4. Your Answer Is An Overlap

So now you’ve decided what your brand cares about. You’ve gone through the exercise of identifying your audience, and painting a picture of what they care about. Your content strategy is where those Venn diagram circles overlap. It’s the stuff you and they should be connecting over because you organically have it in common.

As in life, the hardest is to commit to not talking about all the stuff in your circle that isn’t in theirs. Sure there will be times to talk about your business, what makes it tick, what inspires you, etc, but to the extent those topics don’t show up in the circle representing your audience’s existing curiosities, those make sense for paid content, when you are being interviewed, or your diary.

Second-hardest is to pass on things you know your audience cares about, but that don’t ladder into what’s important about you. There’s a trap of creating content that ends up engaging the people you’re after in the short term, but adds no lasting value for your brand. These are the junk food of content creation.

Meanwhile, the overlap is the stuff that builds a lasting relationship between you and your audience. It's the marketing equivalent of realizing you’ve read all the same books, have felt similarly about them, and then have a way to connect going forward.