Read time: 3 minutes
In a consulting call earlier this year, I was explaining why creating content is valuable to their work. I took some notes and drew a diagram. While cleaning my desk today, I rediscovered this diagram and wanted to share it with you.
Creating content is a part of “business operations” and should be treated as an essential part of our work. It can help us better understand and serve our audience, participants, and members.
By ignoring this important element of our work, we miss out on engaging with our people, understanding them better, and puts us in a defensive position over the long term.
Unfortunately, congregations and other organizations still see this process as non-essential and will continue to fall farther behind.
Creating content and posting online is a learning tool.
It can give you instant feedback on who you’re serving and if you’re doing it well.
Yes, getting lots of likes and comments can feel good, but it is about the qualitative data you’re getting.
It helps you understand the question: what resonates with my people?
This diagram will outline the steps to help you understand this concept.
Let’s unpack it together.
Ideally, you already know your audience and what they want and need.
Hopefully, you’re continuously analyzing their needs, the problems they encounter, and how you’re helping solve those problems for them.
In part, posting online is expressing to them you understand what they experience.
When you post, you receive feedback: comments, replies, likes, etc. This helps you understand if what you’re posting resonates with your people.
You might also get no response, which is important feedback too. It means that what you posted didn’t resonate at all and that you have to shift your strategy. Continuously posting content that gets no response, hoping it will change is rarely a successful approach.
You are going to get 2 kinds of responses:
affirmation that you got it right
feedback that you missed the mark
If you got it right with that post, then you know you should double down and make more content to respond to that issue. Your audience will know you understand them, and you can offer more and better on that subject.
If you missed the mark with that post, you will refine your understanding and try again.
Every post is an opportunity to learn something new.
In both cases, the feedback can help you understand the challenges your audience faces in greater detail.
This process is about always deepening your understanding.
Maybe you:
understood part, but not the entirety of the issue
overlooked a glaring challenge
discovered something new about your people
Develop a new offering to provide something better.
Every time you understand your audience’s problems better, it invites you into a new opportunity. A piece of content can help draw that out.
As you post and reflect on the feedback, you might find that you can create a new offering and provide a new service to your audience, congregant, or member.
A piece of content can provide you with a test to see if an idea has traction.
Those new ideas, directly connected to a new understanding of the barriers your audience experiences, will lead to new opportunities to connect with them.
More than that, it could lead to signing a new member, landing a new client, or engaging a new participant.
The process is ongoing.
New interactions will inspire new posts and the cycle begins again.
Content leads to content leads to content. Each piece and post seeks to express understanding and problem-solving for your people.
As a result, creating content is of high value to you, as well as your audience. It isn’t merely a side project but an important engagement tool.
Communication and creating content to engage with your audience isn’t a luxury or an extra to our work. It is an essential part of operations, and we should understand it in that context.