Create

Your systems must create content your niche audience needs. This content must solve their problems, answer their questions, or entertain them. There’s a lot happening in the Create stage. For example, building processes that will develop your ideas into published pieces. Here’s where you’ll also create personas to understand your audience through empathy and their behaviors and attitudes. Technical decisions are also determined at this stage, including which media formats your audience prefers and the ideal channels and social platforms for delivery.

Engage

Reads, views, and likes are nice, but they are vanity metrics. Your content system has to engage your audience. This is accomplished online and with live events. You can engage with your audience via comments and forums or with webinars or other online events. Your content system will have a prescribed method to help ensure that you have high-quality engagement that adds to the conversation by providing value. As you grow your network, members of your online community will want to participate in live events, such as workshops, conferences, or even sporting events. Live events will grow your audience and will strengthen your network.

Manage

Content systems usually begin small and manageable, but they scale. As your system grows, you’ll need documented procedures and strong internal controls. Documented procedures, or what I like to call SOPs (standard operating procedures), are basically checklists that anyone can follow to accomplish a given task within your system. From how to publish a piece of content to the technical specs of a graphic, documentation makes scaling possible. Of the four stages, some would say that Manage is their least favorite because of its focus on establishing and maintaining processes, and that can be intimidating and time consuming. However, it’s critical to your success and, in subsequent posts, we’ll explore ways to build these key skills.

Optimize

How do you keep your audience engaged? Keep improving everything in your content system. Improve your content. Improve your user experience. Improve your processes. If you listen to your audience, it will tell you exactly the changes to make. Your niche audience’s needs, attitudes, and behaviors will change and you’ll need the flexibility to adapt to those changes. If not, you risk losing your audience. (Think: Blockbuster, Kodak, Polaroid, and MySpace)

The Eight Components Shaping Content within a Content System

Now that we know our four stages, what are the specific elements within each stage that allow us to achieve the media organization mindset? The following components are interwoven throughout our four stages of content systems:

Research

I am a data-driven decision maker, and this is because I understand that research guides me and mitigates risk. My research activities are present in all four stages of a content system. For example, during the creating stage, I conduct audience research. In addition to online research, I study a segment of the population by having conversations and conducting small focus groups to understand their world, their problems and their dreams. My research goal here is to identify a niche audience that has an unmet need. Once I have that audience, the deep dive research begins. I learn everything I can about them so my team and I can create personas – fictional characters that accurately represent our target audience. I also identify and confirm the audience’s unmet need so I can develop a proposed solution. This is how I mitigate some of the risk. My research validates that the audience’s need is real and there are no other significant resources addressing it.

During the managing stage, however, the research might be qualitative (small focus groups) or quantitative (data analytics) depending on my research goal. All research at any stage seeks to answer a question. This question is my research goal. My research goal keeps me focused on finding and collecting the data I need. Not all data, just the right data. Data is easy to access, so it’s possible to get overwhelmed. My research goal acts as a filter to ensure I’m only seeing relevant, high-quality data.

Analysis

My team and I analyze data throughout all four stages. Online tools, including the ability to conduct virtual focus groups, allow us to collect lots of data. Again, having access to virtually unlimited data is often problematic for companies unsure of their specific needs. Just log into Google Analytics for an example of a data deluge. To keep us focused, analysis is tied to our research goals. My analysis processes include organizing the data and reviewing it to find patterns for answers to our research questions.

Strategy

Business strategist Michael Porter says strategy is knowing what not to do. So, what do you do? Within our content systems, strategy is an output of research and analysis. Here’s the key when building and maintaining a content system: the entire team needs to be involved with development and implementation, and everyone needs to understand that it is fluid—it is open to revisions. Strategy is our roadmap. From developing objectives through execution, strategy is present at every level of a content system.

Budget

Unless you work for a large organization willing to invest money into the R&D of a content system, chances are your system will start with you or a small team. Some of the most successful content systems have had very simple beginnings with no financial resources. In these cases, for example, an individual created a blog that resonated with people and slowly built a community. As the audience grew, the content creator needed to bring on support people to develop engagement. Gary Vaynerchuk’s story is a great example. He started shooting simple videos explaining different wines sold at his father’s store. (Check them out here.) Week after week, month after month, he created content that people looked forward to and shared. Eventually, this evolved into a multimillion-dollar business, and today he’s a digital marketing expert. Content systems scale. Generally, they grow slowly which makes it easier to manage and monitor finances. We’ll share simple tools and techniques to help you manage your budget. By the time you grow your audience to the point where you can monetize your content, you’ll have the financial resources to hire an experienced business manager to support you.

Lean Startup Principles

Today everything is lean thanks to Eric Ries’s book, The Lean Startup, which details a method for building new companies or products. At a very high level, implementing this method involves identifying a problem, using data to develop a minimum viable product and testing it with a target audience to achieve validated learning via the Build – Measure – Learn feedback loop. So why is this baked into our content systems? The principles of The Lean Startup are necessary to achieve the media organization mindset.

A media organization is a business, and most content systems are built from the ground up; therefore, I see them as a startup. Applying Ries’s startup acumen to content systems is another way to build success. My team and I apply Lean Startup principles within our content systems because it ensures we are creating content our audience needs. That is, we fully understand our audience’s problem and our content system achieves product market fit. Ries’s principles also improve efficiency. The typical months of business plan development is replaced with creating a hypothesis, testing it quickly, and iterating. This saves lots of time and money.

Story-Driven Marketing

Robert McKee—Fulbright Scholar, author of Story, feature film consultant and screenwriting teacher—argues that storytelling is the future of marketing and is the only way to connect with an audience.

From Paleolithic cave art to Instagram posts, humans have always told stories. Some researchers say our brains are hardwired for story because that’s how we make sense of the world. Stories can fill the gaps. They can help us understand. But most importantly, stories makes us feel. McKee shows how stories can create bonds with an audience via empathy and curiosity. Applying his storytelling principles – along with the principles from others like Aristotle and Joseph Campbell – ensures your content resonates with your audience on an emotional level.

Psychology

Understanding the science of psychology is necessary for employing evidence-based strategies to empathize with your audience. This doesn’t mean dusting off your DSM-5. We turn to people like Dan Ariely, Jonah Berger, Charles Duhigg, and Daniel Kahneman because their analysis of behavioral and cognitive psychology is important to dynamic content systems.  Berger’s Contagious: Why Things Catch On and Robert Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion are must-reads for people looking to connect through story.

In fact, psychology is in play throughout the entire content system. Psychographics, not demographics, for example, empower us by giving insight to our target audience’s attitudes, behaviors, and values. Understanding our audience at this level helps us predict and influence behavior.

Communication

Within a content system there are two types of communication, internal and external. The internal communications exist within the content system’s team and the external communications are with the content system’s audience.

Internal communications are usually interpersonal or within small groups. That’s been true for decades, but now with virtual workplaces and global teams we have to consider cultural diversity and technology when developing an internal communications plan. Creating an internal communications plan during the early stages of developing a content system ensures that the team is sensitive to cultural differences and has identified the optimal technology platforms or tech stack to facilitate the interactions.

In terms of external communications, you might think our mode of communication would be mass communication. And you would be dead wrong. Mass communication means broadcasting your message quickly to a large group of faceless people.  That one-sided form of communication is gone. Content systems need to engage a niche audience. Our communication is narrow and deep and invites engagement. Today’s audiences want to interact with brands. Remember, it’s all about them and not what you’re selling or pushing. This external communication is at the heart of the content system. Don’t let the fact that it’s at the end of this blog post diminish its importance. A content system is a communication system – it’s an on-going cycle of interactions.

Understanding how we communicate with our niche audience, including language usage, the media formats and platforms, is crucial to a successful content system.