G'day. My name is Trevor Young and welcome to the Become Your Own PR Machine podcast - great to have your company. Now owned media content, these are big pillars of what we talk about here on the show. And today, I want to focus on a model that I created, I reckon least a decade ago, and it's been 1 I reckon the most educational tool or the use most useful educational tool that I use with clients. Now I had a terrific discussion.

Just the other day with the coaching client. He's the owner of a thriving service based business of around 15 people and And 1 thing he got a lot out of was my content buckets model. Now. This is something as I said, I've been. Working on for a number of years refining, refining and I find a really useful tool.

When it comes to breaking down the types of content that we use in our business. Now. While it's important to ensure that our content is focused and relevance for the audience. Always. But it's also critical that we keep things fresh and, interesting.

And that's where the buckets come into play. And when I say fresh and interesting, not just for for the audience and the people who are going to. Consume our content, whether it's, you know, podcasts, text, blogs, articles, newsletters, videos, But also keep it interesting for us because if you're going to be out there, you know, you're running a business and you're... Whether it's a, you know, business. As I said, with my client, he's got 15 staff, and it's a, you know, it's a thriving growing business or you run a sol...

You're a solo and you run a 1 person business. As we know, if you're listening to this content, creating content is is a critical component of your overall, you know, P r and digital communications efforts. And if you're going to get in the trenches, it's really important too. Keep things interesting and fresh for your good self. Now, the 4 buckets.

There are 4 buckets are in this content buckets model, and they are utility content, leadership content. Human content and what I call brand content. So let's unpack them a little bit. So let's start with utility content. This is content that's.

It's often how to information, self serve information. This is this is content that addresses people's challenges, their their needs, their pain points relevant to your expertise. Now it fills in informational gaps, people might have about your product or service offering or it might be, you know, bigger content around your industry. And again, people have informational gaps. So this is classic content marketing when you hear and read and and listen to the in egg equates the content marketing guru, this is the content that they...

Is their default. Because no 1 ever went wrong being useful in health right? I mean, no 1 ever went wrong, using content to help people, clients, prospective clients and customers, with an issue or a a challenge or a problem or a pain point that or an information gap that they might have. They might have. And if you can provide...

You be the provider of that and and create and distribute that content in a way that's that's open transparent, useful, helpful. You're in a pretty good spot. And and for me, it's utility content is is the great best part places. Start working with another client at the moment. Again, they got 15 staff.

So a lot of my clients tend to be written in the 15 staff mark, which is interesting. Or they're much or they're smaller 5 and above and not much in between 5 and 15, which is interesting. And a lot of this particular client, I I asked them to go away and think about as a starting point for their content that, you know, we've we've created our avatars. But now you know, 3 very distinct target audience groups that we're looking at. And then we're looking at, okay.

Go away, talk to the people on the front line of the business who are talking to the clients all the time. And what are the challenges pain points? You know, the issues that they have, the roadblocks that, you know, we might be able to help them with through the provision of timely and relevant content. And so they've come back with an amazing spreadsheet, and and they've got about, you know, 30 different pain points. So that gives us a lot of content.

Start, that gives us almost a year's worth to to really dig into and keep going. So it's a really good easy place to start. A great example. I I like giving is a guy called Andy K. He's a 1 of the directors of orbit media studios.

It's a Chicago digital marketing agency. And I I really urge you to check out Andy stuff there's nothing he does know about websites and Seo and and blogging and using content to drive website traffic. He is. He's got depth of knowledge in that space and his content is so helpful and useful. It's utility content to a t.

Then we have leadership content. Now leadership content is a little bit different in as much as it's... Inspiring people to think bigger. It's thought provoking. It could it's it's bigger picture themes, could inspire people, challenge the way.

They think about a particular topic or issue that's again relevant to your your industry, your area of expertise. And to, you know, move people with your ideas, so challenging so where utility content is useful and hopeful in it and and and really has the audience in mind and and is, you know, is 0 in on their their problems and pain points. Leadership content people don't know what they don't know. And and a lot of the the top non fiction authors Malcolm Glad world. Seth God, for example, they're creating you know, writing books and they create content obviously, Seth Go has a very, very long running blog.

And he's not sitting there wondering about your pain points and your issues. He's challenging you to think different about business and marketing and leadership. And so, you know, that's that's perfect leadership content. So inspiring people to think bigger, Think differently. Thought provoking content.

And you gotta hurt your brain a little bit on this. This is about original thinking original Ideas exploring ideas in public and that scares a lot of people, and that's why there's not that many good thought leaders have there. So leadership content is where the thought leader plays, utility content is where the the bona fide domain, expert, the professional subject matter expert that they play in that arena as well. It doesn't mean you can't combine it to, but people tend to fall 1 way or the other. Just a couple of other examples of leadership content.

Mark Sc. He runs a terrific blog called businesses grow. Is his blog. Check him out. He's always pushing forward with his thinking in these ideas and and he too has books that extrapolate out on those ideas after he's he's blog about them for a while.

West Kay I was another 1. She's a marketing executive, entrepreneur and adviser. She was a... C founder of M, This is an education company that's served over 20000 students and thousands of experts. So She talks about marketing and teaching this.

So there's a number of areas that Wes plays in and in the in the content marketing sand. But 1 of her articles I urge you to have a look at is are all around having a spiky point of view and it's classic It's a leadership content piece, but it's also if you wanna create leadership content, it's great to develop your own spiky. Point of view. The third... I've got utility content content, the third type of content or the third bucket of content is human content.

Now this is a bit all about making your brand more relatable to people. Take people, take your audience behind the public face of your business or your organization, show the more personal side, you know, if you're running a personal brand based business and you're out there, a consultant coach speaker, you know, you're doing your thing. You take people behind the Velvet rope and into the personal side of your life as well. And it's also under this bucket, I like to tell other people stories, employees, partners, others in your in your network and your community. So if you're interviewing people on on on a podcast and getting their stories out of them, That's great human content.

So, you know, human is... I I add this 1 in and I really put a number on this because human content it makes you relatable and, you know, as we know stories. Personal stories really hit the mark, more often than not with people because we love stories and we... You know, we love seeing selfies of people behind the scenes of their work. So this is 1 thing social media is terrific at.

And your content could well be all, you know, your human content could very much be very social media driven. So human content. And, you know, if that's all you do, you're gonna probably bore people. But every now and then you just start throwing in some really personal stuff, personal stories on your blog perhaps or on your podcast or if you're running a Youtube channel. But certainly on social media you know if you're a speaker, what's happening behind the curtain, where are you traveling to today?

I have 1 client and he's you know, very buttoned up and down and he was doing a a lot of great utility based content and moving into the sort of the thought leadership type content. And then when they suggested, well, you you've got this big presentation tomorrow at on a webinar. Why don't you just take a photo saying I'm putting the finishing touches and he's the photo and put it up on Linkedin and and that went very, very well. So every now and then the human side, let's let's not forget that. That's why I like these 4 buckets because it allows us.

They're kinda like little filters and it little reminders of oh, we could mix things up a bit. And the fourth 1 is brand content I put this in because, you know, we have to... You know, we're in a business. We have to promote our product services, build our brand. And awareness of who we are and what we do and what we stand for in the marketplace.

So this is call it chess for what it is chest bleeding content could be product launches as new hires if you're running a company. It could be content that has a promotional call to action. So bookings downloads registered to this subscribe to this. I advise my clients to limit this type of content at 10 percent to 20 percent. Of your overall output.

But if you do mix it up and you've always got useful helpful content or your you you're at there provoking thought and sharing ideas and exploring those ideas in public. You add the the occasional selfie and some some human stories and and that side of things in your content mix. Then it's absolutely fine to put some promotional branded content out there. So don't forget that... That's it.

So leadership content, inspiring people to think bigger thought provoking content that explores ideas in public, utility content, which is to give, how to feeling information gaps people might have about your business or industry, human content, personal stories behind the scenes, making your brand more relatable and brand content. This is brand messaging promotional content. Please limit that to 10 to 20 percent of your total output. Now in coming episodes, I'm going to break a few of these out, particularly the leadership content. This is a real important play for.

For your P efforts. Leadership content can really be a a key differentiator for your brand and your business. And I see it as a really big opportunity for a lot of particularly service based businesses. And And then the other 1 will be human content. We can delve a bit.

We're going deeper into that and what does that look like and who's doing it well. But the leadership content. Keep an Eye at that for the next episode. I'm gonna give you heaps of examples that you can go away and check out. And but until then, Thanks for listening to they'll become your own P machine podcast.

If you wanna subscribe to our newsletter and get details on what we're doing here on the podcast plus other tips ideas, insights and stories. Please go to become your own p r machine dot com. Sign up there. And I look forward to continuing the conversation with you.