or assume that they know more than they do.

It happens with content strategy when we include too many CTAs or too much info. It also happens when you’re doing your website copy and, you spend a ton of time on your special process, product, or method but not on the results or benefits to the customer.

It’s kind of like watching that show “How it’s Made.” It’s fine when there’s literally nothing else on, and you suddenly find yourself intrigued by how they make umbrellas. Otherwise, it’s not really on your radar to seek that information out.

Your only thoughts around umbrellas are, “Wait, do I have one? It’s suddenly raining!” and “I hope this thing won’t flip upside down in the wind and make me look like a fool.” 

By providing way too much info, you lose people. Don’t give people too much to focus on and don’t overestimate their ability to take it all in. 

So if you think you might be throwing a lot of information at your audience, then just focus on one clear, easy solution they can understand and feel good about.

People hate to be sold to but they love to buy. And they’d rather learn about a business from content than from a traditional ad.

All content needs to have a reason for being.

It might serve a specific purpose: to entertain or to inform.

It might be an image or a video or a story you tell via an email to your subscribers.

Content is whatever lives inside those little boxes that we look at on our multi-sized screens.

The size of the screen might change, and the format might be different, but all content has one thing in common.

Content is a creation. 

We can debate individual merits, but any content involves translating an idea into a form that can be understood by another.

A lot of business owners struggle with content creation for this very reason: the creativity part of it.

Most of us were taught that you can’t make a living being creative and that we should choose a “practical” career. 

So when faced with a task that is oddly necessary for business but also inherently creative, a lot of entrepreneurs don’t know where to start.

They end up posting things haphazardly on social media, or send an email to their list when they have an idea but then abandon them for weeks at a time. They ramp up when launching a product but don’t engage with their customers otherwise.

The power of good content is tangible. It reinforces your brand messaging, it provides value, and it creates an emotional response in your customers.

So how do we marry fickle Content Creation with the steely world of Business?

We need a framework in which to play.

It’s counter-intuitive, but narrowing your scope opens you up to much more creativity. By minimizing your choices and setting up constraints, you free your mind to expand.

Limitations force creativity and kill analysis paralysis. Your mind will think up creative ways to work within those parameters.

Once you have the framework, you won’t spend time fretting about what to post or trying to figure out how to be everywhere at once. 

Your brand messaging will have more weight because you’ll be able to create content with ease. You’ll have a plan that works for you and is also flexible enough to evolve with your needs. Your content will be in the line of sight of your target customers with less effort.