match your content to your offering

The way you create and, more importantly, publish your content should be consistent with your business’ offering.

First of all, when I say “offering,” I mean that at a very fundamental level. This is usually one of a small list of things, e.g.:

• products
• information
• services
• experience
• or transformation

The second thing to consider about your offering is: where does it fall on the scale from luxury to necessity?

Once you have paired those two qualities of your offering, you can start thinking about how to build the acoustic environment for your content.

For example, if you offer a service that people will only need once, or very infrequently—maybe in an emergency situation—the way you publish information about it should probably be more or less static and well organized. Something like a searchable, categorized library which is easy to navigate even in an agitated state.

What would not be useful is a scrolling feed designed to be subscribed to. Subscribing is not necessary if your service is only needed once, and it means that relevant information probably has to be aimlessly dug out of a sea of click-bait headlines.

On the other hand, if you provide a transformation of some sort, such as coaching or education, then ongoing, subscription-style content which gives prospects encouragement or information on a regular basis might be just the thing.

form informs perception

When deciding what form to use for your online communications, it’s important to consider how you want to be perceived.

Each medium naturally carries with it certain preconceptions and emotional responses on the part of the audience.

For instance, podcasts and video are great at conveying personality, which creates a sense of comradery between the speaker and the audience. Meanwhile, a blog post strips the same message down to a purely intellectual focus, giving the author a more authoritative relationship to the audience.

Of course, there is latitude within each of these mediums—video can be highly intellectual and authoritative, and you can be very relatable and friendly through your writing style—but it’s important to keep in mind that a little extra effort is required to swim upstream of the medium’s innate tendency.

consider the context

As I’ve written about before, the context of our media is just as important as the actual content contained with it.

But what exactly makes up the context of our content?

Here are a few aspects of context to think about before deciding how to form your content:

Proximal

• What other content will be surrounding this piece of content?
• Where will the audience be physically when they are experiencing this content?

Temporal

• When will the audience be most likely to find this content in relation to the time it was created?
• Is this content intended to only be experienced once, or multiple times?
• Is it easy to find again at a later date?
• How long do you expect the audience to spend with the content?

Epistemological

• What does the audience already know about the subject prior to finding this content?
• What does the audience already know about you or your organization prior to finding this content?

Tonal

• What is the tone or mood evoked by the environment surrounding the content?
• What is the possible or likely emotional state of the audience prior to experiencing this content?

Actional / Reactional

• What actions are possible or readily available to the audience during or after experiencing this content?

Once you have an idea of the context of your content, you can start to shape the form of the content in a way that will have the best chance of producing your desired effect.