When you’re coming up with content ideas and creating a marketing plan for your business this heady array of different options can feel quite bewildering - what type of content should you write? What sort of content do you need to plan around? This feeling of overwhelm can stop you in your tracks when you’re trying to cook up a list of things to write about. Where do you start? What will people value?

Many people find it harder to be creative when the opportunity is endless. Constraints are useful for creativity to help you create something remarkable.

So here’s a simple four pillar framework to work to. Four foundational cornerstone content types that clients and customers appreciate, and a useful structure for any good content marketing plan.

1. Helpful content

Answers to client / customer questions, how to… posts, tutorials, tips and tricks.

This is the bread-and-butter content of the web. People use the internet to search for answers to their questions, and your job is to produce the content that gives your type of people the information they need.

What questions are your type of clients or customers asking? What do they really want to know? How can you go the extra mile to help your clients and customers through the content you create for them?

“They ask, you answer.” Marcus Sheridan

This focus on helpful content demands a different marketing mindset and motivation: marketing as service; a ‘help, don’t sell’ approach to the content you share; do all you can to help those you serve, give value. It’s an attitude that will always pay back.

Ideas for your helpful content:

Consider the questions people frequently ask you during the sales process.
What questions do they have at each step of their journey? When doing early stage research into their challenge, when evaluating, purchasing and finally using your service or product?
Have a think about the Big 5 questions that buyers want answers to: cost and pricing; problems (theirs and yours); comparisons and versus; best of lists (best in class, best practices); reviews.
Include how to, why, what, which, where & when questions.

Fabulous example of helpful content in action at River Pools & Spas

What answers can you provide?

2. Human content

Your story, your hopes, fears, and experience.

Content that makes us feel something – laugh, cry, smile – cuts through the noise.

Getting personal takes courage, but that’s what has cut through when it comes to content this year. We’ve been drawn to stories that are super honest, written from the heart. The buttoned up professionalism in the business realm has fallen away in favour of empathy, honesty and humanity. And thank goodness for that.

Intimacy is the biggest trust builder. Intimacy, as defined in the Trust Equation, is related to empathy. The client of someone with great intimacy skills will feel secure, understood, and comfortable sharing sensitive information. Share content with humanity and you’ll foster a sense of deeper connection and build more trusting relationships.

It feels brave doing this kind of intimate writing, as we know from experience. Sharon wrote about ending a business (An end is a beginning - what it feels like when a business ends). Sonja talked about the loss of her mum and how her grief has brought clarity to choices in work and life (Grief, Loss and Clarity). It’s a different kind of writing - courageous but cathartic. It often takes deep thought, and will resonate more deeply with readers too.

It doesn’t always have to be serious. Purpose-driven PR agency Cohesive are really good at showing their human side. Some of their posts are deliberately personal and often written for the joy of it, alongside the 'how to' and more serious stuff. Articles like 10 Terrifying Childhood Movie Moments give a sense of the people working in the business, and they're fun and easy to relate to.

Sonja and Sharon having shredded Valuable Content 1.0

What relevant stories, solace, reflections can you share that will connect with people? Is there something you want to explore writing that doesn’t have a client problem as a starting point?

Ideas for human content:

Why do you do what you do? Tell the whole story.
Report on your journey - what useful lessons for others fall out of that?
Give a sense of the people behind your business. Talk about your life outside of work - what you love and why.
Share the good things, and the bad things. The hard things, and how you’ve solved them.

3. Curious content.

What are you learning? Research results, expert interviews, book reviews.

Undertaking some unique research is a great way of showing, not telling, your deep interest in your subject, and in helping your clients and customers too. It makes for original and highly shareable content.

Your curiosity could spark a simple survey that you share on social media, or it could lead to months of exploration/interviews/analysis behind the scenes. Sharing the journey that your curiosity takes you on, as well as the final results, maximises the content value.

On a small scale, we’ve done surveys to uncover the challenges of content creation which have fuelled blogs and reports, as well as ideas for products and services. Simple quick surveys are valuable temperature checks for readers, but you can go further too. Take a look at HSBC annual Expat Explorer survey to see how far curiosity can take you when you scale it up, and combine it with some beautiful design.

We’ve also interviewed experts and commentators in our field and shared their ideas with our audience. A great way to widen their perspective and add more value. Mark Masters used this approach to kick start his business. You could do the same.

What are you curious about, that your clients and customers want to know too? What’s the big, overarching question that you all seek to answer?

Ideas for curious content:

What have you learned recently your audience can benefit from? Lessons from books you’ve read? Talks you’ve listened to online?
Where would having some statistics help you? If you want to know what percentage of your audience struggles with x challenge vs y challenge, ask them. The better you understand your audience, the better you’ll be able to serve them.
What industry-leading research report could you author each year?
How about interviewing other experts in your field?

4. Celebratory content.

Showing and celebrating what’s working; giving your customers / community a voice.

Bring on the positivity in your content.

It’s easy to think that celebratory, good news will land badly at times like this, but this year we’ve badly needed good news. It feels good when someone posts a win – an award, a much wanted project, a new source of funding, a career change. It shows that there are some green roots of recovery in an economic landscape that can feel very bleak at times. And if they can do it, we can do it too. We need more joy in our lives.

Case studies are really valuable content, but often get overlooked. Share what you’ve been working on and the outcomes it's achieved.

Try giving your customers / clients / community a voice through your content. Share their successes too. Share other people’s success that people can learn from.

This approach has worked really well for us with the Valuable Content Awards we’ve given out over the years: https://www.valuablecontent.co.uk/valuable-content-award. We look for examples of valuable content in action around the world and hand out awards (yup, real badges) to a variety of people - from one-person bands to successful start ups and huge corporates, from a surf school in Sennen to a policeman on the Isles of Scilly! We interview each winner and share their content lessons.

You could do this too. If you could create an award scheme what would you create it for?

Ideas for celebratory content:

Awards. What would your version of the Oscars be? By celebrating the best examples of the vision and values that you stand for, you’ll spotlight someone else’s success as well as your own purpose.
Business success stories. Share other people’s as well as your own. Business is an ecosystem and we’re all connected to each other - big up the people who are doing a great job in associated fields. By calling out what you’ve learned from it, you’re not only helping them but you’re underlining your own values too.

Build these 4 content types into your plan

Remember to bear these four favourite content types in mind when you’re devising a list of ideas to include in your content plan. It’ll ensure you deliver a variety for your audience, and it makes content ideas generation easier, and a lot more fun.

Different types of content do different jobs, from first touch to helping you close a sale and everything in between. From starting a conversation to leading your reader to take action. Building a combination of helpful, human, curious and celebratory content into your plan will help to ensure you cover all bases.

As always, this all starts from understanding your particular ideal audience and what they’ll find relevant. A good first step would be to get your ideal client firmly in find and to think of an idea for each content type. What can you create that she would find interesting and valuable? Then write something for whichever one of the four types of content that excites you most.

[This post was co-written with Sharon Tanton and first published on The School of Valuable Content website.]

4 cornerstone types of content to build into your content marketing plan