Why entrepreneurs with coaching, consulting, or training products need intentional content
What do coaching, consulting, and training have in common? First, they are all products that leverage your expertise and unique methodology to add value to your clients. Second, they all rely on your ability to create compelling and effective content to fulfill a value proposition.
For example, as educational content designed to impart knowledge for specific learning objectives, training courses can be comprised of a variety of content forms: learning objectives, explanatory information, exercises, assignments, assessment, a script for the instructor or video, and checklists.
When you have a content-based product, your content not only defines your brand in the form of marketing materials – it is also the product itself!
What is content?
Let’s start with the basics – what is content? Because I live and breathe it, I can forget that many entrepreneurs aren’t aware of my definition of content.
It often happens like this: I’m talking with an entrepreneur and want to get an idea of how they capture their methodology and promote it with content – articles, blog posts, presentations, books, podcasts, webinars, training, policies and procedures, terminology, etc. And once created, where do these files live? Can team members or customers easily find the information? How hard is it to update and maintain the files? Lastly, is my client actively using the content or are the files gathering virtual dust?
So, I ask them to tell me about their content. Inevitably, they either don’t know what I’m talking about, or they reference a set of files that are neither entirely relevant nor representative of the breadth of work they’ve invested many hours crafting.
I think the reason for this confusion is that content is one of those words, like “love,” or “freedom,” that have as many interpretations as there are people. Given that content is how others engage with your ideas, products, and services, it’s essential to recognize what it is and how you can leverage your investment.
Broadly, content professionals tend to define content as text, images, or media that effectively provide information. For example, if you create educational materials, such as online courses, everything that goes into the courses, from lesson plans, to supplementary material, to video, is content. Some examples of internal or backstage content are materials that capture and support your methodology, including processes and procedures, terminology, policies, checklists, and guidance.
What is intentional content?
Intentional content is content that is designed to support your business goals. In order to create intentional content, you need to figure out three things:
Who your intended audience is.
What value you need to communicate to them.
How they can best experience your message.
For example, if you want to educate auditors about your auditing method, you need to consider your intended reader’s (the practitioner’s) experience, industry, and any standards or regulations with which they must comply. This may involve focusing on a specific area, such as a given industry or locale, to provide the best value.
How do you create intentional content-based products?
Because a content-based product relies on one or more pieces of content, your product design process is what content professionals call content strategy. Although you don’t need to be a professional communicator to develop the right content for the right user experience, you do need a plan to produce and maintain the content.
Here are the basic steps:
Identify who you serve.
Identify what they want and need.
Define the user journey to serve their needs with actionable knowledge.
Identify how the content artifacts relate to support the user journey.
Create content artifacts.
Deliver the experience.
Measure their effectiveness.
For example, to develop a training course, you start by identifying who needs your knowledge and how they can best acquire it. Depending on your audience, you may need instructor-led training (ILT), virtual instruction, or a hybrid experience.
Next, you identify the information your audience needs to be successful in a given context. With that goal in mind, you can define the path with learning objectives, determine which artifacts are necessary for the learner, and establish how the artifacts relate to each other throughout the learning journey. For instance, if training is part of an accreditation or certification, you must design assessment to evaluate the learner’s success.
The ADDIE Model is the industry standard for training.
Product creation is where your knowledge and expertise differentiate your method from your competitors. It’s also probably where you feel the most confident. In the training example, you can relate scenarios and provide context based on your own experience.
Lastly, you want to measure how effective the training is – how many learners pass the assessment the first time? Can they demonstrate the skills you are trying to impart? You’ll use this information to further hone your product until it’s optimized to help you meet your business goals.
Conclusion
All the above steps are the intentional part of “intentional content” – if you skip them, your product effectiveness will suffer. While your non-optimized content-based product may accomplish the goal of documenting and disseminating your knowledge, it will not have the focus, directedness, and maintainability of a product designed for success.
The good news is that you are an expert in your field and have a unique methodology to help those you want to serve. If you have a content-based product and aren’t confident about how to optimize it, call Intellectual Property by Design. Amber and her team can help you create content with confidence!
