How To Create Content That People Want- Part 2

There are a lot of different styles to present content and several mediums to deliver them.  Written content is no different.  If you want to have your content read by as many people as possible, there are some things that you can do to increase your chances of that happening.

Frequently when someones puts together content, they put it together in a manner in which they like to process content without regard to the end user.

This bring me to the topic of psychographics.

Early in my writing and marketing career, I gave very little thought to how an end user would like to process information.  I thought there was a one size fits all technique that worked.

That changed for me when I attended a course titled Book Publishing 2.0 about a year and a half ago where I was first introduced to the topic of psychographics.  At the time I went to the course, I knew I wanted to get more serious about my writing  but wasn’t sure the best way to get started.  I learned a lot in the course but the most important information for me was in learning about the Myers Briggs Typology test and how understanding that test could make me a more engaging writer.

If you aren’t familiar with The Myers Briggs test, it basically breaks us down into 16 different personality types that describe how we use perception and judgment in our decision making. You can read more about the test here.

The class that I took broke these types up into 4 personas which are competitive, spontaneous, methodical and humanistic.

Yesterday I talked about how your content is presented and how it looks is very important to readers.

This is especially true with regards to personas.  Some people want bullet points.  Some people don’t mind paragraphs of information.  Some people want pictures and visuals.  Some people prefer text.

So what does this have to do with creating great content?

When it comes to creating your information, it’s important to consider all of the personas.

Take headlines as an example.  The reason that people use the word simple in their headlines is because there is a certain group of people (spontaneous) that gravitate towards that word.  If you used the words, step-by-step or how-to, that may appeal more towards another group (methodicals).

The body of your content is just as important.  I mentioned the use of bullet points before because this is a great way to present material to a spontaneous or competitive person who doesn’t want to be bombarded with tons of details.  A methodical likes to see things presented in a step by step manner.  For humanists?  You need to make sure that you tell a story or use some kind of emotional connection with your reader.

We spend a lot if time talking about presenting good content and not enough about how to present that good content effectively.

You will not cater to each persona in one article but you can create different articles on the same subject that is presented in a different manner or pick certain days to write to a  different persona for your business.

Writing to personas takes some getting used to at first but once you get the hang of doing it you will find that more people gravitate towards your content.